With our voices and our votes, we have ushered in a new chapter
in the history of our city, a city that's truly safer for
everyone by investing in what actually works to prevent crime.
>> Mke no mistake about it, Chicago is a union town.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> Progressive union leader and
now former Cook county commissioner, Brandon Johnson,
the progressive in the mayoral race has won the Chicago mayoral
race narrowly beating out Corporate Democrat Paul Vallas.
This is an excellent win.
As you can see, it was a close election.
Brandon Johnson won 51.4% of the vote, Paul Vallas won 48.6%,
and this is a big deal because let's just be honest.
I mean, Vallas was backed by the police union,
huge proponent of charter schools which led to Brandon Johnson,
the Progressive, earning the support from the teachers unions.
And so this is good news.
The idea of going to a, honestly, a so
called Democrat who in previous interviews said I'm more Republican
than Democrat wouldn't have been a good idea for Chicago, if you ask me.
Now, the focus of the election laid heavily on the issue of crime in the city
with Vallas acting as the tough on crime candidate.
And despite previously arguing in favor of defunding the police,
I think Brandon Johnson did something really smart in this election where he
kind of backed away from that kind of messaging.
And instead focused on reallocation of funds,
raising revenue by taxing wealthy households to pay for
certain programs that would obviously deal with the root causes of crime,
reopening mental health facilities.
I cannot emphasize enough how incredibly important that is, and
I love that he focused on that.
Now I hope he actually accomplishes it and also better.
He just had a better, more holistic approach, policy approach,
to some of these complicated issues.
Now, he discussed some of his platform during an interview here at TYT just
last month.
Let's watch.
>> What has happened over the course of decades is that there's been the defunding
of our public schools, the defunding of public housing,
the defunding of public transportation, health care, access to good paying jobs.
We spend more money per capita in terms of law enforcement policing
than anywhere else in the country, and it has not resulted into a safer city.
You have to have smart policing.
I mean, the fact of the matter is one,
we're not solving any crimes in the city of Chicago.
Our clearance rate is absolutely abysmal.
20, 25% of crimes are actually being solved in the city of Chicago.
And so that's why my approach, because I have the ability to do this as mayor of
the city of Chicago, we're gonna train and promote 200 more detectives.
If we can't solve crime, it's gonna be very difficult for
us to actually have a safer city.
So it's a holistic approach.
The last thing that I'll say is this too, I'm gonna double the amount of young
people that we hire in the city of Chicago.
There's a direct correlation between youth employment and violence reduction.
>> And I have to say I was impressed with Johnson after that interview.
I asked him tough questions and he had good answers.
And to me, what sets him apart from other Progressives who claim to have
implemented progressive criminal justice reform is that his approach
was actually holistic instead of, we just need to like minimize the prison
population like we've done here in California where it's like we're just
gonna release people some of whom have been convicted of very violent crimes.
And then what?
There's no effort to help them reintegrate into society.
There's no effort to rehabilitate them if they have committed violent crimes.
His approach, Brandon Johnson's approach is a smart approach because it talks about
the root causes, it talks about how he's gonna tackle the root causes where
he's gonna get the money to tackle the root causes.
Anyway, I just think his campaign was smart and he was underestimated by
people including Laurie Lightfoot, now the former mayor of Chicago.
She said, let's go to the last graphic here.
They've endorsed Brandon Johnson, God bless.
Brandon Johnson isn't going to be the mayor of this city, oops.
>> Yeah, and look, I go back far enough and
I guess that would have seemed like a pretty reliable prediction at one point.
He was at 3% in the polls.
So a lot of work obviously had to be done.
And I don't know, I mean, maybe he obviously did a lot of great work but
got sort of an assist by some of the messaging of Alice as well as,
I don't know, maybe the way that the Republicans tried to impact this race.
Like incessant messaging about crime and
trying to lead people to see the race through only that lens when that was
not the only thing that they were running based on.
He supports a number of extensions and expansions of a number of different social
services, new taxes, again, as you said, to pay for these sorts of things.
One thing I would just quickly say, I use the term on my show and
I shouldn't have that, so Vallas says that he's tough on crime.
But let's get rid of that, right, I hate that.
That's just propaganda.
What does it mean?
Being tough on crime means just being stupid and single-minded and
believing that literally just hiring cops is the only thing that's gonna solve
our problems.
If solving more cops led to less crime, why is there any crime?
Because we have been funding cops more and more every year for literally decades.
It clearly is not the solution to all of our problems.
>> And the experience of any number of different countries around the world,
including the vast majority of Europe implies that there are other ways to get
to the sort of outcomes that we want.
>> And that's what I want.
I mean, and I thought that's what all Progressives wanted.
But I don't know, I guess I was blind to a more extreme version of the left that
thinks like, no, just let's abolish all of it, which I think is crazy.
No, I want a Nordic approach to it, right,
where prisons aren't just a place where you send people to be tortured, but
a place where people get rehabilitated and you see the success in that when
it comes to the recidivism rates in Nordic countries, right?
That's why I was impressed by Johnson, I really was.
Because he seemed to have thought about the more granular elements
of criminal justice reform instead of just spouting off good sounding
talking points that would appeal to a Progressive base.
I think the reason why he resonated with voters in Chicago is because,
look, pay attention to what he said in the interview, right?
So he talked about hiring, he did talk about hiring more cops, but
he specifically said detectives because they are not, right now as it stands,
they are not solving crimes.
The police department there is failing in solving crimes.
You need more detectives to do more investigations and
actually find the violent criminals who are carrying out the violent crimes.
I thought that was smart.
I love what he mentioned about funding mental health that's so
desperately needed.
He's just a good candidate overall.
And believe it or not, the fear mongering coming from Vallas
in regard to crime in Chicago turned a lot of voters off as well.
I wanna get to that real quick.
Kristen Lopez, a 30 year old graduate student said that when she learned Vallas
was endorsed by the Police Union, she knew Johnson would get her vote.
Crime was one of Lopez's general concerns, she said, but
she also cared about issues like gentrification and affordable housing and
rejected Vallas' notion of adding more police officers to the force.
Now again, Johnson proposed that too, but
he was very specific in wanting to add detectives to the police force.
Some voters supporting Johnson simply did not believe that he would be able to
defund the police.
So some of the fear mongering coming from Vallas in regard to Johnson potentially
defunding the police they didn't buy.
James Wallace liked Johnson's plan to fund mental health,
as I did, and disliked Vallas' hysteria about crime,
which she said reflected a white racial bias quote.
When it started affecting people, not of color,
then they want to put it on the news, she said.
Look, to be fair, local news covers crime and almost exclusively only crime.
>> [LAUGH] That's what local news does.
>> Yeah, there's a lot of racial bias the way local news covers, of course.
>> Yes, and that is true too.
>> But look, long story short, this is a good win.
I was concerned that Vallas was gonna win
considering how well he did prior to the runoff.
And look, this is what he said back in 2009.
I think it's important to watch this video and see who he really is and
celebrate the fact that he lost this mayoral race.
>> Do you think of yourself as a Republican?
>> I'm more of a Republican than Democrat.
>> If you run again for office,
you'd be running as a Republican as opposed to Democrat.
>> Yes, if I for [CROSSTALK].
>> Ok, well, I'm glad you lost.
>> I think what you just saw is a great example of this.
The state legislator, the woman in North Carolina who just flipped parties to
provide a veto proof majority for the Republicans,
there is a great example of this.
As the Republicans turn against democracy as a result of their inability to
win elections straight up,
there's a lot of different strategies they're gonna use to stay in power.
One of them is, as they come to realize that being a Republican is seen as
incredibly toxic, they're just not gonna run as Republicans.
They're gonna win in Democratic races and then flip or
just govern as a Democrat, but passing the sort of things a Republican would.
And so we need to be even more hypervigilant for
them infiltrating our side cuz in many places in the country,
that's the only way that they're ever gonna win a race.