And the good buys won in both cases.
In what is arguably the more important election, Janet Protasiewicz beat Australopithecus Dan Kelly for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, giving the court a liberal majority for the first time in 15 years.
It wasn't just a victory, it was a blow-out, with Protasiewicz (this name is gonna kill me) beating the extreme right winger Kelly by 11 points. (Which was followed by a concession speech from Kelly that made Donald Trump look like a gracous loser.)
The Wisconsin Supreme Court election was a huge win for liberals, not only because they will have gained a majority on the court, but also because Justice-elect Janet Protasiewicz beat conservative Dan Kelly by an astonishing 11 points.
While Protasiewcz broke new ground Tuesday, gaining a court majority for the first time since 2008 in a record-turnout election for non-presidential years, Kelly landed in familiar terrain: He lost by 10.5 points in the 2020 Wisconsin Supreme Court election.
Protasiewicz’s victory came after conservatives aired concerns about Kelly’s rhetoric, saying his focus on defending the Constitution wasn’t resonating with voters nearly as much as Protasiewicz’s focus on abortion. Kelly pivoted his strategy toward the end of the race, seeking to portray Protasiewicz as soft on crime, but Tuesday’s results showed that his new message didn’t have its intended effect.
That's because Protasiewcz ran on an issue that voters knew that she will deliver on, protecting abortion rights, and Kelly ran on "The Constitution" which means nothing.
Hopefully, the new liberal majority on the court will take a critical view of the various actions taken by the legislator to keep minorities from voting.
And then there is Chicago, where Brandon Johnson defeated Paul Vallas in the race for mayor.
In this case, it's clear that Chicagoans were not interested in the Wall Street lackeys who had preceded him, Richard M. Daley, Rahm Emanuel, and Lori Lightfoot.
Vallas was very much in that mold, and additionally, he was a hatchet-man for Rahm Emanuel as schools chief, where he aggressively closed community schools in Black and Hispanic areas, and funneled money to Wall Street backed charters in whiter neighborhoods.
Despite a lot of money from big business, Johnson won by 1.8 points.
Brandon Johnson defeated Paul Vallas in Tuesday’s election to become the next mayor of Chicago, a stunning rebuke of the political establishment by the unapologetically progressive Cook County commissioner whose campaign themes of racial justice and uplifting the working class caught fire.
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Johnson, a 47-year-old longtime Chicago Teachers Union leader, announced his candidacy for mayor in October by the Jenner Academy school building, where he started his career in education at the mostly Black elementary school that had served children who lived in the Cabrini-Green public housing complex next door.
His position as a CTU leader was important, because the union went up against Rahm Emanuel, and his political machine, and won.
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CTU President Stacy Davis Gates often invoked the Chicago Board of Education vote to close 50 schools in 2013 as a pivotal moment for the city’s progressive movement. Her predecessor, late President Karen Lewis, declared that they needed to shift the political landscape to influence decisions from City Hall, setting a string of events in motion that culminated with Johnson’s election.
Despite formidable progressive labor support, Johnson entered the race as an underdog and was polling as low as 3% in December. Vallas emerged as the top vote-getter in the city’s Feb. 28 election after focusing on crime and public safety in a divided nine-candidate field where he was also the only white hopeful.
In February’s first round, Vallas won 33% of the vote to Johnson’s 22%, while Mayor Lori Lightfoot only received 17% of the vote en route to the first reelection defeat of a Chicago mayor since Jane Byrne lost her bid for a second term in 1983. So began a runoff campaign in which the two extreme poles of a once-crowded race jockeyed for the middle.
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Tuesday, with roughly 99% of the city’s precincts reporting, Johnson was ahead with 51% of the unofficial vote to 49% for Vallas, who came close as ever but failed to shake off his history of never winning elected office.
Early returns also showed voter turnout among young adults aged 18 to 24, consistently the most reluctant to cast ballots but likely a core base for Johnson, surged compared to the Feb. 28 election, up 32%. Among 25- to 34-year-olds, that jump was 24%.
This is not a surprise, the young voters know that they will be paying for the sellouts of Vallas and his ilk. They know that they have 61 years left on a larcenous parking meter deal with private equity signed by Richie Daley, and they were guaranteed that Vallas would do more of the same, because he had already done so with his advocacy of charters
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As a CTU organizer, Johnson was an instrumental force in crafting the union’s brash political strategy that earned the group a formidable reputation as a progressive powerhouse but also raised criticisms from opponents that Chicago doesn’t need a mayor beholden to CTU. As his candidacy nonetheless gained momentum, eventually propelling him into the runoff, those attacks snowballed with Vallas trying to paint him as too radical.
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Vallas had reassembled the vestiges of the Daley machine as well as Black establishment Democrats, the business community and labor groups representing first responders and the trades in propelling his candidacy as one that he signified would steer the city back to its former glory.
As I noted above, people are sick of the, "Daley machine as well as Black establishment Democrats."
In the old days, the machine would deliver, and get streets fixed and make sure that the garbage was collected, but today, their goal is to privatize, and ensh$#tify these services in order to curry favor with big business.
The political calculus for supporting the Chicago machine simply no longer exists.
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