With just a few days left in the Chicago mayoral election, the race is still completely up for grabs.
Paul Vallas has run a vastly superior race, both in strategy and execution. He’s wisely running a persuasion campaign focused on winning support from elderly Blacks, working class Whites, and less progressive Hispanics. He’s effectively gone on the attack against his opponent while avoiding major gaffes. He’s earned an impressive lineup of endorsements and, more importantly, deployed those endorsements effectively.
Meanwhile, Brandon Johnson has run a comparatively poor race, failing to define his opponent and making rookie mistakes like not cleaning up minor debts to the city. He’s gone all in on his strategy to fire up and turn out his progressive base, and while we won’t know until Tuesday (or later) whether he made the right call, based on turnout last November and even in February, it’s hard to see this being a smart play since female, minority, and progressive turnout has been weak in Chicago. Had he instead moved slightly to the center for the runoff, Johnson had a chance to lock this race up weeks ago.
If Vallas is dominating the campaign, why isn’t he a lock to win on Tuesday? Because: math. To win most campaigns, you simply need to dominate your base and win more of the middle than your opponent. Not so for Vallas, due to the city’s partisan makeup. He has to completely control his base, dominate the middle, AND win over 20% of his opponent’s base in order to pull off a victory. Said another way, with baseball finally back: Vallas has to score 5 runs to win, while Johnson only has to score 3 to win.
As a result, Johnson could end up eking out a victory even after running a poor campaign. All polling has Vallas up ~5 points going into Election Day, but Johnson has the stronger ground game, which means he will likely overperform his poll numbers. Johnson will win vote by mail ballots by a large margin—the question is whether Vallas can win Election Day and early voting by enough to overcome that deficit.
Based on early vote turnout so far, it looks like Vallas is exactly where he needs to be. Turnout is strong among seniors and voters 45-64 while it’s weak among younger voters. White voters are dominating early voting, making up 48% of the early vote, while Black voters make up just 24%. Republican turnout is up while Democratic turnout is down slightly. The only positive early vote signs for Johnson are female turnout looking strong, at 54% of the vote so far, and Hispanic turnout being low, at just 13% of the turnout.
Vallas remains the frontrunner and the odds on favorite to win, though it wouldn’t be a shock if Johnson were to pull this off. The final outcome could be anywhere from Vallas winning by as much as 8% to Johnson winning by 4%. Expect Johnson to slow play election night since, like in the runoff, he’s likely to gain a few points post Tuesday as outstanding vote by mail ballots arrive.
