Chicago Mayor Struggles to Capitalize on Success Fighting Crime

(Bloomberg) -- Chicago is finally getting its crime problem under control, with murders dropping to a decade low, offering a rare piece of good news to Mayor Brandon Johnson. Voters though aren’t ready to get behind the beleaguered leader.

The first-time mayor has an approval rating of just 26%, with 58% of respondents saying they dislike the way he is handling the job, according to a new poll by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center and the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation. Johnson’s high disapproval rating cuts across all races, ages, income levels and regions of the city, the poll showed.

The results come even as Police Chief Larry Snelling has been made significant progress in reducing crime, repeatedly cited as a top concern for residents and businesses alike. Murders fell 32% to 188 in the first half of the year, the lowest in more than a decade. Johnson’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Johnson, a former union organizer who surprised pundits when he beat incumbent Lori Lightfoot in 2023, has struggled to gain support for the policies he ran on. He failed to enact a so-called “mansion tax” on sales of properties priced at or above $1 million and to gain support from Illinois Governor JB Pritzker to implement a financial transaction tax.

He’s so far also been unable to new find ways to raise revenue to close a more than $1 billion budget hole forecast for next year. Even in the South Side, where Johnson enjoys his highest approval ratings, 51% of residents still dislike his handling of his job. 

His performance is in stark contrast to Pritzker’s. The billionaire governor, an heir to the Hyatt hotels fortune, has a 64% approval ratings among Chicagoans, according to the poll, which interviewed 1,111 residents between June 23 and July 9 as part of ChicagoSpeaks, a probability-based panel designed to be representative of the city of Chicago household population. The poll has a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points.

Pritzker, a Democrat who is widely seen of having White House ambitions, has his highest approval rating of 77% among residents that earn $100,000 or more a year. He still gets high marks from more than 50% of residents earning less than $30,000 a year, the survey showed.

“I find it fascinating that we’ve got two prominent Democratic politicians that are viewed so dissimilarly by Chicagoans,” said Christopher Berry, faculty director for the Mansueto Institute and associate director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Municipal Finance. 

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