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      Mel King, Whose Boston Mayoral Bid Eased Racial Tensions, Dies at 94

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      The first Black finalist for mayor of the city, he was credited, along with the eventual winner, Raymond Flynn, with running a respectful, calming campaign.Mel King, a Black community activist whose barrier-breaking campaign for mayor of Boston in 1983 helped ease racial tensions there that had been caused in part by court-ordered busing to desegregate public schools, died on March 28 at his home in Boston. He was 94.His wife, Joyce (Kenion) King, confirmed the death.In the decade before he ran for mayor, Mr. King had been a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, where he led the passage of laws creating nonprofit agencies that helped finance and renovate substantial amounts of affordable housing,“He’s the father of affordable housing in Boston,” Lewis Finfer, a longtime community organizer in Boston who is director of Massachusetts Action for Justice, said by phone.During his mayoral campaign, Mr. King drew support from what he called a “Rainbow Coalition” — a core that included Black, Hispanic, Asian and progressive white supporters. That term was soon adopted and expanded nationally by the Rev. Jesse Jackson.Mr. King narrowly finished second to Raymond Flynn in a nonpartisan nine-candidate primary and was then soundly defeated by Mr. Flynn in the runoff general election.Still, Mr. King, the first Black mayoral finalist in the city’s history, received a strong 20 percent of the ballots cast by white voters. (Boston has never elected a Black mayor, but for several months in 2021 Kim Janey served as the acting mayor.)Mr. King and Mr. Flynn, both sons of longshoremen, ran an issues-oriented campaign that focused on working-class voters and reflected their long friendship, which began when they were teammates on a semipro basketball team.The campaign was free of rancor about their opposing positions on enforced school busing between predominantly white and predominantly Black sections of the city — Mr. King was for it, Mr. Flynn was against it. That issue had divided the city, sometimes with violence, since 1974, when a federal court ordered the measure as a remedy to racial segregation.“We set a civil tone, one of good will that changed the racial dynamic and toned it down,” Mr. Flynn said in a phone interview. “It wasn’t what people expected, but they were able to say if these two guys can do this for the city, we can do it as well.”Pat Walker, the field director of Mr. King’s campaign, said in an interview that “both campaigns kept the violence and ugliness from breaking out.”Mr. King himself told The Boston Globe a decade after his mayoral run: “What I believe people want more than anything else is a sense of a vision that’s inclusive and respectful and appreciative of who they are. What the Rainbow Coalition did was to put that right up front, because everybody could be a member.”Mr. King joined a singalong while running for mayor of Boston in 1983. He and his opponent, Raymond Flynn, ran a rancor-free campaign that focused on working-class voters and reflected their long friendship.John Blanding/The Boston Globe, via Getty ImagesMelvin Herbert King was born on Oct. 20, 1928, in Boston, one of 11 children. His father, Watts Richard King, who was from Barbados, was a union secretary in addition to working on the docks. His mother, Ursula (Earle) King, was from Guyana.Mr. King attended Claflin University in Orangeburg, S.C., a historically Black school, where he was captain of the football team. He had to adapt to the realities of living, even temporarily, in the Jim Crow South.“I stopped going to the theater where Black people had to sit upstairs and started patronizing the Black theater instead,” he wrote in his 1981 book, “Chain of Change: Struggles for Black Community Development.” “I rode in the back of the bus once and it felt so crummy that from then on I hitchhiked.”He graduated in 1951 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a year later received a master’s in education from Boston Teachers College (later Boston State College). He taught at two local high schools before becoming a social worker, first as director of boys’ activities at the Lincoln House settlement house and later as director of youth opportunities for United South End Settlements, a nonprofit social services agency that serves mostly low-income families and that had absorbed Lincoln House.When he was fired in 1967 over a policy dispute with the agency, local residents protested, saying that he had been helping them overcome poverty. An editorial in The Globe called him a “deeply respected leader” of the community.His profile in the city grew.In 1968, Mr. King led a successful demonstration by more than 1,000 people against a city plan to build a parking garage on the site of housing that had been demolished as part of an urban renewal project on the city’s South End; in 1988, a development of 269 mixed-income apartments opened at the site under the name Tent City, a nod to the tents that protesters had earlier pitched and occupied on the property.In 1989, Mr. King, who by then was executive director of the New Urban League, joined with other members of that group to disrupt an awards luncheon of the United Fund, a major local philanthropy, which had recently reduced its financial allocation to the league. Mr. King scooped half-eaten rolls and pieces of coconut pie into a laundry bag marked “Our Unfair Share — Black Crumbs,” held it over his head and dumped it on the head table.“We’ve been getting crumbs,” he said at the time. “We’re no longer going to accept crumbs.”In 1979, when Pope John Paul II visited Boston, Mr. King led a march to express outrage over the shooting of a Black high school football player during a game. The player’s wounds left him a quadriplegic. Three white teenagers were charged.“This walk,” he said during the event, “is to indicate that the pope should not come here without helping his flock to overcome their racism and to get the leaders of this city involved in that kind of dialogue that will put an end to the racism in this city.”During his mayoral campaign, Mr. King took controversial positions. He told a mostly Jewish audience that he would welcome Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, to Boston if he came peacefully. Given the choice between President Ronald Reagan and the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, he told a radio station, he would take Castro, because he had done more for the poor.Mr. King’s other work included teaching in the urban studies and planning department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1970 to 1996. There, he started a Community Fellows Program for leaders nationwide.In 1997, he created the South End Technology Center at Tent City, which offers community residents free or low-cost training in computer technology. He was its volunteer director.In addition to his wife, Mr. King’s survivors include his daughters, Pamela, Judith and Nancy King; his sons, Melvin Jr., Michael and Jomo; and his sister, Olga King. More

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      Three Takeaways From a Tumultuous Day in Politics

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      A blowout in Wisconsin, an indictment in New York and a progressive victory in Chicago.Supporters of the victorious Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, on Tuesday night in Milwaukee. Abortion was a key issue. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesIt has been a big — even historic — week in American politics. Donald J. Trump was indicted. The liberal candidate for Wisconsin Supreme Court, Janet Protasiewicz, easily prevailed over a conservative, Daniel Kelly. And Brandon Johnson, a progressive, was elected the mayor of Chicago.What did we learn? While in some cases it’s too soon to say much, here are a few early takeaways:It’s still 2022, at least in WisconsinIf the 2022 midterm elections offered any lesson, it was that liberals excel when abortion and democracy are on the ballot. Liberal voters turn out en masse. A crucial sliver of voters — perhaps as few as one in every 30 or 40 — will flip to vote for the Democrat when they otherwise would have voted Republican.That pattern continued in Wisconsin on Tuesday, when the liberal candidate won by 11 points, a striking margin for Wisconsin. Like many of the best Democratic showings of 2022, the Wisconsin race seemed likely to decide the fate of the state’s abortion ban and its gerrymandered legislative maps.Interestingly, Wisconsin was not a state where Democrats excelled last November. They didn’t fare poorly, but Senator Ron Johnson still won re-election and the incumbent Democratic governor won by just three points. The 2022 showing was no Democratic romp like in Pennsylvania or Michigan, where a stop-the-steal candidate or abortion referendum helped Democrats.This time, the issues facing Wisconsin voters were more like those in Michigan and Pennsylvania. As a result, Wisconsin liberals won a Pennsylvania-like and Michigan-like landslide.Too early to tell on Trump, but a short-term bumpIt’s still far too soon to say how the indictment of Mr. Trump will play out. But there are already plenty of signs that he has gained among Republican primary voters since last Thursday, when news of the indictment broke. Indeed, all four polls taken over this period showed Mr. Trump gaining compared with their previous survey.We’ll probably return to this question in more depth next week. After all, none of these polls were taken after his flight to New York or his surrender to authorities in Manhattan. And he was already gaining before the news of his indictment, so it’s hard to distinguish his latest gains from the continuation of a longer-term trend.Still, it would be no surprise if Mr. Trump is benefiting from the indictment. For days, the conservative media ecosystem has been dominated by a chorus of his defenders, including none other than his chief rival, Ron DeSantis. This is about as favorable of a media environment as it gets for a Republican primary candidate.How this will play over the longer term — especially if Mr. Trump faces other indictments — remains to be seen.Brandon Johnson, a progressive, as he concluded his victory speech on Tuesday in Chicago.Evan Cobb for The New York TimesBlack voters are the fulcrum of a divided Democratic electorateThe Chicago mayoral race wasn’t a Democratic primary, but it was about as close as it gets for a general election: Both candidates were Democrats, and 82 percent of Chicago voters backed Mr. Biden in 2020. Like many Democratic primaries over the last decade, it pitted an activist-backed progressive against a more moderate candidate.But while we’ve grown accustomed to victories for moderate Democrats in most of these intra-primary fights, in Chicago it was the progressive candidate Brandon Johnson who prevailed. That’s in no small part thanks to the backing of Black voters, who have often offered decisive support to high-profile establishment-backed candidates, from Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to Eric Adams.With many examples of Black voters backing moderate candidates over the years, it can be tempting to assume that they are the reliable moderate allies of the establishment. In reality, it’s not so simple. In particular, Black voters have often backed Black progressives over white moderates and liberals.In the New York mayoral race, Black voters overwhelmingly backed Mr. Adams over the liberal Kathryn Garcia, even though they also preferred the Black progressive Maya Wiley over Ms. Garcia, based on data from ranked choice balloting. When Black voters side with progressives, the establishment’s position suddenly looks a lot weaker: Black voters represent around 20 percent of Democratic voters.Mr. Johnson, who is Black, routinely won 80 percent of the vote in the South Side’s majority Black wards, helping him squeak past the moderate Paul Vallas, who won a lot of the rest of the city.Mr. Johnson’s success doesn’t necessarily mean that Black Democrats are feeling the Bern, or otherwise itching to support progressive candidates. In this year’s primary, Mr. Johnson fared best in relatively young and white progressive areas on Chicago’s North Side, while the incumbent, Lori Lightfoot, carried the South Side wards where Mr. Johnson would dominate just a month later.But the importance of Black voters to progressive fortunes might offer a lesson for activists who hope one of their own might win a Democratic presidential primary.After all, the last candidate to beat the Democratic establishment in such a Democratic primary was none other than Barack Obama. More

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      How Brandon Johnson Made Up Ground and Won Chicago’s Mayoral Race

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      Mr. Johnson, a progressive county commissioner, won over liberal voters across the city after finishing second in a first round of balloting.CHICAGO — In the final days of the mayoral campaign in Chicago, Brandon Johnson drew more than 4,000 people to a jubilant rally featuring Senator Bernie Sanders, who endorsed him. He crisscrossed the South and West Sides, visiting six churches in a single Sunday. In a last push on Election Day, an army of volunteers for Mr. Johnson knocked on 46,000 doors across the city, whipping up enthusiasm and encouraging last-minute voters to get to the polls.The coalition that Mr. Johnson needed — young people, Black voters on the South and West Sides, a sizable number of Latino voters, white progressives on the North Side and along the lakefront — was coming together.On Tuesday, Mr. Johnson, a Democratic county commissioner who was unknown to many Chicagoans a few months ago, came from behind to defeat Paul Vallas, a more conservative Democrat and a former school executive who entered the runoff campaign with a significantly larger base of support. Mr. Vallas, 69, was the favorite of many moderate and conservative voters, running on a law-and-order platform in which he promised to expand the police force and crack down on crime.On Tuesday, Mr. Johnson, a county commissioner who was unknown to many Chicagoans a few months ago, came from behind to defeat Paul Vallas.Evan Cobb for The New York TimesBut even though large numbers of Chicagoans had said in polls that they considered public safety to be the most important issue in the election, it was Mr. Johnson, 47, who captured the slim majority of votes in Tuesday’s election. He tapped into the vast network of progressive groups in liberal Chicago — from the powerful teachers’ union to smaller, ward-based political organizations — who focused on field work to rally voters. Mr. Johnson pitched voters on a public safety plan that went beyond policing but distanced himself from past support for defunding of law enforcement.Chicago voters chose Brandon Johnson, a county commissioner and union organizer with more liberal polices than his opponent Paul Vallas.Evan Cobb for The New York TimesMr. Johnson took advantage of widespread doubts among Democratic voters over Mr. Vallas’s party identification, ever since the emergence of a television interview from 2009 in which Mr. Vallas called himself “more of a Republican than a Democrat.”And Mr. Johnson capitalized on key endorsements to bolster his credibility among voters who did not know him well, especially those from Senator Sanders and Representative Jesús G. García, a progressive congressman with a base of support in mostly Hispanic neighborhoods on the West Side.“You walk into a runoff with a certain base, but then you’ve got to expand your base beyond that,” Andre Vasquez, a City Council member who organized for Mr. Johnson, said on Wednesday. “The Latino community did better for Brandon than expected. The North Side performed well. It feels like a coalition of everything.”Still, Mr. Johnson will take charge of a deeply divided Chicago. Mr. Vallas, who was once in charge of the city’s public school system, won nearly 49 percent of the vote to Mr. Johnson’s 51 percent, with thousands of mail-in ballots yet to be counted. In the first round of voting in February, Mr. Vallas received the most votes. Large numbers of Chicagoans said in polls that they considered public safety to be the most important issue in the election.Mustafa Hussain for The New York TimesAhead of the runoff, Mr. Johnson worked to increase turnout among young voters and broaden his support among Hispanic residents.“That’s one thing that really caught my attention about Brandon: He’s out here with my people, my Hispanic community, advocating for himself,” said Lily Cruz, 22, a college student from the Southwest Side who voted for Mr. Johnson. “I feel like he has put more effort than I’ve seen any other politician that wants to run for office,” she added.Mr. Johnson performed well in some largely white neighborhoods near Lake Michigan and in predominantly Hispanic areas northwest of downtown, just as he had in a first round of voting in February. But unlike then, Mr. Johnson, who is Black, dominated on Tuesday in wards with Black majorities, winning 80 percent of the vote in some of those areas on the South and West Sides.Chicago Mayor Runoff Election Results More

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      After His Arraignment, Trump Lashes Out

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      More from our inbox:‘A Great Day for Liberals’ in Wisconsin and ChicagoA Renewed Interest in Freudian PsychoanalysisLos cargos contra Trump representan la culminación de una investigación de casi cinco años de duración.Dave Sanders para The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Trump Charged With 34 Felonies” (front page, April 5):After Judge Juan M. Merchan warned at Donald Trump’s arraignment that all parties must refrain from making statements about the case with the potential to incite violence and civil unrest, what does the former president who can’t keep his mouth shut do during his speech a few hours later?He says hateful things about Judge Merchan and his family, and vilifies District Attorney Alvin Bragg, District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia and the special counsel Jack Smith.And one of the former president’s sons put a photograph of Judge Merchan’s daughter on social media — a clear invitation to violence.It’s time for the former president to be gagged. And when he speaks out with hateful words again, a contempt order and jail time may put a sock in his mouth. About time.Gail ShorrWilmette, Ill.To the Editor:Crowd size has always been important to Donald Trump. It is the metric he uses, along with TV ratings, to measure his impact, to gauge his popularity, to feed his ego.The crowd that showed up Tuesday at his arraignment was hardly composed overwhelmingly of Trump supporters. It looked as if the media and anti-Trump people more than countered his base.No matter how Mr. Trump spins it, no matter how many times at his future rallies he proclaims an overwhelming showing of support in New York City, the camera doesn’t lie.It was good to see him cut down to size Tuesday. For the first time in his adult life he could not control the narrative. He called for a massive protest, he predicted “death and destruction” if he was charged, and he got neither.Len DiSesaDresher, Pa.To the Editor:The April 5 front-page headline “Even as Biden Has Oval Office, Predecessor Has the Spotlight” is a statement that is true only because your newspaper and other media outlets allow Donald Trump to occupy center stage.This behavior of the media has been mentioned many times before, and many believe that the tens of millions of dollars’ worth of free publicity provided to Mr. Trump during the 2016 campaign contributed to his winning the election.It is now 2023 and we are facing an election that could well decide the future of America. I am therefore requesting that The Times stop paying so much attention to Mr. Trump (we’ve heard everything he has to say many times before) effective immediately.David SommersKensington, Md.To the Editor:I felt a real jolt seeing the photo of former President Donald Trump seated at the table in a Manhattan courtroom. It was the jolt of the norms of American justice falling back into alignment.Christopher HermanWashington‘A Great Day for Liberals’ in Wisconsin and ChicagoJanet Protasiewicz, the liberal candidate in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election, during her election night party in Milwaukee on Tuesday. She ran on her open support of abortion rights.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Liberal Wins Wisconsin Court Race, in Victory for Abortion Rights Backers” (news article, April 5):While New York and the nation were fixated on the circus that was Donald Trump’s arraignment, a special election was held in Wisconsin that decided whether conservatives or liberals would control that state’s Supreme Court. Janet Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee County judge, won the race and gave liberals control of the highest court in Wisconsin.Wisconsin is an important swing state, and this new balance of power in the court will have dramatic effects on abortion rights, potential election interference and how election districts are drawn. Conservatives, who have had control of the Supreme Court, will no longer be able to gerrymander voting districts to favor Republicans, nor will they be able to successfully challenge the results of a free and fair election.While this is only one state, we may see similar results in other swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and, yes, even Texas. Donald Trump is to Democrats the gift that just keeps on giving.Henry A. LowensteinNew YorkTo the Editor:Three news stories from your newspaper indicate that Tuesday was a great day for liberals and progressives: “Trump Charged With 34 Felonies,” “Liberal Wins Wisconsin Court Race, in Victory for Abortion Rights Backers” and “Rejecting a ‘Republican in Disguise,’ Chicago Voters Elect Johnson as Next Mayor.”While conservative Republicans are obsessed with culture wars and MAGA, progressives are making political headway. Let’s hope that we continue on this march to liberalism till our nation is free from prejudices, curbs on reproductive and gender freedoms, relentless gun-related violence, etc.Michael HadjiargyrouCenterport, N.Y.A Renewed Interest in Freudian Psychoanalysis Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Back to the Couch With Freud” (Sunday Styles, March 26):It is true that people “see what they want in Freud.” Thus, a younger generation might think Freud “gay friendly” because a 1935 letter declared, “Homosexuality is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation.”However, the article omits that Freud went on to describe homosexuality in that same letter as an “arrest of sexual development.”Freud’s theory that gay people suffered from psychological stunted growth rationalized many decades of discrimination in which openly gay men and women were refused psychoanalytic training because they were “developmentally arrested.” Only in 1991 did the American Psychoanalytic Association change its policies refusing admission to gay candidates.I am glad that Freud is having a renaissance. However, any reading or interpretation of his work should not ignore the historical context in which he lived and the ways, for better or worse, in which some of his theories have been used to discriminate.Jack DrescherNew YorkThe writer, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, is the author of “Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Gay Man.”To the Editor:I was pleased to see New York Times coverage of the “Freudaissance,” which I have been a joyful participant in for more than a decade now, both personally and professionally.One of the understandings I have come to, having spent countless hours on both sides of the proverbial couch, in both psychoanalytic and cognitive behavioral contexts, is that these two approaches do not really diverge from each other as much as many tend to assume that they do.I see the C.B.T. founder Aaron Beck’s three levels of cognition (automatic thoughts, core beliefs and cognitive schemas) mapping neatly onto Freud’s topographical model of the mind (the conscious, preconscious and unconscious, respectively).And I see the dialectic behavioral therapy founder Marsha Linehan’s construct of the “wise mind” as an integration of the rational and emotional minds matching Freud’s structural model of the ego as a synthesis of superego and id.Different terms resonate differently in different generations and with different individuals, but rather than disproving or undermining Freud’s theories, I see today’s evidence-based approaches as indications that the father of modern psychology was apparently onto something more than a century ago.Rachel N. WynerWest Hempstead, N.Y.The writer is a clinical psychologist. More

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      Rejecting a ‘Republican in Disguise,’ Chicago Voters Elect Johnson as Next Mayor

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      In a largely liberal city, Chicago voters chose Brandon Johnson, a county commissioner and union organizer, over Paul Vallas, who took a hard line on crime.CHICAGO — Rufus Burns, a 73-year-old resident of Chicago’s West Side, voted for Brandon Johnson for Chicago mayor on Tuesday. But it was really more of a vote against Paul Vallas.“A Republican in disguise,” he said of Mr. Vallas.Ever since the resurfacing of a television interview from 2009 — during which Mr. Vallas called himself “more of a Republican than a Democrat” — many Chicagoans in this overwhelmingly Democratic city have doubted whether Mr. Vallas, a former schools executive, was really the Democrat that he more recently claimed to be.Mr. Johnson, a county commissioner with more liberal policies on education, housing and policing, won the mayoral election in a close race, according to a projection by The Associated Press. At the polls on Tuesday, some voters said that as they considered the choice between Mr. Johnson, 47, and Mr. Vallas, 69, they were largely swayed by a sense that Mr. Johnson was the true progressive in the race.“It was pretty obvious for me,” said Annie Wang, 22, a business analyst who lives in the South Loop. “Johnson is the much more progressive candidate. Vallas was closer to the Republican Party. That made all the difference.”Carmen Moore, a schoolteacher who lives in the Austin neighborhood on the West Side, said that she cast a ballot for Mr. Johnson because she felt he would be a better agent for addressing systemic issues on the South and West Sides of the city. Then, she added, there was that clip from Mr. Vallas’s television interview, which began playing as a campaign ad in early February.“That kind of got me from the beginning,” she said. “That was one thing that stuck out for me.”In Hyde Park on Chicago’s South Side, Richard Strier, a retired professor of English literature at the University of Chicago, said he was worried that Mr. Vallas was a closet Republican.“Vallas makes me nervous,” he said. “I’m basically voting against Vallas for someone who is more progressive.”Mr. Vallas pitched himself to a voters as a tough-on-crime technocrat who would hire thousands more police officers and make the city safer than it has been since the pandemic, when shootings and homicides spiked. But he also spent much of the campaign trying to convince voters that he was a devoted Democrat.On the campaign trail, he cited support from Black leaders, including Jesse White, the former Illinois secretary of state, and surrounded himself with Democratic City Council members who lined up behind him at events and vouched for his credibility and experience.Voting at Beard Elementary School on Tuesday.Mustafa Hussain for The New York TimesPaul Vallas, lower right, speaks with reporters at Manny’s Deli on election day.Mustafa Hussain for The New York TimesOne major obstacle for Mr. Vallas among liberal voters was his early endorsement by the Chicago chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, a union representing rank-and-file officers whose leader, John Catanzara, has alienated many Chicagoans with strident hard right positions. (Mr. Catanzara, for example, defended the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, then apologized.)Kristen Lopez, 30, a graduate student on the South Side, said on Tuesday that when she learned that Mr. Vallas was endorsed by the police union, she knew who would get her vote for mayor: Mr. Johnson.“That made my choice for me,” she said.Crime was one of Ms. Lopez’s general concerns, she said, but she also cared about issues like gentrification and affordable housing — and rejected Mr. Vallas’s notion of adding more police officers to the force.“Obviously, giving the police more power hasn’t worked so far,” she said. But for some voters, it was Mr. Vallas’s more conservative policies, especially on crime and policing, that drew them to him.Brad Walker, 44, who lives on the city’s North Side, described himself as an independent who is liberal on social issues, but a strong proponent of gun rights and financial responsibility.He voted for Mr. Vallas because progressives “have been very weak” on rising crime in Chicago, he said.“The one thing Chicago was known for was its cleanliness and safety,” he said. “If you’re going to be in the city and pay high taxes, you want to feel safe.”As he cast a vote in downtown Chicago, Daniel Lancaster, 37, an engineer who lives in Roscoe Village, a neighborhood on the North Side, said that he saw the two candidates as far apart politically. Mr. Johnson was “the Bernie Democrat,” he said, noting his endorsement by the progressive Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.“For me, it was more of a vote for an ideal,” he said.Voting for Mr. Johnson was riskier, Mr. Lancaster conceded. His proposals for solving crime were more long term than Mr. Vallas’s, with calls to invest more deeply in education and affordable housing.“There’s a lot of political theory behind it, but it’s going to take more time,” he said.Brandon Johnson holds his I VOTED card outside the Lorraine Hansberry Apartments polling site.Jim Vondruska for The New York TimesIn the Far North Side neighborhood of Rogers Park, on the shore of Lake Michigan, Cal Graham, 62, said he took Mr. Vallas’s years-ago description of himself as a Republican seriously.“He said he was,” Mr. Graham said.But Mr. Graham said that he remains unsure if Mr. Johnson is better equipped to handle the crime problem in Chicago.“I don’t know until one of them gets in office,” he said. “That’s the only way you can tell. They all have ideas but nobody has the solution.”For Kevin Yahampath, 23, a business analyst, choosing between Mr. Johnson and Mr. Vallas required a last-minute gut check. Before he headed into a polling station in the Loop late Tuesday afternoon, he logged onto an online quiz on the Chicago Sun-Times website, designed to help voters see which candidate aligned with their politics.The quiz told Mr. Yahampath that he was a Johnson voter.“I kind of expected it,” he said. “I knew Vallas was to the right.”Robert Chiarito More

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      Chicagoans Go to the Polls in a Mayoral Race. Here’s What to Know.

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      Paul Vallas, a former public school executive, has called for a crackdown on crime, while Brandon Johnson, a county commissioner, wants to expand social programs.CHICAGO — After rejecting the incumbent mayor, Lori Lightfoot, in the first round of balloting in February, Chicago voters were set to choose on Tuesday between two candidates with starkly different visions for the country’s third-largest city.Paul Vallas, a former public schools executive, has run on a more conservative platform, calling for a larger police force, a crackdown on crime and more charter schools. His opponent, Brandon Johnson, a county commissioner and union organizer, has campaigned as a proud progressive who wants to expand social programs, spend more on neighborhood schools and add new taxes.The runoff election comes as Chicago fights to regain its prepandemic swagger. In recent years, the city has been confronted by rising crime rates, an emptier downtown and census estimates showing a loss of residents. Ms. Lightfoot, who missed the runoff after receiving only 17 percent of the vote in February, presided over two teacher work stoppages and civil unrest during her single term in City Hall, leaving many voters frustrated and frightened.“This city needs a lot — it needs safety,” said Shermane Thompson, who voted for Mr. Johnson and said she was scared to let her 9-year-old son play outside. “Jobs, mental health — it’s a lot of things that need to be done. But I want it to be done in a way that is long-lasting and that works for everyone, not just for select people.”The election in Chicago is the latest race in a large, liberal American city in which crime has been a primary issue. In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat and former police captain, defeated progressive candidates in his party’s 2021 mayoral primary by calling for a crackdown on crime. And in Los Angeles last year, Karen Bass, a liberal congresswoman, was elected mayor in a race in which her more conservative opponent, Rick Caruso, a billionaire real estate developer, ran on a law-and-order message.Mr. Vallas, 69, made public safety the focus of his campaign, calling for tougher prosecutions of minor offenses and a rapid expansion of the Chicago Police Department, which is operating under a consent decree in federal court and without a permanent superintendent. That platform helped Mr. Vallas finish in first place in the first round of the election in February, though well short of the outright majority he would have needed to clinch the job without a runoff.In a heavily Democratic city, Mr. Vallas has faced criticism for past comments that he considered himself to be more of a Republican than a Democrat, and for an endorsement from the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, whose leaders frequently use brash rhetoric and support Republican politicians. Still, his description of Chicago as a city in crisis and his pledge to get crime under control resonated with many voters.“I’m tired of looking out my window and watching drive-by shootings,” said Sherri Ortiz, a West Side resident who said this week that she was leaning toward Mr. Vallas, who she believed was more likely to fix things quickly.Mr. Johnson, 47, qualified for the runoff by defeating several better-known candidates competing for the same liberal voters. A former social studies teacher, Mr. Johnson has spent the last dozen years as an employee of the Chicago Teachers Union, a powerful but polarizing political force that contributed heavily to his campaign. In recent weeks, he has described a public safety vision that goes beyond law enforcement, but has tried to distance himself from past support for defunding the police.In a West Side campaign stop on Monday, Mr. Johnson pitched an upbeat vision for the city, saying “a better, safer Chicago is possible if we actually invest in people.”“We deserve to have a leader that’s prepared to bring people together,” he said, “and that’s what my candidacy reflects.”Earlier on Monday, outside a South Side doughnut shop in the neighborhood where he grew up, Mr. Vallas said his record leading “institutions in crisis” made him the right candidate for the moment.“It’s about leadership, it’s about somebody with the experience,” said Mr. Vallas, who led the school systems in Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans, and was surrounded by Black politicians who had endorsed him.Race has often played a role in elections in Chicago, which has roughly equal numbers of white, Black and Hispanic residents. Mr. Vallas, who is white, made it to the runoff with strong support in the city’s downtown and in majority white areas of the Northwest and Southwest Sides, where many municipal workers live. Mr. Johnson, who is Black, performed well along the city’s northern lakefront, home to many white progressives, and in predominantly Hispanic areas northwest of downtown.With polls suggesting a tight race, both candidates touted support from Black and Hispanic politicians as they sought to win over voters who supported Ms. Lightfoot or Representative Jesús G. García, another mayoral candidate, in the first round of balloting.Whoever wins the election, it will mark a decisive shift from the policies of Ms. Lightfoot, with Mr. Vallas running to her political right and Mr. Johnson well to her left.Four years ago, Ms. Lightfoot, also a Democrat, carried all 50 wards in the runoff election, becoming the first Black woman and first gay person to serve as Chicago’s mayor. But her tenure was bumpy from the start. Soon after she took office, the teachers’ union went on strike. And after less than a year in office, the coronavirus pandemic upended every aspect of daily life. As the virus spread, the Loop business district emptied out and homicides rose to generational highs.On the campaign trail this year, Ms. Lightfoot emphasized investments in long-neglected parts of the South and West Sides and noted that homicide rates, though still higher than before the pandemic, had started to decline. Voters, however, decided to move on.Michael Gerstein More

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      Democrats Run on Abortion, Even for Offices With Little Say on the Issue

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      GREEN BAY, Wis. — Eric Genrich is running a full-throated campaign in support of abortion rights, reminding voters of his position at every turn and hammering his anti-abortion opponent in television ads. At a recent event, he featured an obstetrician who now commutes to a state where abortion is legal to treat patients and a local woman who traveled to Colorado to terminate a nonviable pregnancy.There’s just one inconvenient reality: Mr. Genrich is running for re-election as mayor of Green Bay, Wis., an office that has nothing to do with abortion policy.Even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer, putting back into effect a Wisconsin law from 1849 that bans nearly all abortions, the city did not have a clinic that performed the procedure, nor a health department that regulated it.Mr. Genrich is one of several candidates for municipal offices on the ballot this spring in races in Wisconsin, Chicago, St. Louis, Lincoln, Neb., and elsewhere who are making their support for abortion rights — and often their opponent’s past opposition — a centerpiece of their campaigns, even though abortion policy in all of these places is decided at the state level.Mayor Eric Genrich of Green Bay, Wis., left, has made abortion rights central to his re-election campaign. At a recent news conference, one speaker was Dr. Anna Igler, second from right, a Wisconsin obstetrician-gynecologist who traveled to Colorado for an abortion because her fetus had a severe abnormality.Kayla Wolf for The New York TimesDemocrats used a muscular defense of abortion rights to great success in the midterm elections last fall, and, if that strategy works again, they are likely to copy it next year in races at all levels of government, including in President Biden’s campaign if he seeks re-election.The focus on abortion rights in down-ballot races, however, reflects Democrats’ increased nationalization of local politics. For decades, local Republican candidates ran on issues like abortion, immigration and national security, putting them in simple terms: “A noun, a verb and 9/11,” Mr. Biden once said in describing the phenomenon.Now Democrats are doing the same on abortion in left-leaning cities, hoping to win over independent voters and some moderate Republicans.Doing so allows Democrats to avoid discussing crime rates or other less appealing campaign topics. But beyond that, they recognize and emphasize that in today’s tribal politics, the precise responsibilities of an office matter less than sending a strong signal to voters about one’s broader political loyalties.“It’s definitely not a municipal issue per se,” Mr. Genrich said in an interview. “Voters don’t care about some of these parochial distinctions between municipal boundaries. This is a city issue, a state issue, a federal issue. Some of their most important questions are, what do you stand for fundamentally?”Mr. Genrich declined repeated opportunities to explain what, precisely, the mayor of Green Bay could do about abortion in his city.Still, Republicans running for mayor find themselves doing a political tap dance, trying to de-emphasize but not disavow their opposition to abortion rights, which is not an electoral winner in Democratic cities. In Green Bay, Mr. Biden won 53 percent of the vote in 2020; last year, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, took 55 percent of the city’s vote.Mr. Genrich’s opponent in Tuesday’s officially nonpartisan election, Chad Weininger, is a former state legislator who cast a series of votes to restrict abortion rights before last year’s Supreme Court ruling. Now, as television ads and campaign mail blast his stance and label him “MAGA Chad” to emphasize his Republican politics, he is trying to change the subject.Chad Weininger, who is running for mayor against Mr. Genrich in Green Bay, is a former state legislator who has opposed abortion rights in the past. Kayla Wolf for The New York Times“I’m running for mayor, I’m not debating abortion,” Mr. Weininger said. “We could have discussions about nuclear arms, but guess what? Can’t do anything about it. We can have discussions about securing our borders, but there’s nothing we can do about it.”National Democratic organizations that do not typically involve themselves in local elections are using abortion policy to promote and raise money for candidates who back abortion rights.Emily’s List, a group that backs women who support abortion rights, has endorsed mayoral candidates in Jacksonville, Fla., Madison, Wis., and Lincoln, Neb.In Lincoln, where Mr. Biden won 54 percent of the vote in 2020, Mayor Leirion Gaylor Baird, a Democrat, said her constituents had demanded to know what she could do about proposed legislation in the Nebraska Legislature that would restrict abortion rights. Her answer: speak out against the bills.Mayor Leirion Gaylor Baird of Lincoln, Neb., has urged constituents to speak out in favor of abortion rights. Madeline Cass for The New York TimesVoters, Ms. Gaylor Baird said, are “much more interested in knowing where people stand. So I expect that people will want to know where I stand on this issue, even if it isn’t a local issue typically.”Her main opponent, Suzanne Geist, a Republican state senator who has sponsored bills to restrict or ban abortion in Nebraska, said her actions in the State Capitol should have little bearing on how she would run the state’s capital city. She said she would prefer to focus on issues like public safety and the health of the city’s business community.Talking about abortion, Ms. Geist said, is “a way of avoiding what the present issues are and trying to get the public wrapped around something that really has nothing to do with the mayor’s office or the mayor’s race.”Suzanne Geist, a Republican state senator running for mayor of Lincoln, Neb., said that talking about abortion was “a way of avoiding what the present issues are and trying to get the public wrapped around something that really has nothing to do with the mayor’s office or the mayor’s race.”Madeline Cass for The New York TimesPast opposition to some abortion rights has become a political liability even for candidates who support them now. In Chicago, Paul Vallas, the former Chicago Public Schools chief executive who is running for mayor, is being attacked by his more liberal opponent, Brandon Johnson, for a 2009 television interview in which Mr. Vallas said, “Fundamentally, I oppose abortion.”Mr. Vallas’s statement, which he made when he being asked about possibly running for state office as a Republican, came after he had declared himself “personally pro-choice” but said he would favor banning some late-term abortions.Mr. Johnson is now broadcasting ads with a clip of Mr. Vallas’s statement that he opposed abortion; Mr. Vallas has responded with advertising declaring that he supports abortion rights.In an interview on Sunday at a Greek restaurant, Mr. Vallas said Mr. Johnson had taken his past abortion comments out of context.“It’s had some impact,” he acknowledged.In other races, municipal candidates are trying to find ways to make their cities have some influence over abortion access.Daniela Velázquez, a public relations executive running for the St. Louis Board of Aldermen, has proposed providing money for women seeking abortions to travel across the Mississippi River to Illinois, where the procedure remains legal. While abortion became illegal in Missouri after the Supreme Court’s decision, Ms. Velázquez said many in St. Louis supported abortion rights.“I have been knocking on doors and people have looked at our lit and been like, ‘Oh, you know, pro-choice,’” she said. “Then they say, ‘Yeah, I’m going to vote for you.’”Democrats are open in their belief at the current moment, the best way to win votes is to focus on the abortion fight.“Abortion and reproductive rights is the No. 1 issue in 2023,” said Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, which has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to back Mr. Genrich in Green Bay and Mayor Cory Mason in Racine, who is making similar arguments there. “It’s the No. 1 issue that moves voters that normally vote Republican to vote for someone else and it’s the No. 1 issue to get Democrats off the couch and casting ballots.”Beyond the Green Bay mayoral election, abortion is a major issue in Wisconsin’s race for the State Supreme Court, which will finish on Tuesday and is likely to decide whether the procedure remains illegal in the state. Kayla Wolf for The New York TimesIn November, Racine asked voters on the midterm-election ballot if Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban should be repealed — and 71 percent said yes. Mr. Mason is now running television ads highlighting his stance in favor of abortion rights and attacking his opponent.Abortion, Mr. Mason said, comes up in his discussions with voters as much as snow plowing, public safety and housing.“These two big issues around freedom, the freedom to vote and the freedom to make your own health care decisions, they are every bit as front and center in this race as anything else that we deal with at the municipal level,” Mr. Mason said.Mr. Mason’s opponent, Henry Perez, a Republican city alderman opposed to abortion rights, said voters in Racine did not care much about the issue. He said that he did not remember how he had voted in the November abortion referendum, and that too much fuss was being made over abortion being banned in Racine when it was available across the state line in Illinois, roughly 25 miles south of the city.“A lot of people I’ve talked to say, ‘Henry, abortion, really?’” Mr. Perez said. “What do we care about it here? I mean, it’s not a thing that we do. And there’s always options like going out of town, you know, or going over to the next state to take care of an abortion if they need to.”Mitch Smith More

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      A Chicago Mayoral Hopeful Who Took on Hard-to-Fix Schools Faces a Political Shift

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      Paul Vallas has long been a supporter of charter schools. He is running against Brandon Johnson, an ex-teacher with a different approach.CHICAGO — Paul Vallas took control of Chicago Public Schools when the district was among the country’s most troubled. He went to Philadelphia to head up a teetering education system that the state had taken over. And after Hurricane Katrina washed away much of the New Orleans school district, he helped rebuild it.Mr. Vallas built a reputation as the educational emergency responder of the 1990s and 2000s, someone sought out for the most challenging jobs. When he got to a new city, he moved quickly and forcefully, clashing at times with school boards and labor groups that objected to the pace and scope of his changes.“I’ll do 10 things and maybe accomplish five of them as opposed to someone who will do two things and maybe accomplish one,” Mr. Vallas said in an interview.One of two Democrats in Chicago’s mayoral runoff election on Tuesday, Mr. Vallas highlights his record of improving facilities, keeping schools open more hours and overhauling low-performing schools. He also forced out longtime educators, took a hard stance on student discipline and greatly expanded the number of charter schools, policies that earned him fans and enemies wherever he went.Mr. Vallas, 69, has put his education record at the center of his campaign for mayor of Chicago, arguing that the city needs that brand of crisis management to lower crime and improve schools. Yet he faces a changed political era in which teachers’ unions have asserted their power and many Democrats have grown skeptical of the idea of school choice, which Mr. Vallas supports and was once widely embraced by his party.Mr. Vallas is competing against Brandon Johnson, a county commissioner and former teacher who embodies the progressive critique of Mr. Vallas’s education philosophy. Mr. Johnson, a paid organizer for the last 12 years with the Chicago Teachers Union, has called for sweeping new investments in neighborhood schools and social programs. He wants to expand vocational programs, add resources for students who do not speak English and avoid closing schools with low enrollments. He has also been on the front lines of three work stoppages as his union clashed with two mayors and articulated a liberal vision for Chicago that extended well beyond schools.Mayoral candidate Brandon Johnson waited for a mayoral forum to begin at Kenwood Academy High School in February. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesIn Mr. Johnson’s telling, Mr. Vallas is an out-of-touch administrator whose policies would not help Chicago’s poorest residents. And when Mr. Vallas first ran Chicago’s schools, Mr. Johnson said, he made the city’s entrenched problems even worse.“The tale of two cities has been brought to us by Paul Vallas,” Mr. Johnson said. “He created a stratified system.”Mr. Vallas’s embrace of school choice, including magnet schools, military-style academies and charters, was a central part of the crisis playbook that he began developing when he ran Chicago’s schools in the late 1990s. Back then, though, many liberals as well as conservatives saw charter schools as a way to improve struggling school districts like Chicago. Charter schools, which are privately run and publicly funded, are popular in many low-income neighborhoods as alternatives to regular public schools. Teachers’ unions, though, have often bitterly fought the expansion of charter schools, most of which are not unionized. The unions contend the schools deprive the public school system of resources.Mr. Vallas came to Chicago’s schools from a finance role in Mayor Richard M. Daley’s City Hall instead of through the ranks of teachers and principals. He took over Chicago Public Schools in 1995 as Mr. Daley’s handpicked leader at a time of financial and educational crisis. The Illinois government, then controlled by Republicans, had just handed the mayor control of the system.Mr. Vallas quickly embraced other alternatives to traditional neighborhood schools, including magnet schools and military-style academies.His policies won praise from liberals who credited him with restoring order and raising test scores using a back-to-basics approach.The Clinton-era New Democrats were ascendant, and Mr. Vallas in many ways epitomized the moment, approaching the job like a corporate executive; his Chicago Public Schools title, after all, was chief executive.Under his leadership, the district placed faltering schools on academic probation, fired underperforming principals and ended social promotion, the practice in which failing students were advanced from grade to grade simply to keep them with their peers. The move helped him initially win over teachers. An official at the American Federation of Teachers hailed Mr. Vallas in 1997 for giving educators more leverage over students who were not doing their work.“People thought he was better than sugar,” said Josephine Perry, an instructor for a union that represents service employees in Chicago.Years later, though, much of what Mr. Vallas has spent his career championing — the tough disciplinary policies, the openness to charter schools — has lost some of its bipartisan sheen. Ms. Perry, who said she plans to vote for Mr. Johnson, summed up a concern of many Democrats: Mr. Vallas, she said, is “more aligned with Republican values.”Though Mr. Vallas is a Democrat, he has campaigned on a tough-on-crime platform and is far more conservative than Mr. Johnson. Mr. Vallas has also received endorsements from conservative organizations, including the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, and financial support from some prominent Republican donors.The political divide on charter schools is complicated. A national poll last year by Education Next, an academic journal, found that a majority of Black people surveyed supported charter schools, while fewer than half of white people and Hispanic people did. Along party lines, Republicans supported charters at a far higher rate than Democrats.Mr. Vallas says it is not an issue of Republicans versus Democrats. It is about teachers’ unions, which he said have become “more radicalized” with power to shape Democratic Party politics.“The unions realized that they were losing ground, and I think it forced them to become much more political than they had been,” Mr. Vallas said.Leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union, which has donated heavily to the Johnson campaign, said they had been defending public education in a city where mayors have repeatedly failed to invest properly in schools. Stacy Davis Gates, the union president, said she believed Mr. Vallas was going to close some schools and privatize others if elected mayor.Mr. Vallas, center, talked with local school council members as Chicago Public Schools chief executive in 1996.Ovie Carter/Chicago TribuneHe “is going to marginalize Chicago Public Schools in a way that will make getting a public education almost impossible,” she said.Mr. Vallas says he wants to expand high-performing charters in Chicago but has not called for eliminating neighborhood schools.Though comparing academic achievement data over time is difficult, Mr. Vallas compiled a mixed record as a school executive in four cities that included notable successes as well as disappointments.In Philadelphia, Mr. Vallas’s first stop after Chicago, proficiency in math and reading improved in the years after he arrived, according to a study by the RAND Corporation. But that study also found that privately managed schools in Philadelphia, which included some for-profit charter operators, performed no better than district-run schools, on average.Ed Rendell, a Democrat who was governor of Pennsylvania for much of that time, said he believed that Mr. Vallas did a good job under trying conditions, even though not all of his ideas worked.“He was an innovator,” Mr. Rendell said. “Some his innovations were good and had a positive impact. Some were well-meaning and well-targeted but didn’t work.”Mr. Vallas’s tenure in Philadelphia ended after the district recorded a budget shortfall, which Mr. Rendell said “wasn’t a disaster” but also “wasn’t acceptable.”Mr. Vallas was especially aggressive in spending on school construction, which was also a theme of his tenure in other cities with decaying school buildings.“He always told me that if you send a kid to school in a school that has no paint on the walls and a heating system that doesn’t work and it hasn’t been cleaned,” Mr. Rendell said, “the kid’s going to figure out pretty fast that no one values their education.”But the scale of the change he sought, and the idea that the system needed an overhaul, made him plenty of enemies. Kendra Brooks, now a member of the Philadelphia City Council, said she got started in politics after watching with dismay as Mr. Vallas made extensive changes to neighborhood schools while expanding charter and magnet programs. She described his tenure there as a failure that continues to hurt the city.“When you restructure over 200,000 children into a new system, it’s not easy to just flip back to something else,” Ms. Brooks said.Building a new system was exactly what Mr. Vallas was hired to do at his next stop in New Orleans. He arrived in 2007, nearly two years after Hurricane Katrina had washed away much of the school system, and had to start rebuilding before it was even clear how many students would be returning to the city.To make it work, Mr. Vallas helped build a network of charter schools overseen by public officials but largely independent of the kind of bureaucracy typically associated with big-city school districts. A Tulane University study later found sustained improvement in achievement and graduation rates in the new, charter-centric school system that he developed.“Paul Vallas came in to stabilize schools. He didn’t come in to do charter schools,” said Paul Pastorek, the former state education superintendent of education for Louisiana and Mr. Vallas’s boss in New Orleans. “But I think he recognized the value of charters when he came here.”Mr. Vallas visited students at A.P. Tureaud Elementary School in New Orleans in 2007.Cheryl Gerber for The New York TimesStill, Mr. Pastorek stressed that Mr. Vallas was more than willing to close charter schools that were faltering, citing a 2011 decision to shutter the Harriet R. Tubman School in the city’s Algiers neighborhood.“Heavy political pressure was applied to keep it open,” Mr. Pastorek recalled. “Paul recommended the state board close it, and we did. Every school had to meet the same standard, including charters.”From New Orleans, Mr. Vallas went to take over the schools in Bridgeport, Conn., in 2012. Bill Finch, who was mayor of Bridgeport at the time, said he was impressed with the speed with which Mr. Vallas addressed budget problems, created academic programs and injected energy into a long-struggling school system.“We went from a disastrous situation to a normal situation,” Mr. Finch said. “And I think it was actually better than normal because Paul really innovated.”But as in other cities, Mr. Vallas upset people with the pace and type of change he was proposing. He was ultimately forced to leave after courts ruled that he did not have the proper credentials to lead a Connecticut school district.Now back in Chicago and running for mayor, Mr. Vallas continues to back charter schools and defend his education record against criticism that he breaks more than he fixes. He talks often about using schools “to fill gaps,” getting eyeglasses to children struggling to see and keeping buildings open into the evenings to keep students safe and engaged.“I’ve always been able to multitask,” Mr. Vallas said. He added: “I felt I had to level the playing field.”Julie Bosman More