Mayor Brandon Johnson was already facing a rocky road to re-election with a 30% approval rating, only $400,000 in his campaign war chest and a fractured coalition of progressive unions that helped put him in office.
Now the embattled incumbent will have to survive a potentially costly and time-consuming petition challenge seeking to disqualify him for failing to file the 12,500 valid signatures needed to get his name on the ballot.
Former State Sen. Rickey Hendon (D-Chicago) is leading the drive to knock Johnson off the ballot on behalf of millionaire businessman Willie Wilson. Hendon predicted that Johnson would become the first incumbent Chicago mayor to be disqualified from the ballot.
“We found a lot of problems — way too many to describe. The lawyers will hash it out, but I doubt very seriously that he has any chance of making it” on the ballot, Hendon told the Sun-Times. “I was shocked. I’ve never seen such a poorly put together filing in my life. It was the absolutely worst. I blame his campaign staff. The mayor should fire somebody. Heads should roll. The mayor trusted the wrong people.”
Hendon said he’s had a team of 20 people pouring scrutinizing Johnson’s petitions for the last ten days.
“They have circulator problems. They have photocopy problems with thousands of signatures photocopied. They have all kinds of issues that will bring them under the 12,500 by a lot,” Hendon said. “There were petitions that didn’t belong to his campaign. Melissa Conyears-Ervin for treasurer was in there... There were some pages were people obviously wrote multiple names. Missing addresses. People who live outside Chicago."
Johnson’s political director, Christian Perry, said he is confident the mayor will survive the challenge.
But even if his name does appear on the ballot, the challenge will strain Johnson's campaign coffers.
If Wilson campaign’s challenge takes the mayor under the required 12,500 signatures, Johnson could be forced to get affidavits from enough of the people associated with those challenged signatures to meet the mandatory minimum to qualify.
Veteran political consultant Frank Calabrese mounted the 2019 petition challenge that knocked mayoral candidate Dorothy Brown off the ballot. At the time, Brown had filed roughly 25,000 signatures. Without knowing the details of Hendon’s challenge, Calabrese said he would be surprised if the Wilson campaign succeeded in getting Johnson knocked off the ballot.
The adjudication of challenges will continue until Dec. 17, when the final mayoral ballot if certified.
“Assuming that Johnson was telling truth when he said he was filing 33,000 signatures, it’s more likely than not that he stays on the ballot unless his petitions are just atrocious,” Calabrese said. “It’s much more likely that he’s gonna be on the ballot than off the ballot if he actually filed 33,000 signatures because he filed 2.5 times the requirement. So that means nearly two-thirds would have to be bad.”
Incumbent mayors traditionally file a wheelbarrow full of nominating petitions on the first day of filing to qualify for the lottery to be the first name on the ballot. Johnson waited until the Friday before the Monday deadline, and then surprised political observers by filing what he said were 33,000 signatures.
That’s a relatively low number for an incumbent mayor. Richard M. Daley, Chicago’s longest-serving mayor, once filed more than 100,000 signatures with help from once-powerful Democratic ward organizations filled with city workers.
Veteran political operative Victor Reyes, who is advising newcomer Lisa Nee’s mayoral campaign, traced Johnson’s petition troubles to three factors — all related to the Chicago Teachers Union.
They are: the civil war between CTU and SEIU that prompted two SEIU locals to endorse Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias; the decision by rank-and-file teachers to reject a dues increase, and the CTU's preoccupation with elected school board races.
“If they don’t have SEIU, who are probably as politically active as any union out there, who knows? He may have lost a lot of his high-end circulating folks and run into some problems,” Reyes said.
Giannoulias has a $19.3 million campaign war chest that makes him the presumed frontrunner in the 16-candidate field.
His campaign filed a petition challenge against attorney William J. Quinlan. That turns the tables on Quinlan, who has promised to appeal a lawsuit dismissed by a Circuit Court judge seeking to prevent Giannoulias, U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley and Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas from simultaneously running for mayor while also seeking re-election to their current offices.
"I'm running for one job — mayor of Chicago," Quinlan said Monday. "They should have to pick one too."
Objections were also filed to the nominating petitions submitted by Susana Mendoza, John Kelly, Giannoulias, Pappas, Quigley, Zoey Ma, Nee, Jesse Maronto, Danielle Carter-Walters and John Kitover.
Contributing: Misha Manjuran Oberoi
