Chicago Should Align its Electoral Calendar with Normal Cycles

Estimated reading time: 2.5 minutes (526 words)

A recent opinion poll found Mayor Brandon Johnson’s approval rating was a dismal 29 percent. For comparison, President Biden’s approval rating in the RealClearPolitics average for the period between January 16 and February 12 was 40 percent. Former President Trump’s approval at the same point in his presidency was 45 percent. 

Mayor Johnson’s apocalyptic numbers were credited by the poll to disapproval on education policy, migrants, housing, and crime. These numbers are terrible, but Chicago’s off-cycle election process (i.e., not tied to the federal election calendar) makes it more difficult than it needs to be for the city to choose the best leader for the job. 

In the election won by Brandon Johnson turnout was up over 2019, but still fairly low by other standards: 613,795 people voted out of a pool of 1,587,153 registered voters, for a turnout of 38.67 percent. This was five percentage points and almost 87,000 more voters than when Lori Lightfoot won the office in 2019. 

But compared to turnout in on-cycle elections, those numbers are abysmal. In Chicago, no on-cycle election in the past 24 years has dipped below 70 percent turnout, which is also as far back as the Chicago Board of Elections’ online archive goes. For those curious, the lowest turnout election was 2000 which came in at 70.22 percent, and the highest was 2012 at 75.41 percent. 

More people voted just for President Obama’s reelection bid (853,102) than who voted at all in the most recent mayoral election. Looked at another way, just 20 percent of registered voters chose the next mayor. That’s a problem, and it’s one that leads directly to many of the issues the city is trying to navigate today. 

Off-cycle elections depress turnout and, according to recent research, tend to elect governments misaligned with their constituents. A 2020 study by researchers at Boston College used school board election data to examine the effects that on-cycle and off-cycle elections had on winning candidates and their relationships with constituents. They found that on-cycle elections are “far more likely” to produce better alignment. 

And really, why wouldn’t that be the case? On a basic level, on-cycle elections produce larger turnout, which is another way of saying there is a larger sample size of constituents to draw from. When 30 percent or more people vote on-cycle than off the results will certainly be different. Why on-cycle elections produce higher turnout is debatable — but the data don’t lie. 

The data were not lying, either, before the most recent mayoral election. The issue that Paul Vallas centered his campaign on — crime — was cited by a majority (54 percent) of Chicago voters as their top issue just over one week before the election, according to a Manhattan Institute poll released at the time. That same poll found Vallas with a 5 point lead heading into the election.

Of course, Johnson’s rock-bottom numbers could all be self-inflicted, and indeed, some of them are. Changing when elections are held would do nothing to change the challenges now facing the city. But maybe, changing elections can give the city a better opportunity at picking the right leader for the moment.