Blue City Blues

Who are those people in large Blue cities who vote for more crime, more illegals, more drug use, and more general craziness? I wish I could tell you, but while pondering that question Block Club Chicago—a generally quite liberal outlet—has a rather fascinating article to factor into your speculations:

Black, Latino Voters Had ‘Shocking Low’ Turnout In Election That Made Brandon Johnson Mayor, Report Shows

White voters continue to have outsized influence on City Hall, the study shows. And the number of Black voters who came out to elect Mayor Harold Washington was nearly triple the number that showed up for Johnson.

Before we get to the details, here are two points to have firmly in mind.

First, Chicago voters had a pretty clear choice this time around—for the last mayoral election. Paul Vallas ran on a law and order platform, at least claiming that he wanted to do something to get crime and criminals under control. Brandon Johnson had a long and very clear record of being in favor of defunding police and giving the Chicago Teachers Union as much money money as they cared to ask for. I hope you see the connection.

Second, for our purposes Chicago demographics break down roughly like this:

White: 30%

Black: 30%

Hispanic: 30%

Asian: 7%

Also bear in mind that the two demographic groupings that are disproportionately affected by crime are Blacks and Hispanics. One would therefore expect that, with a clear choice on offer, the groups most affected would be motivated to get out and vote.

If you expected that, you’d have been very, very wrong. The actual turnout was hopelessly lopsided in favor of White voters—these percentages provide the percent of registered voters in the top 3 categories who actually voted:

White: 61.1%

Black: 29%

Hispanic: 20.5%

The citywide turnout was 38.68 percent, according to the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners.

Those numbers alone make it abundantly clear that the White vote has a disproportionate say in who gets elected mayor in Chicago. And the researchers who studied the election results were able to confirm that it was the White voters who made the difference in electing a pro-crime mayor:

Juan González, a senior fellow at the Great Cities institute, a hub for urban research, said he and co-author Matthew D. Wilson used “granular,” precinct-level data combined with data from the 2020 census to dig into the demographics of voting patterns.

…

However, when looking at the precincts with a Latino population over 80 percent, the vote split 49.5 and 50.5 percent for Johnson and Vallas, respectively, the report concluded.

Each of the ward’s white-majority precincts overwhelmingly voted for Johnson, suggesting his victory in the ward was buoyed by those votes, González said.

So, to put the results in the crassest possible manner, Whites voted for more crime for their Black and Hispanic co-residents. On the other hand, Blacks—but especially Hispanics—seemed to regard picking a mayor to be someone else’s business, even though they would be the ones most affected in their daily lives by the results. Go figure—I cant’.

Ah, but here’s one factoid—which you needed to read all the way to the end to discover—that restores one’s faith in rational predictions based on self interest:

González and Wilson also found precincts with a high Asian-American population cast 77.8 percent of their votes for Vallas.