Local polls rarely make national news, but the latest approval ratings of Mayor Brandon Johnson — announced by a Republican-leaning polling firm — generated a month-long media cycle of their own.
The poll, conducted by M3 Strategies, determined that Johnson had a favorability rating of only 6%. It also found that, if the 2023 mayoral election were held today, former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas would be the leading contender.
The poll asked a number of questions of the 696 voters on the list, however, the (dis)approval statistic about Johnson’s leadership is the portion that went viral. It blew up across right-wing media, local media and also made headlines on Democrat-leaning cable shows.
“Is this the least popular politician in America?” Newsweek asked in its headline. (In recent years, the weekly news magazine has moved from centrist to fairly conservative in its op-ed section.) The stat appeared again on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.
“I read that the current mayor of Chicago has an approval rating of 6.6 percent. …What’s going on in Chicago?” Maher joked with his guest, former Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who has hinted at his interest in running for office again.
And it came up yet again as fodder to mock Johnson during a congressional hearing over sanctuary cities. Rep. Nancy Mace interrupted him to say, “This is why you have a 6% approval rating because you suck at answering questions.”
Unexamined in coverage of this poll are its clear partisan motivations. Experts who analyzed the poll say that you can determine some of the motivations by reviewing how questions were written, how results were calculated, who financed the poll and who stands to gain from the narrative that one of the most progressive mayors of a major U.S. city was less popular than even “communicable diseases,” as written by the conservative news site, The National Review.
Of course, polls are frequently commissioned by political organizations and operatives to assess public opinion — and subsequently broadcast to the public to signal consensus or discord. But when accepted as fact by sources, without disclosure of political affiliations or corroboration from other reputable sources, a poll can reinforce existing bias.
To that end, we spoke to polling experts and political strategists to better understand the context in which it was released.
Wayne Steger, professor of political science at DePaul University, believes that the poll is “reasonably accurate” given past polls that place Johnson’s approval rating low, but adds that “the poll would not have been released to the media if the results were favorable to Johnson.”
Gustavo Sánchez, founder of the left-leaning polling firm, IZQ Strategies, felt that the poll methodology was not as transparent as it could be. “Could you say that Brandon Johnson’s approval ratings are pretty underwater right now? Like, yeah, I think that’s true, it’s been true for a little while, but could you say they’re as bad as this poll shows? Not really, unless you have some other polls to compare it to.”
Political strategist Delmarie Cobb believes there’s a lot of bias in the polling and in the coverage of Johnson. “If you say something enough times, people will believe it.”
Behind the pollster
M3 Strategies is a polling firm created by Matt Podgorski, a former political science professor who is founder of the Northwest Side GOP Club and who ran and lost as the Republican candidate in the 2022 election for Cook County Board of Commissioners, District 9. Podgorski frequently provides polling and consulting services, advertising, and other communications to conservative candidates across Illinois.
On his Twitter/X account, Podgorski retweets messages that criticize Johnson’s advocacy for trans people; boosts Trump border czar Tom Homan and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis; and pushes misinformation about the March 2024 killing of Dexter Reed during a Chicago traffic stop.
M3 Strategies started publishing poll results in December 2022, ahead of the 2023 mayoral election. At the time, the firm frequently released polls presenting itself as independent without disclosing that mayoral candidate Paul Vallas was its primary client. Vallas’ campaign paid M3 Strategies nearly $520,000 during his run for mayor. (Vallas has described himself as a moderate Democrat, however media such as The Intercept have questioned if he is in fact a closet Republican given the amount of campaign funding provided to him by the right. The New Republic also asked if he was a “pseudo Dem.”)
The current poll was commissioned by Juan Rangel of The Urban Center, a nonprofit founded in 2023 to “give voice to a centrist community in Chicago and across Illinois.” Rangel is the former head of the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO), a Chicago nonprofit that operated the most Hispanic charter schools in the nation until it was discovered in 2017 that Rangel had defrauded investors, spent public money on luxurious restaurants and travels, and handed out jobs and contracts to cronies. He later resigned in disgrace.
Vallas is listed as chair of the Urban Center PAC, according to Illinois State Board of Election filings.
Behind the poll
The TRiiBE spoke to Gustavo Sánchez, founder of progressive polling firm IZQ Strategies, to unpack M3 Strategies’ poll methodology and results.
M3 Strategies did not respond to a request for comment.
The poll, released on February 22, surveyed 696 likely voters over two days using a web link sent via text message. In a LinkedIn comment, the firm said the poll only included people who voted in the 2023 municipal election.
Demographically, 43% of those surveyed were white, 27% Black, and 18.8% Hispanic or Latino, and more than 68% were over age 45. Politically, 39.8% considered themselves moderate, with 17.2% conservative and 43% liberal. During the 2024 presidential election, 71% of those polled voted for Kamala Harris and 18% voted for Donald Trump.
Sánchez said that the demographics of those polled seemed generally in alignment with who votes during a municipal election, which tends to turn out fewer but more informed voters who are inclined to follow local politics than, say, a presidential election. And in a blue city, it made sense that 71% voted for Harris.
What is unclear, however, is how the poll is weighted. It is common practice for pollsters to apply different weights to respondents’ answers in order to make the sample’s demographics match as closely as possible to those who usually vote in those elections.
For example, Sánchez guessed that the 18.8% figure representing Hispanic or Latino respondents is probably closer to 13% based on ethnicity models of commercially available voter files and the fact the poll was only delivered in English, which leads Sánchez to believe that some Latino respondents, belonging to a demographic that favored Vallas during the 2023 mayoral runoff, were possibly counted twice in the M3 Strategies poll. Similarly, white voters were likely weighted down to 43%. This is because Sanchez believes those voters might have been over-represented in the original sample, since whites tend to respond more to such polls than others.
When asked about M3’s reputation, Sánchez said, “I don’t think they’re better or worse. I think they’re average, with a conservative leaning. Typically, you can tell conservative lean just by the questions they ask and how they choose to present them. They did a poll a while ago that was … pretty bluntly trying to cast immigrants in a problematic light for Chicago.”
In a question asking who respondents would vote for if the mayoral election happened today, Paul Vallas (27.4%) and Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias (21%) were by far the top contenders, with Johnson trailing at 8.2%.
Sánchez found it surprising that the poll did not list Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García, who ran for mayor in 2015 and 2023, and instead listed lesser-known Latino elected officials like Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (the longtime, former 4th district Congressman who started in 1993 and retired in 2019) and Ald. Gilbert Villegas.
“He may not run, but he still did very well in the last mayoral [election],” said Sánchez. “By not putting Chuy, you’re also giving Latinos a little bit easier of a reason to go for Paul Vallas.”
Unusually, the poll results also shared word clouds summarizing people’s opinions of different politicians. For Mayor Brandon Johnson, the largest words were “incompetent,” “racist” and “ctu.” (Johnson is a former organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union, which backed his campaign.) For Paul Vallas, the largest words were “better, “good,” and “mayor.”
“I would totally ignore the word clouds,” Sánchez said. “There’s a lot of messiness when it comes to trying to do this kind of thing. For example, if somebody puts ‘police’ vs. ‘police brutality,’ the word ‘police’ may show up large and ‘brutality’ may show up small, but really it’s those two words together is what someone was trying to say. I’m looking at one of them and it just says ‘better,’ or ‘great’ or ‘voted.’ What am I trying to learn from these words of different sizes?”
Behind the “outrage cycle”
Chicago is a familiar punching bag for the right, so it’s no surprise that the poll became a vehicle for conservative-leaning publications to express their animus against what they describe as a “crime-ridden, broke city” (The Daily Mail) with a “wannabe-gangster mayor” (Outkick).
“The national right-wing media landscape relies on local news for clickbait and to drive engagement,” said H Kapp-Klote, a progressive comms strategist who most recently worked for the Chicago Teachers Union and has written about this phenomenon in his newsletter. “Chicago is one of their favorite sources of outrage: a handful of funded players on the local level can create an outrage cycle that will dominate the news cycle, from Facebook to Fox News and all the way to AM radio.”
Kapp-Klote observed that this repetition can cause even people on the left to repeat conservative talking points. “I don’t necessarily care so much how people feel about Mayor Johnson or about whatever is happening with that administration as much as the fact that I’ve been really stunned by the number of people I‘ve spoken to in my life who are saying stuff that I know Austin Berg wrote,” said Kapp-Klote, referring to the vice president of the Illinois Policy Institute, a conservative think tank.
Delmarie Cobb is wary of elected officials like Emanuel coming back into prominence on the strength of these media cycles. During his interview with Maher, Emanuel used the opportunity to pontificate about the white majority’s perception and understanding of so-called wokeness in the Johnson administration, which is largely staffed by Black and brown professionals.
“I don’t want to hear another word about the locker room, I don’t want to hear another word about the bathroom,” Emanuel said. “You better start focusing on the classroom.”
Cobb’s response to the poll and conversation surrounding it is measured.
“With everything else, take it with a grain of salt,” said Cobb. “Everyone’s pushing their narratives, from the president on down. And you have to do your own homework.”
Homework in this case means doing your research on who finances the information that you consume. Cal Tech, for example, is one of many universities that offers free, clear instruction and tips on how to interpret poll data.
During the 2023 mayoral election, Sánchez of IZQ Strategies crowdfunded to conduct his own polls and was one of the only pollsters who predicted that Johnson would win the runoff.
“Whatever organization or entity is most well-funded has the ability to do polls,” Sánchez said. “You essentially put the opposition in a position where they have to just let it happen or they have to scramble to do their own research to either validate or contradict what has been put out there. As response rates continue to go down, the more expensive doing good polling gets and the more it becomes this sort of oligarchal relationship between media and politicians or interest groups.”
“Ultimately, it’s up to Johnson’s camp and others to do their own polling so that there’s more than just the M3 poll,” he added. “When you leave a vacuum and let your enemies tell the story and have no defense, then this is kind of what happens.”
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