Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson calls Chicago ‘a tale of two cities.’ Can he make it whole?

Within seconds of stepping onstage to declare his triumph in the Chicago mayoral race, Brandon Johnson extended an olive branch.

After briefly marveling at his improbable political rise, the newly minted mayor-elect said his first order of business was delivering a message to those who’d voted for his opponent, Paul Vallas.

“I want to work with you, and I’ll be the mayor for you too,” Johnson said, after the audience’s light grumbling over the mention of his rival.

But bringing the city together after the bitter race may be even more improbable, given the cavernous differences between Johnson, who will enter City Hall as one of America’s most progressive big-city mayors in generations, and his more conservative rival who ran a law-and-order campaign.