Election day in Los Angeles has Mark Glennon, founder of Wirepoints, returning fresh from three days in the city, and he told Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer that he was genuinely surprised by what he found. The local television coverage of the mayoral race, including the Republican and reform candidates, was fair, balanced, and substantive in ways that have no parallel in Chicago media. Commentators were giving Pratt and other candidates a real hearing, the ads were well-produced and pointed, and the issues driving the race, public safety, homelessness, the Pacific Palisades fire, government incompetence, were being treated as legitimate rather than being suppressed or dismissed. He said it was a dumbfounding experience precisely because he expected the worst from Los Angeles media and instead found something that looks more grounded than what passes for political journalism in Chicago.
Proft had framed the discussion around what a Spencer Pratt equivalent would need to do in Chicago ahead of the 2026 mayoral race, when Brandon Johnson will be on the ballot. He said Pratt’s formula is telling the truth about what has actually happened, which resonates because voters can see the decay themselves and feel condescended to by leaders who tell them otherwise. Doug Ellin, the creator of the HBO series Entourage who is not a Trump supporter and did not vote for Trump, posted a video this week explaining why he is voting for Pratt, describing the cameras and security dogs and firearms he never needed five years ago, describing a home invasion, and noting that everyone in his neighborhood has the same story. He said the city has collapsed in five years and there is no denying it unless you have an agenda.
Proft argued that Chicago requires going further than even Pratt has had to go in LA, because Chicago has the Safety Act problem that LA does not. He said any candidate who wants to present something different next year must be willing to speak about what that law has done to the people it has affected, using the words of the Gorman family as the standard. Sheran Gorman’s mother testified at a hearing about her daughter’s murder, describing her child running forty feet for her life and never coming home, and asked directly why anyone would vote for the policies that enabled it. Proft said any candidate unwilling to take up that challenge, to hold the political class accountable for the specific human cost of the Safety Act and similar policies, is not actually offering something different and voters will know it.
On the Bears situation, Governor Pritzker signaled this week that he considers the public financing negotiation essentially over, invoking the principle that he will not force billions in taxpayer dollars on the public for a team worth eight or nine billion dollars. Glennon noted the obvious selectivity, pointing out that the same government has no problem directing hundreds of millions to Chinese Communist Party-connected battery plant investors. He said politicians have looked at the polling, seen that voters tell pollsters they do not want to subsidize a billionaire-owned franchise, concluded they can absorb the political cost of the Bears leaving, and effectively decided to let it happen.
On the state budget, Glennon said there is another roughly billion dollars in new taxes in the spending plan, mostly directed at businesses but ultimately passed along to consumers, along with attempts to regulate online advertising revenue and other tech-adjacent revenue streams that represent the messiest collection of tax increase attempts he has seen in recent memory. He said the politicians face no consequences for any of it in the current electoral environment.
On Brandon Johnson’s new homegrown purchase assistance grant program offering up to seventy thousand dollars in down payment grants to homebuyers with incomes up to one hundred and eighty-two thousand dollars for a family of four, Glennon said the economics are straightforward and circular. Subsidizing the purchase price drives prices up, congratulating the buyer for receiving the grant before they face the property taxes that will consume much of the artificial equity they accumulated. He noted that the program is being financed out of the 1.25 billion dollar bond the city approved in 2024, meaning borrowed money is being used to fund current political patronage that future taxpayers will service.
On the George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which is set to open this September in Los Angeles after Chicago blocked its 2014 proposal to locate on the lakefront, Glennon called it a spectacular privately funded building that represents exactly what Chicago turned away, while the city instead handed over nineteen acres of historic Jackson Park to what began as a three hundred million dollar Obama Presidential Center now running at eight hundred and fifty million, five years late, with only a million dollars deposited against the promised four hundred and seventy million dollar endowment meant to protect taxpayers from maintenance costs. He said the juxtaposition of what Chicago chose to build versus what it refused to build is a fairly complete statement about the priorities of the political class that has governed the city.