Mayor offers up scapegoats for Bring Chicago Home’s demise. Please.

In his Wednesday post-mortem on the apparent defeat of his signature Bring Chicago Home tax hike, Mayor Brandon Johnson went out of his way to pin the blame on Republican voters in Chicago.

The mayor donned his amateur political scientist hat and explained that the number of GOP primary voters who voted for Donald Trump for president were presumably also “no” votes on the referendum and were enough to sink it.

“The same people who want to see Donald Trump become president again, those are the same voters, if you look at where there were more “noes,” they were concentrated there,” he said.

Sure. But here’s the thing. Chicago is an overwhelmingly Democratic city. In 2020, Joe Biden got 83% of Chicago’s vote for president while Trump got 16%. Yes, Republicans live here. They pay taxes. They contribute to this city. News flash! They tend to oppose tax hikes and similar measures that would hurt the business climate here.

But the real reason for the evident failure of BCH wasn’t the relatively meager number of GOP primary voters who predictably voted “no.” It was that lots of Democrats didn’t buy what the mayor was selling, either. If one assumes every single one of the 37,000-plus Republicans who voted for president on Tuesday (and by the way, more than 20% chose someone other than Trump) voted against Bring Chicago Home, it means that over 47% of the Democrats and independents who voted also said no.

So Mayor Johnson ought to tend to his own political house instead of making MAGA excuses for this rebuke. “I will be punching back,” Johnson told reporters after the vote, referring to industry opponents to the real estate sales tax hike.

When it comes to the GOP in this town — a largely powerless voting bloc — his blame game looked more like punching down.