Wilson Makes a Move

This certainly made the mayoral election a bit more interesting:

• Mayor Brandon Johnson already faces a rocky road to reelection, with a 30% approval rating, only $400,000 in his campaign war chest and a fractured coalition of progressive unions that helped put him in office.

  Now the embattled incumbent also must survive a potentially costly and time-consuming petition challenge seeking to disqualify him for failing to file the 12,500 valid signatures needed to get on the ballot. When he filed, he submitted 33,000 signatures.

  Former state Sen. Rickey Hendon is leading the drive to knock Johnson off the ballot on behalf of Willie Wilson, the millionaire businessman mounting his fourth mayoral campaign. Hendon predicted Johnson would become the first incumbent Chicago mayor to be disqualified from the ballot.

Hendon claims to have found hundreds, perhaps thousands of photocopied nomination petitions in Conehead's filings, not to mention hundreds more for Melissa Conyer-Ervin last run for office, hinting that perhaps the stacks of nominating petitions are just performative theater and connected candidates merely recycle the same bundles of petitions year in and year out.

Either way, it's a bold attempt to knock off the incumbent from even making it to Election Day, let alone the runoff.