Political attack ads are flowing as Mayor Brandon Johnson and the Chicago City Council race against the clock to pass a 2026 budget before the Dec. 31 deadline, with particular focus on the mayor’s push to reinstate a corporate head tax.
One ad, paid for by the Atlanta-based Black Voters Matter Fund (BVMF), caused a stir this week for what some saw as a characterization of Ald. Andre Vasquez as a puppet of President Donald J. Trump, Elon Musk and their rich pals. Vasquez leads the City Council’s Progressive Caucus.
“Alderman Andre Vasquez is protecting billionaires and big corporations over Black + Brown working-class Chicago in the middle of Trump’s cuts,” the political ad reads. “Tell him to stand with Mayor Brandon Johnson and working-class Chicago.” The ad encourages residents to text the word “BUDGET” to a five-digit number, which yields more information from the mayor’s Protecting Chicago Budget and links out to an Action Now page where residents can send scripted letters to their alders.
But here’s where things heat up: In a fiery video posted Tuesday on Instagram, Vasquez accused Johnson’s administration of being behind the attack.
“Let’s keep it real because I got people hitting me up, [saying], ‘I wonder who put out that ad?’” Vasquez told his Instagram audience, accusing the mayor of coming for his progressive bona fides. Vasquez voted 10-25 with the Chicago Finance Committee on Monday to reject the revenue-generating options in Johnson’s budget proposal, which includes the head tax. Vasquez said he did so because of a plan to borrow money to cover police-misconduct spending.
“Literally, there’s only one group that’s gonna put out that ad. The Fifth Floor. The Johnson administration,” Vasquez continued.
In so many words, the mayor’s office said it wasn’t them.
“Independent groups across the political spectrum are spending money to push councilmembers to support their agenda during this budget cycle,” reads an emailed statement from the mayor’s office. “We cannot speak to the motivations behind the groups that are buying ads both in support of the mayor’s proposed budget and against it.”
In a Wednesday phone interview with The TRiiBE, Vasquez said he learned about the ad about 30 minutes after a meeting he had with the Johnson administration about the budget. He thought the ad was funny because it looks like an AI-generated “No Limit album cover from the 2000s.”
“The city needs us to come together and figure it out,” Vasquez said. “So let’s not take shots at each other, and understand that if you’re going to take shots at somebody, be prepared for responses. We’re adults. Some people know I’m a battle rapper. … probably not the one you want to bring it to.”
Afterward, his friend created a tricked-out version of the graphic with the words “Andre Vasquez The Budget Don. 40th Wardd [sic] Mob Platinum Puppet Master.” Vasquez posted the meme to his Instagram page to the soundtrack of “Make ’Em Say Uhh,” a late-1990s platinum rap track by No Limit Records founder Master P.
“It’s pretty clear where it might be coming from, and so it may not be directly from [the administration],” Vasquez said, “but it’s clearly someone aligned and there had to be some level of conversation to know, like, ‘Hey, they voted a certain way so go send these out.’”
On Thursday, The TRiiBE spoke with Black Voters Matter Fund co-founder Cliff Albright. He said his team has had no communication with the mayor nor his administration.
“It’s interesting that the alderman would think the mayor’s office would be the only entity interested in seeing this kind of budget be passed. We’ve got a long track record of dealing with issues like this, not as much in Chicago because it’s not one of the core states where we do our work, but this whole issue of the ways governments at all levels — city, state and federal — often carry themselves on the backs of Black communities,” Albright said.
According to its website, BVMF aims to increase power in marginalized and predominantly Black communities across the U.S. Among its five core beliefs is supporting individuals and organizations striving to obtain social justice.
The point of the Atlanta group’s local ad campaign is to help residents connect the dots between the ways billionaires influence federal policy and the trickle-down effect on local government, Albright explained.
“Part of the reason we’re doing this campaign,” Albright said, “is because we don’t want this to be a conversation between Black Voters Matter and Ald. Vasquez or any single alderman. We want it to be a public conversation. That’s why what’s asked for in the ads is for folks to get more information, to reach out to the alders and to even ask the question — which one of our other ads are about to do. If not the head tax, then what?”
BVMF was founded in 2016 by Albright and LaTosha Brown. A related organization BVM Capacity Building Institute is a 501(c)(3) that lists as board members #MeToo Movement leader Tarana Burke; Baye Adofo-Wilson, former Newark, New Jersey, deputy mayor; and Jackson, Mississippi, activist Rukia Lumumba, daughter of civil rights activist and former Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba and sister to Chokwe Antar Lumumba, who also served as that city’s mayor. The 19th* called BVMF a “get-out-the-vote powerhouse” in its 2021 profile of co-founder Brown.
“It’s pretty interesting that a group based out of Atlanta is paying attention to Chicago alderpeople and how they vote in a finance committee hearing, which is a pretty niche meeting to be watching,” Vasquez said.
Albright told The TRiiBE he learned about Chicago’s budget season and Vasquez’s position on Johnson’s proposed corporate head tax through a Chicago Sun-Times article. Published on Nov. 13, the Sun-Times reported that Vasquez is “still searching for head tax alternatives.” He also said, according to the article, it may be a better idea “to restore the automatic escalator locking in annual property tax increases at the rate of inflation” and possibly doubling the garbage collection fee.
“They’re pushing the corporate head tax as the end-all-be-all, and I don’t know if that’s the right answer or not,” Vasquez told Sun-Times political reporter Fran Spielman.
Albright said they’re learning about the budget season through publicly available press conferences and media reports.
“And to be honest, we really, like a lot of the nation, started paying more attention to Chicago and the mayor because of the battle over ICE and the National Guard. That’s how I first found out about The TRiiBE,” Albright said. “And so it was really in the aftermath of following that, and continuing to follow that, that we come across this budget question, which fits into one of the priority areas that we routinely deal with.”
It was not their intention to cause confusion or disruption, Albright said.
“To do this type of campaign, which inevitably involves mentioning specific alders, we don’t want to harm relationships that some local comrades and they have,” Albright said. “Sometimes it’s easier for somebody who doesn’t have to navigate all of that to ask some of the questions that, quite honestly, need to be asked.”
Parts of Johnson’s 2026 budget proposal are a call from community organizers with the People’s Unity Platform, who are pushing for more progressive forms of taxation. They rallied behind the proposal through their Babies Before Billionaires campaign over the summer. Johnson also stood with labor and community organizers in October during a pep rally before unveiling his budget proposal.
“Just in terms of us as an organization, look, we want to learn from community,” Albright said. “If folks have issues with the way we’ve gone about this, we want to be in discussion.”
Albright shared that his Atlanta-based organization is willing to pull the graphic of Vasquez out of their political text campaign with his commitment to the corporate head tax: “We’re already making some changes to some of the graphics and videos we’ll be doing. So we don’t view ourselves as above debate.”
