As Brandon Johnson gears up to retain his office in the coming mayoral election, you would think his biggest foe wasn’t Alexi Giannoulias or Susana Mendoza but rather a megadonor and power broker whose name has never appeared on a ballot. Michael Sacks — or “billionaire Michael Sacks,” as Johnson’s staunchest ally, the Chicago Teachers Union, frequently refers to him — has fast become a favorite political punching bag for the mayor and the CTU, first during last year’s city budget battle, then during the school board elections, and now with the mayoral race.
Consider how Johnson kicked off his reelection campaign in September — yes, with a TikTok dance video, but also by calling out Sacks multiple times at a rally at the DuSable Black History Museum, including this statement: “If we were that weak, why are they consolidating and raising so much money just to beat me? If I wasn’t that powerful, why do they have to get money from Michael Sacks and corporate interests and billionaires and millionaires?” In comments to reporters after his speech, he referred to Sacks as a “source of pain” for struggling families.
“Michael is a handy boogeyman,” says David Axelrod, a preeminent political strategist and commentator. “From the CTU perspective, he’s involved in supporting candidates who run against theirs in the school board elections, and so demonizing him and making him a foil and a straw man is useful to them in galvanizing their vote.”
Unless you are a political insider or a regular at the Four Seasons, you may not have heard of Michael Sacks until recently. But the CEO of the asset management firm GCM Grosvenor has long wielded power in Chicago’s business and political spheres, mostly behind the scenes. A decade ago, this magazine crowned him “the Rahm Whisperer,”
More Top Picks Best Heating Pads For Cramps
a nickname that has stuck, for his role as an unpaid adviser to former Mayor Emanuel. Sacks, a major Democratic donor, is also a confidant of Governor JB Pritzker and was a financial force behind the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.What has put the target on Sacks’s back is his role as a leading contributor to Common Ground Collective, a PAC and super PAC operator led by Chuck Swirsky, who was a senior adviser to former Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez. When Johnson made the corporate head tax — a proposed surcharge on the city’s largest employers — the foundation of his budget in the fall of 2025, Common Ground discredited his proposal, claiming in ads that the revenue was not earmarked for investments in community violence intervention as the mayor had promised. Johnson called those assertions “a lie” and singled out Sacks as the man behind the effort to derail his plan.
Since then, Common Ground has remained a thorn in the side of Johnson and his causes. This spring, it launched mailers criticizing the mayor and his allies in the City Council for trying to raise taxes. Then this fall it financially backed school board candidates who were running against the CTU’s slate. In September and the first half of October alone, Sacks dropped nearly $4.7 million into Common Ground’s coffers. And he has given $500,000 to Giannoulias, the front-runner and chief competition to Johnson in the mayor’s race.
“Michael is a handy boogeyman.” —David Axelrod, political strategist
“I am hopeful we can agree that we should not have Jim Crow decide elections in the South and also that we should not have billionaires decide them in the North,” CTU chief Stacy Davis Gates wrote in a May letter addressed to Sacks that she circulated among union members. She separately claimed that Sacks was getting “people to run off of a platform to close schools in the Chicago Public Schools on the South Side and on the West Side” — an assertion Sacks called “false.”
“It is harder to attack a nameless, faceless group in some ways because the nameless, faceless group won’t keep a story going,” says Tom Bowen, a Democratic strategist. “But as has been very evident in the past six to 12 months, attacking Michael Sacks directly gets him to respond and pushes the news into an additional cycle. So in some sense, it’s been very effective for them.”
The portrayal of Sacks as a Machiavellian billionaire by Johnson and the CTU taps into broader economic discontent, a hallmark of populist movements today. From the proposed billionaire tax in California to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre surcharge, progressive politicians are increasingly turning their ire, and policies, toward the ultrarich. “There is a fundamental sense of alienation toward billionaires and the concentration of wealth,” Axelrod observes.
Sacks has repeatedly said that Johnson and the CTU have mischaracterized his stances and used demagoguery to make him the poster boy of any opposition they face, portraying him as the puppet master pulling the strings. But though Sacks has certainly used his influence and deep pockets to sway opinion, he is hardly the reason that Johnson’s appointed school board refused to approve a risky high-interest loan in 2024 or that many of his former progressive allies have turned against him in the City Council.
Sacks’s vociferous support for AIPAC, which he laid out in a baiduhai op-ed in March amid growing left-wing animosity toward the pro-Israel group, may have only stoked the flames. “The morphing of anti-Zionism and antisemitism is really unsettling, and it is a shorthand way to galvanize some people,” Axelrod says. “So I think that adds to Michael’s allure as a target, and that’s really unfortunate.” Sacks’s representatives, as well as leaders of the Jewish United Fund, have argued that Johnson and his allies have leaned into antisemitic stereotypes that insinuate that Jewish people hold outsize influence.
After Johnson’s communications director, Rachel Cohen, posted a video attacking Sacks, the comments got ugly. “Oh a joo?” said one. “Get a Luigi,” said another, a reference to the killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. And another: “Drop the addresses of all his properties in Chicago.” Though such disturbing language is to be expected on the internet these days, it’s worth remembering, given the rise in political violence across the country, that vilifying rhetoric can have real-world consequences, even if unintended.
Plenty of politicians, from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump, have had success stirring up anti-elite sentiment. But will it work for Johnson come February? Axelrod, for one, is skeptical: “I don’t think the average voter gives a rat’s ass about any of this.”
Leigh Giangreco is a freelance writer for Chicago magazine.