“Our movement grew,” union President Stacy Davis Gates, a close confidante of Johnson’s, told POLITICO on Wednesday. “We now have to work to realize the values that we came into this endeavor with, and the platform he ran on.”

Johnson was a little-known candidate just a few months ago. Departing Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who failed to advance to Tuesday’s runoff after winning her first term in 2019, famously declared her CTU-backed rival “isn’t going to be the mayor of this city.”

The union and its affiliates responded by bankrolling Johnson’s campaign with millions of dollars and advancing a formidable ground game.

Yet this week’s election was the latest milestone in a long-running union project. CTU’s model of street-fighting progressive politics accelerated in 2010 when former union President Karen Lewis leaped to power atop a 30,000-member union. CTU then launched Chicago’s first teacher strike in a quarter-century in 2012, followed by walkouts in 2016, 2019 and 2022.

Lewis died in 2021, six years after brain cancer ended her nascent campaign to challenge former Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Now it’s Johnson’s turn to carry out the movement Lewis helped build.

“This is the inevitability of a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago saying that this city deserves a [mayor’s office] that prioritizes the many,” Davis Gates said of Lewis, and Johnson’s win.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What lessons should the Democratic Party draw from the union’s victory? And what, if anything, can be applied from this election to the party’s looming fights in 2024?

What Chicago shows is that you can have values. You can value investing in people, you can value health care for people, you can value safety for people, you can value a fully funded education. And you can do that with people who are typically shut out of the political spectrum. The lesson is that there are a lot of people who have been excluded from the political process who engaged and transformed Chicago over the course of many years. This is a culminating point that takes us to the next plateau.

This race is the culmination of years of CTU organizing and political work — but now the union is in a different position. You are now the establishment, in a way. Governing is different from campaigning. How will the union and mayor-elect confront this?

We are not the establishment. We are still the movement. Our movement grew on Tuesday. And so we have more people to talk to, engage, and strategize with. But you can’t call us the establishment when we still have 60,000 people unhoused in Chicago. We haven’t established anything, except for that Brandon Johnson is the mayor of the city. We now have to work to realize the values that we came into this endeavor with, and the platform he ran on.

What do you see as some of the most difficult decisions that are facing mayor-elect Johnson and how is the union going to face that challenge?

I’m going to go back to being an advocate for school communities and all who are in those communities. That’s what I get to do. What Brandon gets to do is make sure he reopens publicly-run mental health clinics. He gets to implement the consent decree. He gets to help us build a more equitable and just school system, as a partner and not an adversary. We are more than happy to be in coalition with him and to partner with him. But Brandon and his team at City Hall get to govern the city. Our union and our movement will continue to organize and build movements throughout the city.

Where will the mayor-elect find members of his cabinet? Is a full house cleaning and reordering in order, or do you think he might keep on some people who are already serving?

In any big institution, you’re going to need people who have institutional memory. You’re going to need people who know where the bathroom is — and then you’re going to need people with fresh ideas. You need a team of people who are committed to the objective of one Chicago, the people’s Chicago. And then you fill in the rest with the right type of team chemistry.

Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez has not yet been on the job for two years, while a revolving door of district leadership has historically contentious relationships with the union. Should he stay on as CEO?

I don’t get to make that decision. We can’t wait for the day when an elected school board gets to make that decision. I can only say that Pedro and I have been able to turn the volume and the temperature down together, and I’ve appreciated that.

What happens if the mayor-elect has to make decisions that run counter to what he campaigned on, or what the union wants?

It means that we have high quality problems. That’s all that happens. It means that we get to figure it out together. It means that we take our coalition work to the next level.

Now that you’ve reached the fifth floor of City Hall, what’s next?

We’re not at the mountaintop. We’re at the next plateau. The mountaintop is fully funded schools, where our children are housed with their families in the city, and nurses and social workers are in every school. We’re not there yet. We’re still fighting for libraries and librarians. We’re still fighting for more sustainable community schools — and now we have another partner in another level of government to fight with us.

The union has been clear about its desires to raise revenue to fund its policy agenda, but where might you support cuts?

Can I be honest with you? I haven’t even thought about any of that. Right now we are still basking in the glow of this organizing feat that everyone from every side of town joined in. Honestly, it is unbelievable how this city — with its rich history of segregation, redlining and inequity — silenced some of the dog whistles that we heard throughout the campaign. I’m so proud of us right now that I haven’t even thought about that stuff yet.