Starting to look at Tuesday's results -- and asking about the impact of turnout on judicial races

Much as I might prefer it otherwise, Cook County judicial elections are affected by other political races, and in multiple ways.

Turnout has to be the biggest factor. And, whatever we learned in civics about it being the duty of every responsible citizen to vote in every election, voters only come out for marquee, hot-button races.

You know, the kind of races political professionals hate.

There’s a reason why primaries are scheduled so early – the political pros like it this way. Why?

The vast majority of the great unwashed (that’s us, to the pros) aren’t thinking about November in March. We’re thinking about more immediate concerns, like paying the rent or mortgage for the coming month (or the current month!). Maybe we’re thinking as far ahead as Easter or Passover and who’s going where. Maybe we’re thinking about Opening Day. But we aren’t thinking about November. And most of us – the vast majority of us – don’t bother voting in primaries.

The total number of ballots pulled for this primary, City and suburbs, Democrat, Republican, Green, and non-partisan, was 914,972. Of these, 774,666 Democratic ballots were voted. According to the Cook County Clerk, that means only 28.6% of the registered voters in the suburbs made it out to the polls. It was a little better in the City of Chicago, but not much: Only 31.52% of the voters bothered to take any sort of primary ballot.

And even that meager turnout is anathema to the political professionals: The larger the turnout, the harder it is to control the results. Because, for the real political pros, results are all that matter – getting in, and staying in.

In 2014, when we had our last gubernatorial primary, only 16.54% of the registered voters in the City of Chicago bothered to vote, according to the records of the Chicago Board of Elections. Only about 16% (15.99%) of the registered voters came out in the suburbs, according to the Cook County Clerk’s records.

In 2010 – a year that election officials are comparing this current primary to – only 24.54% of the eligible voters in suburban Cook County came out. In the City, according to the CBOE, turnout was 27.28%. (The primary was on Groundhog’s Day in 2010; perhaps the rest of the voters saw their shadows and stayed home.)

So let’s compare 2010 and 2018 in a couple of races. Take the 3rd Congressional District, for example. In 2010, Daniel Lipinski faced no foe in the primary. He nevertheless received 57,864 votes, according to records maintained by the Illinois State Board of Elections. (In 2014, again with no primary opponent, Lipinski had 28,883 votes.)

This year, Lipinski had a very vigorous challenge from Marie Newman. The 3rd District covers parts of Cook, DuPage and Will Counties.

Lipinski lost in the Cook County suburbs, with Newman polling 24,488 votes to Lipinski’s 22,977. He lost in DuPage, 80 to 52. He also lost in Will County, 4,212 to 2,975. But Lipiski prevailed because he carried the City of Chicago, 21,846 to 16,839.

But add that up: With similar turnouts city- and countywide, even with a strong challenger, Lipinski had only 10,000 fewer votes than he got in 2010 when he was unopposed. In other words, his challenger, who got 45,619 votes, brought out at least 35,000 ‘extra’ votes. Those extra votes might have been motivated by Newman’s strong union support – but there was likely a strong gender component at work there as well. That would have consequences in countywide judicial races and in subcircuits overlapping the 3rd Congressional District’s boundaries.

In the 4th Congressional District, Luis Gutiérrez stepped aside at the last minute in favor of Chuy Garcia. Notwithstanding this passing of the baton, a whole bunch of wannabes jumped in, including a bunch of political pros... and then, one by one, all the political pros dropped out, leaving Garcia up against only Richard Gonzalez and Sol Flores.

Like Lipinski, Gutiérrez was unopposed in 2010 – and he got 34,000 votes.

The pros got out, each citing the overwhelming support they'd seen for Garcia. Cloaking Garcia with the mantle of inevitability should have tamped down voter turnout.

But it does not seem to have worked: In 2018 there were a total of 74,620 votes cast between the City and suburbs in the 4th Congressional District. Garcia and (I would submit in particular) Flores brought out a lot of ‘extra’ voters – and Daniel Burke lost his 1st District House primary race – and Beatriz Frausto-Sandoval won her primary race in the 14th Judicial Subcircuit.

Extra voters aren’t controllable.

In 2010, Toni Preckwinkle needed 281,905 votes (out of 575,483 votes cast) to unseat Todd Stroger and fend off Terry O’Brien and Dorothy Brown. This year, Preckwinkle got 249,180 votes in the City alone, and another 183,338 in the suburbs, in defeating Bob Fioretti. The total number of votes cast in this race, however, was 713,158 – over 100,000 ‘extra’ votes over 2010.

In 2010, when Joseph Berrios first won nomination to be Cook County Assessor, he won 203,397 votes, out of 519,716 cast. This year, in losing, Berrios polled 237,992 votes – but there were 700,841 votes cast in this race.

These are ‘down ballot’ races. Historically, there is an increasing drop-off between the top of the ballot, where the would-be governors and senators and presidents are, and the very bottom of the ballot, where the judges are. When the sharp-pencil crowd finishes looking at these numbers, I suspect they’ll find less drop-off than usual between the top of the ballot and these county races. That would mean that extra people came out looking to vote in these races – and if they went that far down the ballot, more voters than usual may have kept right on going into the judicial races.

Moreover, while 2018 is being compared to 2010 by election authorities, there were only 761,626 total ballots voted in Cook County – City and suburbs – in 2010. That’s just about the number of Democratic ballots alone in 2018 – 774,666 Democratic ballots out of 914,972 total. So that’s about 150,000 ‘extra’ Democratic voters in 2018 over 2010. Who were these voters? How did they impact judicial races?

In the modern age, political professionals have enormous amounts of data about us proles. They not only know if we vote, in many cases they can accurately predict how we’ll vote if we can be bothered to come out. And, if they’re worried about whether we’ll do what they want, they’d just as soon we stayed home, thank you.

But that’s for a subsequent post.