Guest Post: Dr. Klumpp makes deeper dive into 2022 retention returns

FWIW is pleased to present this Guest Post by Albert J. Klumpp, a generous and frequent contributor to FWIW over the years, a research analyst with a public policy PhD, and the author of several scholarly works analyzing judicial elections.

by Albert J. Klumpp

Before the 2022 election cycle gets too far in the rearview mirror, I wanted to provide FWIW with two pieces of follow-up analysis that were promised in previous posts. Family health issues pushed back anything election-related for several weeks but I finally am catching up. First up is a deeper dive into the results of the November voting on retention judges.

Overall the final numbers confirm what I reported in November using preliminary numbers:

• Roughly 1.1 million Cook County voters completed the retention part of the November 8 ballot. This number is on the surface very ordinary for Cook retentions, but in fact was produced from two extremes: the lowest voter turnout (45.7%) for any November election since the introduction of retention voting in 1964; and the highest participation rate ever (75.7%) with the smallest proportion of the electorate skipping the retention judges.


• The baseline level of support for the judges was 75.1 percent, a historically typical level for Cook retentions. Rates for the higher-court judges were roughly one point higher, in part because of the small proportion of voters who start but don’t finish the retention section of the ballot and who almost always vote to retain.

Among the 80 wards and townships, these are the ones with the highest and lowest baseline levels:

• Name cues, which are highly influential in primaries, are of little value in retention voting and were of little value this time. Female candidates got a boost of just under two percentage points, and none of the major name categories (Irish, Black, Hispanic) were statistically detectable. Within certain wards and townships, though, there was detectable support for each of the categories. The highest estimates:

• For every election going back to 1976 I’ve been able to estimate the combined influence of bar associations and newspapers. The 2022 estimate, 15.0 percent, is historically typical in magnitude but singularly remarkable because it includes nothing from newspapers. As I pointed out in November, for the first time in many years neither of the major Chicago newspapers provided any sort of guidance to retention voters, either in their own recommendations or by reporting the ratings of bar associations. The suburban Daily Herald likewise provided no guidance.

Nine of the 80 wards and townships produced estimates that exceeded 30%:

With no information provided by newspapers or their websites, many voters apparently turned to other sites, either those of the bar associations or else summary sites like VoteForJudges or Injustice Watch. But the evidence suggests that a major factor was the use of smartphones in the voting booth. This is implied by the predominance of Illinois State Bar Association ratings, which accounted for roughly 60 percent of the total use of bar ratings and which were statistically detectable in 39 wards and 27 townships. Google searches of “Cook County judicial retention” and similar terms on or before election day on mobile devices returned the ISBA’s ratings first among those of the bar groups. In addition, the ratings were presented in a mobile-friendly scroll that, while not the optimal presentation, was an improvement over the paper-formatted guides and cumbersome grids available elsewhere.

• Two social-media sources of ratings on retention judges that emerged in the two previous retention cycles together influenced just over 7 percent of the electorate. The “Girl I Guess” progressive voter guide produced a 5.3 percent estimate, up from 3.4 percent in 2018 and 4.2 percent in 2020. It was detectable in 43 of the 50 wards and 23 of the 30 townships, and had a double-digit influence in 14 wards. Interestingly, while most of those 14 wards were North and Northwest Side wards between the DePaul and Loyola campuses, they also included several Hispanic-majority wards.

In contrast, the Chicago voter “Cheat Sheet” guide prepared by city political activists saw a decline in its influence. Debuting in 2020 as a simple one-page list, it influenced an estimated 2.6 percent of the electorate and was detectable in many Black wards where none of the mainstream sources of information had ever seen success. This year it apparently was retargeted as part of a broader “Young Voters Guide,” and in so doing it influenced only 1.8 percent of a smaller electorate and lost most of its influence with Black voters.

• One final point concerns the partial set of ratings issued by the local Fraternal Order of Police. Typically I don’t examine ratings from unions or special interests because they aren’t detectable in the countywide results. This time, though, one of the judges on the retention ballot alerted me to what looked like unusual results from the 19th and 41st wards. So I added the FOP ratings to the ward and township analyses…and the judge is correct. While not detectable at the county or city-only level, roughly seven percent of the vote in the19th and 41st Wards can be linked to the FOP ratings, as well as between 2 and 3 percent in the 11th, 13th, 23rd, 38th and 45th and Lemont Township.

Overall, the biggest takeaway from this election is the lessening influence of candidate ratings from traditional, established sources and the continued increasing influence of smartphones and social media. As a result of this shift, for the first time ever city voters were more likely than suburban voters to complete the retention part of the ballot (75.7% to 75.6%) and more likely to distinguish among judges with mixed yes and no votes rather than voting unanimously all-yes or all-no. The absence of newspaper guidance clearly was felt more strongly in the suburbs, while voters in the city (where the median age is more than five years younger than in the suburbs) were more receptive to both the content and distribution of social media guides aimed at a younger and more progressive audience.

Finally, the usual qualifier: all of the estimates cited here are just that, estimates, and have margins of error. But all are considered statistically significant and nearly all are highly so.

Next up is a review of campaign spending by 2022 judicial candidates, including a new all-time record set for spending on a circuit court campaign.