It's been a weird election cycle.
Maybe this is not the strangest primary since I've been covering Cook County judicial elections here -- surely 2020 still holds that dubious distinction. Remember how frightened we were in March 2020?
I was scared, at least. And, as I said in that linked 2020 post, I could not understand why the primary had to go forward in March, when the
courts, the NCAA tournament, Major League Baseball, college baseball, restaurants, and even the
St. Patrick's Day parades all had to be cancelled.
Of course, then we were told we were shutting down for two weeks, or maybe 30 days. We -- we the people -- never dreamed the shutdown would persist, in various ways, for two
years or more.
But if 2024 is not the weirdest election cycle, it is still pretty darn strange. I've seen uncontested judicial primaries before -- Eileen O'Neill Burke, for example, was unopposed in 2016, when she was slated for the Appellate Court by the Cook County Democratic Party -- on the same slate with Kim Foxx -- say... was Foxx a MAGA Republican, too?
But I digress... and I don't mean to... this election cycle is different because there are so
many uncontested judicial elections. There's a wholly new subcircuit map in Cook County -- for the first time since the subcircuits were implemented, in 1992 -- which should have created opportunities for ambitious judicial candidates. True, the electoral landscape had been carefully designed in Springfield -- the cartographic skills of the Illinois Democratic Party's mapmakers are legendary -- surely the equal of, if not superior to, the Republican wannabe mapmakers in Wisconsin, North Carolina, or Alabama. Why,
our maps never lose a court challenge!
But the new subcircuit maps have not been field-tested before today. And today... with so many uncontested races... probably isn't much of a test.
And even the races that are contested are mostly one-on-ones.
We have only two candidates vying for an Illinois Supreme Court vacancy. In the past, that race alone would have brought out four or five or more candidates. (OK, OK, Anne Burke was uncontested in her bid for the Supreme Court in 2008 -- but that was certainly an unusual -- and, at the time, understandable -- circumstance, right?)
Turnout will be low today, perhaps historically so. Low turnouts may suggest that voters are disenchanted with our political shenanigans. But low numbers of candidates... has the popular malaise spread to the potential candidates themselves?
The Cook County Democratic Party Central Committee does not slate judicial candidates in the subcircuits. It never has. But committeepersons in the various subcircuits could and did meet as slating committees for the subcircuits in past cycles, slating candidates for vacancies as they arose. I must admit that this is the first election cycle in some time where I did not hear about subcircuit slating committees anywhwere, even after the fact. Some very keen observers have suggested that there was no Democratic Party slating at all in the new subcircuits this year.
But I checked with the Cook County Democratic Party and I can confirm, per a party spokesperson, that, per county Party bylaws, all of the subcircuit committees were organized, with the chair automatically being the committeeperson with the highest weighted vote. I can't confirm that all the committees met, or that all committees that did meet agreed on who to slate, but I can confirm that Hock and Bhave were slated in the new 18th Subcircuit, and Gonzalez and Przekota were slated in the 11th. Only Bhave and Przekota face challenges today.
And therein may lie the explanation for why we didn't hear much about subcircuit slating in this cycle: We did not have to. The slated candidates were the only ones to file in a great many races.
While the Cook County Democratic Party as a whole does not endorse subcircuit candidates, FWIW has also confirmed that 10th Subcircuit candidate Liam Kelly was endorsed by Party Chair Toni Preckwinkle. He is apparently the only subcircuit candidate specifically endorsed by President Preckwinkle.
Polls close at 7:00 p.m. FWIW will have results when they are available.
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