by Albert J. Klumpp
To finish my work on the 2024 election cycle, here as promised is a look at the campaign spending numbers for all of Cook County’s judicial candidates. Inevitably there will be a few late-arriving bills that have yet to be reported for general election contests, but otherwise the following figures summarize all of the primary and general election spending reported by the 70 individuals who ran for the various judicial vacancies open last year.
Unfortunately the summary figures aren’t entirely comparable with those of past years because of a lack of competition. Of the 45 vacancies open for election, 25 of them were won by a single candidate who faced no opposition in either stage of election. Meaning, more than one-third of the 70 candidates had no one to campaign against. This kept the aggregate numbers lower than they could have been.
Nonetheless, the candidates reported a total of $7,458,054 in campaign spending. The largest contributor to that figure was an infrequent Illinois Supreme Court vacancy, which saw more than $2 million in spending. Here is a table showing the top fifteen spenders:
Spending for the lower courts was mostly unexceptional. Celia Gamrath’s reported total of $356,556 was the highest amount spent by any of the six Appellate Court candidates, but two of those candidates faced no opposition. And while it ranks as the eighth-highest total among the 203 Appellate Court candidates since 1980, it is well below the biggest spenders.
Similarly, among Circuit Court candidates there were no extreme spenders as there were in the previous three cycles. For countywide vacancies, the biggest spender was Pablo DeCastro, but his reported total of $185,371 ranks only 38th among countywide candidates since 1980 and can be attributed to the unusual situation (in this election cycle) of facing opponents in both the primary and general elections. And the biggest spender among subcircuit candidates (Paul O’Grady, 15th Subcircuit) ranks only 22nd among sub-county candidates since 1980. (O'Grady was defeated by Luciano Panici, who spent nearly as much.)
But despite the lack of extreme spenders in this cycle, and despite the lesser competitiveness, the aggregate numbers did nothing to change the trend in campaign spending that I have noted in the past, both here in FWIW and in published work. The chart below reports median spending numbers, adjusted for inflation, on a decade-by-decade basis:
In the meantime, and to conclude, the usual fine print: The amounts reported here come from reviewing every quarterly campaign finance report filed with the Illinois State Board of Elections by every candidate. They include items reported as in-kind contributions, and exclude items that are not directly relevant to the vote-getting objective of the campaign (for instance, loan repayments that are technically required to be reported as expenditures). All pre-2024 totals were adjusted for inflation using basic Consumer Price Index data.
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