Dr. Klumpp: Analyzing the results of the March 2026 Cook County judicial primary (Part Two)

FWIW is once again pleased to present a Guest Post by Albert J. Klumpp, a PhD in public policy analysis with a national reputation for expertise on judicial races, the author of several scholarly works analyzing judicial elections, and a generous and frequent contributor to FWIW for many years.

This is Part Two of a two-part series; Part One appeared yesterday afternoon.

by Albert J. Klumpp

The small data set from the March 17 primary precludes any of the more advanced number-crunching that I’ve done for past primaries. But we can at least look at some scatterplots that give insight into the two countywide Circuit Court contests... and that explain how a slated candidate lost decisively.

Figure 2 shows vote percentages for Ashonta Rice, who won her two-candidate contest for the Coghlan vacancy with 60.4% of the vote. Each ward and township is represented by one dot, and the numbers on the horizontal axis represent the Black percentage of each place’s population. As we can see, even in places with very few Black voters, Rice came out slightly ahead. Specifically, in the 54 wards and townships that are 20 percent Black or less, the median vote for Rice was 53 percent. Which makes perfect sense, since Rice held the gender advantage, but was not the slated candidate. But as the plot shows, for the other 26 places with higher Black proportions, her vote percentage increased to as much as 77 percent. It went no higher, because some Black voters stuck with the party slate, but it was more than high enough.

Figure 3 shows her opponent Michael Cabonargi’s vote percentages based on percentage of white population. Cabonargi won in only 14 of the 80 wards and townships, and even in the most heavily white places his support rose no higher than 64 percent. The gender variable tends to be relatively strong in many white-majority areas, and party slating tends to be relatively less valuable in some white suburban townships, and both of those hurt Cabonargi. An Irish surname would have fared better -- in fact, Italian surnames have tended to fare slightly worse than average -- but that would not have made up anywhere near enough of the difference. And not having the first ballot position made his situation even worse.

Contrast the Coghlan contest with the 56.8% victory by Luz Maria Toledo in the contest for the Cobbs vacancy. Figure 4 shows Toledo’s vote percentages by percentage of Hispanic population. Note that there was no gender advantage to gain in this contest, since both candidates were female. And so, as the slated candidate, Toledo had an advantage that was not neutralized as Cabonargi’s was. As the plot shows, she won 72 of the 80 wards and townships, even many with little Hispanic population. So she did not need any name-based boost from Hispanic voters -- but she got it, with heavily Hispanic places giving her as much as 82 percent.

Figure 5 shows the vote for her opponent Linda Sackey based on Black population. Compare it to Figure 2. It shows that with a more generic name, Sackey did not attract the Black support that Rice did. In this contest, as in the other, the name game was decisive.

One final point to make about the Coghlan contest. Anyone who received the multiple mailings sent by the Cabonargi campaign might wonder about the impact of campaign activity. Through the first quarter of 2026 his campaign reported more than $240,000 in spending, the third-highest amount of any candidate (behind only two candidates in the typically big-spending 8th Subcircuit), and roughly $180,000 more than was reported by his opponent. But, as I explained in 2011 in a DePaul Law Review article, in countywide contests even a large spending advantage translates into only a very small shift in vote percentage. A campaign fund of this size would have had far more impact in a subcircuit contest, where money has a much more substantial impact. Possibly enough to be decisive. But here it was largely wasted.

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Typically I end these FWIW posts with a qualifier about statistical estimates and margins of error. But with no statistical estimates to provide this year, I’ll instead mention once more the issue of the gradual decline in numbers of candidates seeking elective vacancies in Cook County. I dug into this trend in detail in a CBA Record article last year (available here), hoping to cast light on the situation. Because, obviously, an elective system cannot function without candidates.