Dr. Klumpp takes a first look at the Cook County judicial retention results - Part I

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 and a generous and frequent contributor to FWIW for many years.

The author of several published scholarly works analyzing judicial elections, Klumpp's most recent article appears in the current issue of The Iowa Lawyer, the magazine of the Iowa State Bar Association, "Iowa’s judicial retention elections: Before and after Varnum," Iowa Law., November 2026 at 26.

This is Part One of a three-part series.

by Albert J. Klumpp

Ballots are still trickling in and being tallied. But at this point the numbers look steady enough to take a first look at the results of last week’s judicial retention voting here in Cook County. Next month when the official results are released and detailed numbers are available at the ward/township level, we’ll take a deeper dive into the details; that will be the third, and concluding part, of this series.

Nationally it was a reasonably calm year for incumbent judges seeking retention. In the eighteen U.S. states with retention candidates on some or all of their ballots, a total of 753 state court judges sought retention, along with 178 judges of local or limited-jurisdiction courts. In sixteen of those states, including Illinois, the judges were 100% successful in winning retention. Four judges in Colorado and two in Alaska were removed; all had received negative evaluations from the official judicial performance review commissions in those states. In Arizona, two judges came extremely close to removal but appear to have barely survived (more on this in Part Two).

Here in Cook County, the expectation was that no judges would be removed, based on the lack of significant opposition or controversy. The Chicago Bar Association approved every judge on the ballot for only the second time ever, and the Chicago Council of Lawyers did the same, for the first time ever. And as they did two years ago, our local print media completely ignored judicial retention in both news and editorial coverage. So as expected, no judges were removed. But to some extent this is burying the lead, because the results are further evidence of how rapidly and completely the content and flow of information about retention judges has transformed in Cook County, within just the last five election cycles.

As recently as 2016, if a judge received a thumbs-up from both CBA and CCL, and faced no opposition from any of our local newspapers, successful retention would be a certainty, with an approval rate well up into the 70s. And yet, nineteen of last week’s candidates are on track to finish below 70, and four below 65.

Sorting through the specifics:

• Voter turnout, based on ballots counted so far, is at 45.8%, just barely above the 45.7% of four years ago—the record low for the judicial retention era (since 1964).


• Those who did turn out completed the retention part of the ballot at the highest rate ever: a median of 76.8%. With no major controversies among the judges running, the high participation is a surprise. This does not appear to be a consequence of any changes to the ballot or the voting process, as has happened in the past, but rather shows simply that more voters are paying attention to retention and are motivated to cast votes on judges.


• The baseline approval rate for a judge without any name-cue advantages or ratings disadvantages was 75.9%, a figure completely consistent with recent history. The average for the five previous midterm elections is 76.0%.


• Name cues, unlike in competitive judicial primaries, provided only modest advantages, or none at all. Female names showed a gain of 1.6 points; Irish names 1.2 points; and African-American names 2.2 points. Hispanic names did not show a gain measurable with statistical significance. All of these results are consistent with those of previous elections.


• The small number of negative ratings from bar associations made it impossible to measure the bars’ impact with any degree of confidence. Indications are that the Illinois State Bar Association had an impact of just under three percentage points, and some of the smaller demographic bars an impact of seven-tenths each, but these are basically guesses and are not statistically significant. With regard to the CBA, CCL and other bars that recommended in favor of every judge, there is no way without an exit poll to determine which all-yes voters were following those ratings. But nothing in the results suggests that the declining influence of those groups has reversed or halted. (Of course, bar ratings used to get a major boost from the newspaper coverage of judicial retention that no longer exists.)


• In contrast, two other information sources continue to grow in influence. One, discussed in previous elections, is the progressive Girl, I Guess voter guide. The guide’s influence suddenly appeared in the 2018 retention vote, with an impact measured at 3.4%. Over the next three elections its impact grew steadily, to 4.2%, then to 5.3%, and two years ago to 6.1% of the vote. And last week the number jumped again, all the way to 7.9%. Meaning, nearly one in twelve Cook County retention voters used the guide as their information source. This is an extraordinary number. To give some perspective, across the previous thirty years of retention elections, my only comparable measurement for a single information source was in 2018, when the county Democratic Party went after Matthew Coghlan using its multiple impeccably-timed mailers sent to everyone on its enormous mailing list. That well-financed effort from the county’s dominant political organization convinced 8.0% of the electorate to vote against Coghlan. Needless to say, the GIG guide has none of the financing, timing or reputation advantages of a major political party. And yet more than 91,000 voters found it and used it for judicial retention.


• The other relevant information source is the Injustice Watch voter guide. This one has been trickier to evaluate because IW does not issue ratings or endorsements, only presents information that they compile about the judges. But using a likely common decision rule among those who use the guide — vote no on judges flagged for controversies, reversals or negative ratings — I generated an estimate of 3.7 percent impact, a figure measured as highly statistically significant. The same procedure two years ago produced an estimate of 2.8 percent, so there does appear to be growing use of the IW guide as an information source. This, too, is a remarkable result because decades of data on judicial retention voting has shown unequivocally that simplicity matters—that voters are far less likely to sort through complicated presentations of information than they are to respond to simple, clear “vote no” messages. But here is an example of the complete opposite happening, the first such example that I have ever found nationwide.

In seeking out and reading relevant social media comments before the election, two facts became clear. One is that there definitely is a strong desire among more and more voters to cast informed votes, with the mindset that the entire slate of judges is not entitled to a blanket Yes vote and wanting to know which judges to support and which to oppose. The other is that bar associations are simply no longer part of the conversation; there seems to be little awareness that they provide information or even exist. The IW and GIG guides were basically the only information sources mentioned by commenters. So it’s no surprise that these have become the most used sources among voters.

Obviously a lot can be said about all this, particularly with regard to bar associations. That will be left to FWIW readers. Instead, I’ll next take a look at another judicial retention jurisdiction, and some election results suggesting that what’s happening here in Cook County may not be all that unique or surprising. For now I simply need to repeat the usual reminder about how some of the figures above are statistical estimates with margins of error, and are considered statistically significant or insignificant as noted. And also note that these are preliminary figures that might shift slightly when final, official vote totals are released next month.