Politicians fanned out across Chicago during a furious final weekend of campaigning, making appearances in St. Patrick’s Day parades, church pulpits and restaurant gatherings as they sought to energize voters ahead of Tuesday’s Illinois primary elections.
A day after tens of thousands of green-clad revelers watched the front-of-the-line jousting among politicians at Chicago’s downtown parade along Columbus Drive, the focus on Sunday was the traditional South Side Irish Parade, where candidates trekked down Western Avenue amid Irish Wolfhounds and high school marching bands.
“It’s a great moment to celebrate another culture,” said Appellate Judge Jesse Reyes, a Democratic candidate for a Cook County seat on the Illinois Supreme Court who is challenging appointed Justice Joy Cunningham. “Today, and tomorrow, everybody’s Irish, right?”
Noting contested countywide races for state’s attorney, circuit court clerk and the seat on the state’s highest court, he urged voters to come out on Election Day. “If you’re really interested in your community, Cook County, I think the people will come out to vote,” he said.
Without contested presidential primary contests to help drive voter turnout at the top of the ticket, expectations are for a low voter turnout, so “institutional support is very important,” said Mariyana Spyropoulos, who is challenging incumbent Democratic Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Iris Martinez.
Spyropoulos got the backing of the Cook County Democratic Party over Martinez, who has bucked several of the organization’s slated candidates and has been feuding with Toni Preckwinkle, the county party chair and County Board president. Spyropoulos said that support “is going to help us, because the party is really strong.”
A day earlier, before joining the crowd at the front of the line of the city’s downtown parade, Martinez several times referred to the party organization as a “dictatorship” and said she’d taken its refusal to support her personally.
Also on Saturday, Martinez joined retired Appellate Judge Eileen O’Neill Burke, who is facing Clayton Harris III for the nomination for the open-seat county prosecutor’s spot, in a back room at Ann Sather’s restaurant in Lakeview.
There, volunteers, precinct captains and North Side elected officials — many clad in green — fueled up on eggs and hash browns as they received marching orders from former 44th Ward Ald. Tom Tunney, the restaurant’s owner.
Martinez is facing “a bruising battle,” Tunney said.
“Part of that is within the Democratic Party,” he added, before turning his attention to promoting O’Neill Burke, who, like the county circuit clerk was not endorsed by county Democrats.
Tunney suggested Tuesday’s results could help maintain commonsense centrism in the party.
“This is, again, a real struggle about how do we make sure our party is as diverse as possible with the most qualified candidates,” he said.
Spyropoulos, a commissioner on the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Chicago board, has criticized Martinez’s acceptance of campaign help and donations from office employees as well as lapses that have improperly exposed juvenile offender data and wrongly kept felonies on individuals’ criminal records.
Martinez, the first Latina elected to the office, has maintained she oversaw improvements to customer service, opened a new domestic violence center and managed to exit federal hiring oversight over the course of her first term. “The office has been doing great,” she said. “Please, don’t believe in the lies that are out there.”
O’Neill Burke, joined by her adult children and husband at the restaurant, gave an abbreviated stump speech, touting her decadeslong career in and out of the courtroom as an attorney and judge and warning that the city’s future as a business hub was at stake over concerns about crime.
“I want my children to come back here and raise their children here,” she said. “But I want them to live in a city that’s safe, … where you don’t have to have your head on a swivel if you go out at night, … where you can ride the CTA and not be victimized.”
Without naming outgoing State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, state Sen. Sara Feigenholtz said the office is “in shambles,” and that “we won’t get off the path we’re on unless (O’Neill Burke) is elected.”
Harris, the county Democrats’ endorsed candidate, has attacked O’Neill Burke’s recent response to a case she prosecuted 30 years ago against an 11-year-old boy who was accused of the brutal murder of his elderly neighbor. A federal judge later found the boy’s confession to police was coerced.
O’Neill Burke has said she had no knowledge the confession was coerced until years later. Had she known, she said, she would not have approached the case the same way.
Asked in an interview earlier this month whether she believed the boy was guilty, O’Neill Burke said, “I believe he had something to do with it.”
Harris on Saturday took issue with that statement. “She doesn’t believe that this kid was innocent, even though he’s been adjudicated — you know, exonerated,” Harris said, noting physical evidence did not tie the boy to the murder scene.
A federal court eventually expunged the boy’s adjudication of delinquency, the juvenile equivalent to a conviction.
O’Neill Burke’s campaign said Harris is attempting “to smear a well-qualified woman’s record.”
O’Neill Burke has highlighted her decades as a prosecutor, defense attorney and judge on the campaign trail, noting she was never accused by any court of wrongdoing in this case or any other, and that the state’s appellate and supreme courts had found no fault with her prosecution of the boy’s case.
She also pledged to maintain the conviction integrity unit in the state’s attorney’s office if elected.
Among the Democrats supporting O’Neill Burke is Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza.
“I think Chicago needs this. Cook County needs this. And I really do believe that we can have the safest big city in America if we elect the right state’s attorney and without a doubt that’s Eileen O’Neill Burke,” Mendoza said.
Harris, who is Black, has spent recent days seeking support from Black and Latino voters. On Saturday morning he was at the Rainbow Push Coalition Forum. Later, he spent time with North Shore progressives, telling 49th Ward volunteers that “safe neighborhoods” won’t happen by “sacrificing justice.”
“Historically, what we’ve seen is when people say ‘Safety, safety, safety’ and everyone gets behind what it looks like, they start rounding up people like me, they start rounding up Black and brown bodies,” Harris said, noting that Foxx’s office had prosecuted major cases and “exonerated more than 250 innocent people that never should have been in jail.”
Several 49th Ward volunteers donned “Bring Chicago Home” buttons. The proposal on Tuesday’s ballot asks voters to authorize the Chicago City Council to increase the real estate transfer tax on high-end property sales, mainly commercial and rental property, to create a fund to deal with homelessness and outreach services.
The referendum question is a signature issue for Mayor Brandon Johnson and is backed by his public employee union allies. Opposition comes from anti-tax interests aligned with businesses, the real estate industry and Republicans.
The referendum is a complicated, multiparagraph section of the ballot. Katy Hogan, the co-chair of the neighborhood independent political organization Network 49, said she has worked to persuade voters to support Harris and Bring Chicago Home, but has found that many people aren’t familiar with the candidate or the issue. “This is an incredibly uneducated bunch of voters in this primary, to be honest,” she said.
U.S. Rep. Danny Davis, seeking a 15th term in a crowded 7th Congressional District primary, spent Sunday soliciting support at South and West Side churches with predominantly Black congregations.
A day earlier, Davis pushed back on the Chicago Teachers Union’s endorsement of one of his opponents, Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin.
Davis supporter Louverta Hurt, a retired CPS teacher and administrator, called the CTU endorsement “an insult.” Davis has been “a strong advocate for education (and) education workers’ rights throughout his entire career,” she said.
Davis, a former teacher, recounted his longtime advocacy for public education, including his role as a Chicago alderman in helping establish local school councils under Mayor Harold Washington in the late 1980s.
“I don’t remember any of my colleagues who are running for this office even coming close or near or anywhere in a long distance with my experiences and advocacy for public education,” Davis said.
In its endorsement last month, CTU cited Conyears-Ervin’s status as a working mother in backing her over Davis and the other three challengers, Kina Collins, Nikhil Bhatia and Kouri Marshall.
On Sunday afternoon, Conyears-Ervin hosted an event at Harmony Community Church in the North Lawndale neighborhood. She was joined by more than 50 supporters, among them many family members and friends, and made an impassioned last call for voters to hit the polls.
Conyears-Ervin touted her support from Black church leaders, including the Rev. Byron Brazier, head of the Apostolic Church of God, and Bishop Larry Trotter of the Sweet Holy Spirit Church.
“Churches are the backbone of the community,” Conyears-Ervin said in an interview after the event. “To have so many pastors, leaders of the church support me — they know I’m the best candidate for Congress for the residents of Chicago and the suburbs.”
Several pastors were joined by Ald. Chris Taliaferro, 29th, in criticizing rival candidates and the media for focusing on accusations of unethical conduct against Conyears-Ervin made several years ago by two former top aides in the treasurer’s office. The Board of Ethics found probable cause that Conyears-Ervin had violated the city ethics code by firing the two employees. The city earlier had paid $100,000 to settle the complaints.
“(Journalists are) not talking about the things that Melissa Conyears-Ervin has done for our families as treasurer and state representative,” Taliaferro said.
As he prepared to march in Saturday’s downtown parade, Democratic Attorney General Kwame Raoul acknowledged divisions among Democrats’ moderate and progressive wings in Tuesday’s primary.
“But,” he said, “I’m confident we all come together and begin to focus on November for the betterment of our state and certainly for the betterment of our country.”
Tribune reporters Jeremy Gorner, Dan Petrella and Rick Pearson contributed.
