Chicago in run by a corrupt boss named Preckwinkle. She not fond of Caucasians & has installed an all Black cadre of leaders including our Mayor, Police Chief & of course the great Kim Foxx who she wants to replace with a Black Prof who's spent zero time in a court room. BTW, this progessive group of Soros supported idiots is driving the City into the ground.
Eileen Burke is a recently retired judge who could have easily lived comfortable on her well deserved pension but has stepped up to fairly prosecute criminals in Chicago (something that's not happening today). Could this be the start of the Windy City's residents getting fed up and electing good leaders?
Wouldn't that be awesome. Fingers and toes crossed that Eileen pulls this one out.
Eileen O’Neill Burke holds slim lead over Clayton Harris III in Democratic race for Cook County state’s attorney
Democratic candidates for Cook County state's attorney Clayton Harris III, left, and Eileen O'Neill Burke appear at an interview with the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board on Feb. 14, 2024, at the Chicago Tribune Freedom Center. (Vincent Alban/Chicago Tribune)
Clayton Harris III and retired Appellate Judge Eileen O'Neill Burke...
By A.D. QUIG | aquig@chicagotribune.com | Chicago Tribune, SAM CHARLES | scharles@chicagotribune.com | Chicago Tribune and MEGAN CREPEAU | mcrepeau@chicagotribune.com | Chicago Tribune
PUBLISHED: March 19, 2024 at 8:55 p.m. | UPDATED: March 19, 2024 at 11:36 p.m.
Nearly eight years after Kim Foxx took office vowing to “rebuild a broken criminal justice system” as Cook County state’s attorney, the Democratic primary that will likely decide her successor was still too close to call Tuesday night as retired Appellate Justice Eileen O’Neill Burke held a slim lead over former prosecutor and government official Clayton Harris III.
But O’Neill Burke stopped short of declaring victory.
“We are cautiously optimistic, but we have to make sure all the votes are counted,” O’Neill Burke told supporters late Tuesday at her campaign party at an event space in River North. “But I know that we can agree that this has been a hard-fought campaign.”
Just minutes later, Harris greeted his backers with a similar message.
“Everybody here in Cook County, all of our communities matter,” he told the crowd of dozens at his campaign party. “So we’re going to wait and we’re going to count all the votes.”
According to Cook County and Chicago election officials, O’Neill Burke and Harris were separated by about 10,000 votes as of 10 p.m., with less than two dozen city precincts outstanding and tens of thousands of mail ballots left to potentially be tallied.
After the polls closed, Chicago Board of Elections spokesman Max Bever said 109,975 mail-in ballots remained outstanding. All of those mail-in ballots will not be returned, some will not be Democratic primary ballots and those that are Democratic ballots may not have votes cast in the state’s attorneys race. Bever expects most to come back by Friday, though the results won’t be official for weeks.
Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who also heads the county’s Democratic Party that backed Harris, said she is hopeful that votes “will swing his way,” claiming votes yet to be counted are in precincts that are likely to be strong for Harris and that mail-in ballots could end up being the deciding factor.
“There’s a lot at stake in this race,” she said.
Based on early returns, however, O’Neill Burke’s message appeared to resonate with suburban voters following Foxx’s two terms in which she helped lead the national prosecutorial reform movement was praised by some for revamping the office’s procedures on alleged police misconduct and wrongful convictions but was frequently hammered by critics for being too soft on defendants. Throughout the evening, Harris began picking up Chicago voters.
The race for the county’s next top prosecutor was in many ways a referendum on Foxx, a Preckwinkle protégé who rode into office on a wave of discontent following Laquan McDonald’s murder by a Chicago police officer.
Harris — who was endorsed by Preckwinkle and by Foxx herself in the closing days of the primary — ran on a “safety and justice” campaign that touched on both the need to charge forward on a reform agenda while also stressing that the state’s attorney’s main job is to prosecute criminals and keep the county safe. O’Neill Burke pushed harder on a tougher-on-crime approach in which she touted her decades of court experience as a prosecutor and a judge and argued the most effective way to “change criminal behavior is by enforcing the law.”
The intraparty fight came to represent a struggle that exists within the Democratic Party as a whole as progressives have pushed harder to reform government systems they believe are fundamentally flawed while less-progressive Democrats fear those reforms might go too far, too fast.
Tuesday’s winner will have a major advantage in the November general election in heavily Democratic Cook County. The Democratic nominee will face former Chicago alderman and attorney Bob Fioretti, who ran for state’s attorney previously as a Democrat but this year is running as a Republican, and Libertarian Andrew Charles Kopinski. Cook County has not elected a Republican to the office since 1992.
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