Campaign Diaries

[Updated with Cohen's withdrawal.] If Illinois’s federal primaries were resolved with little drama on Tuesday, the results of the state-level contests has left the political situation confused for both parties.

Quinn survives, for now

What we know: Incumbent Pat Quinn will be the Democrats’ gubernatorial nominee. I for one did not think he would survive the primary given the evidence that Treasurer Dan Hynes’s brutal attacks had taken a big toll on Quinn, but at the end of the day the governor held off his aggressive challenger by just 3,087 votes out of 912,695 cast - a difference of 0.33%. (Illinois has no automatic recount and Hynes chose to concede the race.) The more progressive of the two candidates, Quinn will thus have a chance to win a full term this fall, nearly two years after he was elevated to the Governor’s Mansion upon Rod Blagojevich’s impeachment.

Quinn’s victory arguably gives Republicans a better shot at winning this race, and this for a very simple reason: Nearly all incumbents have been growing unpopular since states sank in fiscal crises and voters seem determined to reject many governors as they can. In a blue state like Illinois, this should make it easier for the GOP to convince voters who typically vote Democratic to cross-over. (A recent PPP poll shows Hynes performing 7% to 12% better than Quinn.) Just as Democrats would have been better off had Corzine been replaced, just as I no longer think Charlie Crist is the GOP’s best general election bet, just as Ted Strickland, Chet Culver and Bill Ritter’s fortunes collapsed during 2009, so does Pat Quinn enter the general election weighed down by a mediocre approval rating and by the need to defend not only his economic record but also his ties to Blagojevich.

(Quinn has never been close to Blagojevich, who did not tap him to be Lieutenant Governor, but he will still have to work hard to distance himself from the man with whom he shared the ticket. Democrats should be all the more worried about the former governor weighing them down that his trial is scheduled to start in the fall of 2010, two months before Election Day.)

Yet, Quinn is by no means out of the race. Like the other incumbents who were elevated to their state without running for it, he is less defined than other governors and he thus has more room to grow. Second, Illinois remains a Democratic state, one in which Barack Obama’s involvement could pay more dividends than it might elsewhere. And third, the GOP might have nominated a weaker nominee than it was expected to.

Brady holds on to a 420 vote-lead

While most expected a victor to emerge among state Senator Kirk Dillard, former Attorney General Jim Ryan and former state party chair Andy McKenna, a fourth candidate came out ahead of the initial count: state Senator Bill Brady leads his closest competitor Kirk Dillard by just 420 votes - which is to say 20,3% to 20,2%! As many as 11,000 absentee and provisional ballots might still have to be added to the tally, so Dillard could still grab the lead. It should take another 10 days for a final count to be available.

While Brady’s lead is being portrayed as an upset, it shouldn’t be surprising. Not only did polls show that this was really anyone’s contest to win, but he was the only Republican candidate not from Chicagoland! That geographic advantage allowed him to dominate downstate and become a contender statewide. When a primary features 6 candidates who have a credible shot at the nomination, it is obvious that anything can happen since a very small share of the vote is needed to secure victory. On Tuesday, just 12% separated the first vote-getter from the sixth vote-getter!

If Brady holds on to his lead, the GOP will have nominated the second-most conservative candidate among those who were running (the first being Tea Party-favorite Adam Andrzejewski, who got 14%), which could give Democrats ammunition to convince Illinois’s left-leaning electorate to stick with the party they usually vote for. In particular, Brady opposes abortion including in cases of rape, incest and when the mother’s life is in danger, he supports allowing the teaching of creationism, and he is conservative profile on fiscal matters; the 10% across-the-board cut he advocates, which would cut billions from education or Medicaid program, should be hard to defend in a blue state.

Dillard (who appeared in one of Barack Obama’s ads during the 2008 presidential campaign) and Ryan (who has already won a statewide victory) could have made it tougher for Quinn to turn the spotlight on his opponent and thus prevent the race from becoming a referendum on his own tenure. This did not work for the Democratic candidates in Virginia and in New Jersey, but Christie and McDonnell were high-profile Republicans the national party was determined to push through the finish line. We will have to see how much traction Brady’s campaign can gain compared to the one Ryan and McKenna were expected to mount.

On the other hand, if Brady survives the primary it could boost Rep. Mark Kirk’s chances over in the Senate race. If the GOP ticket is headlined by two relatively moderate Republicans from the Chicago suburbs (Kirk and Dillard), it could make it harder for the party to ensure heavy turnout downstate. With Brady on the ballot, however, Republicans could have a more balanced candidate, with one candidate who could ensure downstate conservatives go to the polls and once there also punch the ballot for their party’s Senate nominee.

The Scott Cohen saga

While all eyes were on the senatorial and gubernatorial primaries, however, Democrats got a huge surprise in a race that apparently no one was paying attention to: the primary for Lieutenant Governor. Scott Cohen, a pawnbroker who had never before ran for office, spent heavily from his personal fortune but was not taken seriously enough for either the local press nor nor his rival candidates to spend time vetting him. In a 6-way race in which all candidates got double-digits (!), he prevailed with just 26% of the vote over state Rep. Turner, who received 22%.

Since then, Democrats have been scrambling to address the avalanche of damaging stories that is now surrounding the man who will now be running near the top of their ticket; most discussed are a 2005 domestic battery charge, which was later dropped, and Cohen’s divorce file, which contains allegations of violent acts made by his former wife, who reportedly successfully sought a restraining order against Cohen because she felt threatened by fits of rage caused by steroid use. Also damning are allegations that he missed $54,000 of child-support payment.

I am somewhat uncomfortable condemning someone based on charges he was never tried on - let alone convicted - as that would obviously open the door to huge breaches of the presumption of innocence and of due process. (This of course speaks to a broader problem since people often finding themselves weighed down by charges in their daily activities like searching for a job or housing, even when these charges end up being dropped or even when they are cleared.) Yet, there is no question that all of these stories open up very problematic questions for Cohen to address, particularly the restraining order his former wife obtained and the missed child-support payments.

This has put Democrats in a huge bind: While the nominees for Governor and Lieutenant Governor are selected separately, they run on a ticket so Quinn’s prospects are now tied to Cohen’s!

Since it is difficult to envision Cohen not costing Quinn a lot of votes, Democrats are now trying to find a solution, the easiest of which would be convincing their new nominee to drop out: Quinn, Senator Dick Durbin and Attorney General Lisa Madigan all called on him to do so this week, but can Cohen be persuaded to give up on a race on which he has already spent $2 million?

While The Chicago Sun-Times is reporting that Cohen is leaning towards stepping down, the alternative Democrats are considering would be jaw-droppingly radical, as The Daily Herald reports:

If [Cohen] does not [resign], Durbin and others say Quinn can consider the possibility of running without him by leaving the Democratic Party. It’s happened before. In 1986, Democrat Adlai Stevenson III created the Illinois Solidarity Party to avoid running with a lieutenant governor candidate who was a follower of frequent presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche. Stevenson lost to Republican Gov. Jim Thompson.

Interestingly, the GOP primary also yielded a surprise, as few expected low-profile 27-year old Jason Plummer to pull it off over state Senator Matt Murphy, but Republicans have received no further surprises.

Update: As is already being discussed in the comments, Cohen announced last night that he was withdrawing, an obvious relief for Democrats that allows them to no longer dream of extreme solutions like having the governor run on an independent ticket. The state party committee will now choose a replacement for Cohen. By the fall, we will have forgotten all about the Cohen saga, so this should really not impact the Quinn’s prospects - nor do I think Democrats have much to fear from the fact that one of their nominees will not have gone through a primary: Unless candidates for Lieutenant Governor become hugely controversial, they will not play an important role in deciding the general election.