HOW QUINN WON, PROBABLY

11/3/10

It looks like Pat Quinn (no relation) will be elected (The purists out there insist that we not say “re-elected” because he was not elected governor but rather assumed that post when Rod Blagojevich was impeached.) governor. Quinn leads at this writing by 8,349 votes. If there are 30,000 votes to be counted, absentee and otherwise (I have heard numbers all over the map, but 30,000 is one I’ve heard the most.), Brady would have to “carry” those yet to be counted ballots by almost a 2 to 1 margin in order to win. So, barring a preponderance of those ballots’ coming from downstate or something odd in a still unscheduled recount, Pat Quinn will be our governor for the next four years.

While I said in one of yesterday’s posts (MR. TRIPARTISAN, THAT’S I!, 11/2/10) that the governor’s race, along with the senate race, was very close and could go either way, I thought Quinn would lose because his totals in the city would not be big enough to counteract Brady’s big victories downstate and in the collar counties. I cited two reasons for what I thought would be a winning, but relatively weak, performance, in the city. First, I thought that the committeemen in the Machine wards, mostly on the fringes of the city, the guys whom Quinn has spent a career bashing as ethical pygmies, would not be expending any more effort than necessary to roll up the vote totals for the governor in their wards, wards in which many of the residents would look favorably on Bill Brady’s social conservatism in any case. Second, I stated that Quinn might not win the black wards big because of his snubbing of Art Turner for lieutenant governor after Scott Lee Cohen dropped out of the race. As it turns out, he will win because I was wrong, dead wrong, in that prognostication.

Quinn won the city big, getting 75.4% of the vote. He did very well in those “Machine” votes, as these examples illustrate (the site does not handle spacing well, so this isn't as neatly spaced as I would like, but you should be able to follow it...the ward number is first, the committeeman second, Quinn's percentage third):

Ward Committeeman Quinn’s Percentage
11 Daley (John) 64.2%
12 Cardenas 73.9%
13 Madigan 68.5%
14 Burke 76.2%
19 O’Shea 62.5%
23 Zalewski 57.8%
33 Mell 70.3%
36 Banks 59.8%
38 Cullerton 58.3%
40 O’Connor 70.8%
45 Levar 56.0%
47 Schulter 69.0%
48 Ronen 75.3%

Quinn also carried the black wards by percentages in line with historic Democratic performances in those wards, as the following examples illustrate (again, the site doesn't handle spacing well, but the ward comes first, Quinn's percentage comes second):

Ward Percentage
3 89.4%
6 92.8%
7 91.2%
8 92.9%
17 93.0%
20 90.8%
21 92.6%
24 93.0%

You get the picture; apparently, the snub of Art Turner for Sheila Simon apparently didn’t have much impact.

Incidentally, and to no one’s surprise, Brady did best in the 41st Ward, the only ward represented by a Republican alderman, Brian Doherty, who is leaving his post in the city council for a run at Jimmy DeLeo’s state senate seat. Brady got 44.7% of the votes in the 41st, trailing Quinn by 2.8%, a very respectable showing.