Illinois Democrats appeared poised to strengthen their hold on the state’s Supreme Court, as voters in two northern Illinois judicial districts appeared to have selected Lake County Judge Elizabeth Rochford and Third District Appellate Justice Mary K. O’Brien to the Illinois Supreme Court.
On Tuesday, Nov. 8, unofficial election results indicated Rochford had defeated Republican former Lake County Sheriff Mark Curran in the state’s Second Judicial District.
According to the unofficial tallies posted Tuesday, Rochford had received about 54% of the vote in the mostly suburban counties that made up the Second Judicial District, including the counties of Lake, Kane, McHenry, DeKalb and Kendall.
Rochford declared victory, and Curran phoned Rochford to concede on Tuesday night.
And in the Third Judicial District, O’Brien held a lead over incumbent Republican Supreme Court Justice Michael J. Burke. According to unofficial tallies, O’Brien led with a little less than 51% of the vote.
The Third District includes the counties of DuPage, Will, Grundy, LaSalle, Kankakee, Bureau and Iroquois.
It was unclear how much of those tallies included votes cast by mail. Under Illinois law, election officials are required to count ballots received by mail up to 14 days after Election Day. Final vote totals will not be known until then.
O'Brien declared victory Wednesday morning, and said on Twitter that Burke had called her to concede.
With the wins, Democrats would hold a 5-2 majority on the state’s Supreme Court.
That achievement would also represent a vindication for a political gambit by the state’s Democratic leadership, who redrew the state’s judicial district boundaries for the first time since they were first created under the state’s current constitution in 1970.
Democrats publicly claimed the district boundaries were redrawn simply to account for changes in population over the past few decades.
Republicans and other observers, however, noted the boundaries gave Democrats a chance to not only hold their decades-long majority on the court, but also increase it to the judicial equivalence of a supermajority.
The boundary changes also came shortly after Republicans shocked the state by booting Democratic former Illinois Supreme Court Justice Thomas Kilbride from the court in a retention election in 2020. Observers noted that under the past judicial district boundaries, Republicans could have conceivably flipped the court’s majority for the first time in modern history, should they use heavy GOP majorities in the old Third District to put a Republican in that seat.
As of Nov. 8, it appears the Democrats had succeeded in their efforts to thwart the GOP’s attempt to secure a majority, instead giving Gov. JB Pritzker and the state’s progressive wing a lock on the court, potentially for decades to come.
Justices are elected for 10 year terms, and don’t face contested partisan races again. Instead, voters will be asked in 2032 whether they wish to retain the new Supreme Court justices, presuming the justices serve out their full terms and wish to remain on the court.
Justices David Overstreet and Lisa Holder White hold the Republicans’ only two seats on the court, from the downstate Fourth and Fifth Judicial Districts. Three Democrats – Chief Justice Mary Jane Theis and justices P. Scott Neville and Joy V. Cunningham – are serving on the court from the state’s First Judicial District, which only includes Cook County, the state’s most populous county.
The races for the state’s two open Supreme Court seats in the Second and Third districts were marked by vicious advertisements aimed at both sides.
Ads backing Rochford and O’Brien, for instance, asserted that Curran and Burke could unilaterally make abortion illegal in Illinois and arrest and jail women and doctors.
Ads backing Curran and Burke accused O’Brien, who is a former Democratic state lawmaker, and Rochford of being puppets of Democratic powerbrokers, notably including indicted former House Speaker and Illinois Democratic Party Chairman Michael J. Madigan.
The races also drew unprecedented spending on judicial races in Illinois, with millions of dollars flowing into the campaigns and to so-called independent expenditure committees set up for the express purpose of winning the Supreme Court contests. By some estimates, nearly $19 million was spent on the two races.
Pritzker, a billionaire, dumped hundreds of thousands of his personal funds into the Rochford and O’Brien campaigns.
All for Justice, a committee established by prominent Illinois trial lawyer Luke Casson, who is connected politically to Illinois State Senate President Don Harmon, raised millions of dollars from Harmon, a host of other prominent Illinois trial lawyers, labor unions, abortion providers, and other progressive organizations, to run many of the ads targeting Burke and Curran.
Meanwhile, the Republican candidates were backed by millions of dollars from the Citizens for Judicial Fairness independent expenditure committee, funded heavily by billionaire Ken Griffin. Formerly Illinois’ richest resident, Griffin departed the state for Florida earlier this year after his preferred candidate for governor, Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin, was defeated in the Republican primary by downstate farmer and State Sen. Darren Bailey.
Bailey also lost easily to Pritzker in the race for governor.
In announcing her win, O'Brien, who had earlier touted endorsements from fellow Democrats and progressive political groups, said: "This was a hard race, with a lot of outside interests who made it their mission to bring their political agenda to the courts."
She continued to tout her commitment "to bringing fairness and impartiality to the courts."