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Politics

March 17 primary winners and losers

By CHARLES N. WHEELER III

Charles N. Wheeler III

The March 17 primary ballots were still being counted when the spin-meisters in the media professed to have discerned the epic forces at work in the election. According to this newly minted conventional wisdom, the voting revealed two profound currents coursing strongly through the electorate, one favoring women and the other opposing incumbents.

The instant analysis seemed a perfect fit for Carol Moseley Braun's upset win over U.S. Sen. Alan J. Dixon for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination. Buoyed by such tides of change, Braun was sure to be sworn in as the nation's first black woman U.S. senator; Republican hopeful Richard S. Williamson was merely an inconvenient delay to history's march.

Now that the election-night euphoria has passed, however, perhaps it would be wise to temper those first impressions. Consider, for example, two facts:

• Women lost most of the mixed-gender primary contests for Congress and for the Illinois General Assembly. There were five congressional, 10 Senate and 40 House races in which voters could choose from candidates whose numbers included at least one woman and one man. In 28 of those, a male candidate was the victor; female candidates claimed 27. Women challengers managed to oust three male incumbents (and one woman lawmaker), but men won 19 of 29 contests in which no incumbent was running. Women incumbents accounted for 13 of the female victories, while male officeholders won seven mixed-gender contests.

Almost breaking even is an achievement that should portend the new Illinois General Assembly next year will be more representative of the populace. Still, 49 percent does not a revolution signify.

• Incumbents won 77 percent of the congressional and legislative races in which they faced nonincumbents. Excluding seven contests in which sitting Democrats found themselves paired by the vicissitudes of redistricting, officeholders turned back challengers in 44 of 57 races.

Among the incumbent winners were four white lawmakers who won Democratic nominations from black majority legislative districts. Whites also won in three other African-American districts, in the process ousting two incumbent blacks. The results seemed to vindicate Democratic complaints that the GOP remap would cost minority seats by stretching their numbers too thin, but Republicans blamed greedy white Democratic ward bosses while leaders of the Harold Washington Party pledged to field black candidates in those districts in the November election.

Voters, meanwhile, will have another chance to vent their displeasure at incumbents in November, but when less than a quarter of the challengers can wrench nomination from a sitting lawmaker, it hardly seems that anti-incumbent fervor is sweeping the electorate.

But what of Braun's stunning victory over Dixon, unbeatable in 29 previous campaigns spanning more than four decades? While the image of Du Page matrons marching arm-in-arm with Chicago west side welfare mothers to send a black woman to the U.S. Senate would delight a Hollywood scriptwriter, election results suggest that's not quite the way it happened. According to unofficial returns, Braun, a former legislator who is now the Cook County recorder of deeds, won about 38 percent of the vote to Dixon's 35 percent. A third candidate, multimillionaire trial lawyer Albert F. Hofeld, took 27 percent.

Braun did garner crossover votes in the suburbs, and she ran well in Chicago's lakefront liberal bastions and downstate college towns. But she built her winning margin in her home turf, Chicago's black wards, where she annihilated Dixon. In the 19 city wards in which African Americans make up two-thirds or more of the population, Braun collected about 83 percent of the vote, piling up a 132,000-plus lead over the incumbent. Outside those city wards, however, Braun won the support of only 31 percent of Democratic voters as Dixon out-polled her by more than 89,000 votes. In seven Chicago wards where whites make up three-quarters or more of the population,

6/April 1992/Illinois Issues


for example, Braun barely hit the 20 percent mark in losing to Dixon by about 35,000 votes.

And in this Cinderella tale, as in the original, the heroine needed help. In Braun's case, the fairy godfather was Hofeld, who poured out some $4.3 million of his own money to finish dead last. Most of Hofeld's largesse went into television commercials trashing Dixon. The negative spots succeeded in convincing many Democratic voters to jettison the incumbent, but they failed to persuade most of them that Hofeld was a suitable replacement. Instead, Braun became their major beneficiary, picking up almost 60 percent of the non-Dixon vote.

The returns also suggest that Hofeld played the spoiler, holding down Dixon's totals in areas where Braun did poorly. In the seven white wards, for example, Hofeld took 30 percent of the vote, to Dixon's nearly 50 percent and Braun's 20 percent.

Hofeld also outdistanced Dixon by some 35,000 votes in the suburbs, but ran about 20,000 votes behind Braun there. Outside the Chicago area, Hofeld won 13 of the 96 downstate counties, but finished some 77,000 votes behind Dixon, while Braun trailed badly with only 20 percent.

The voting patterns suggest that Braun is anything but a sure bet for November. Her base in Chicago's black community is solid. Elsewhere, the key question is: Can she keep her crossover Republicans and attract conservative Democrats who voted for Dixon or Hofeld? Or will they find her legislative voting record too liberal?

Braun also might benefit from having Williamson as an opponent, rather than one of the GOP's top-of-the-line models, all of whom wimped out rather than face Dixon. In his first post-primary ventures, the Kenilworth attorney appeared far from polished; in fact, his stump style makes Adlai E. Stevenson III seem charismatic. More important, Williamson's campaign theme of "fundamental change" seems woefully inappropriate after March 17.

Even Prof. Harold Hill would have a tough time convincing voters that sending one more well-off, middle-aged, white male lawyer to the U.S. Senate was more radical than electing the first black woman.

Charles N. Wheeler III is a correspondent in the Springfield Bureau of the Chicago Sun-Times.

April 1992/Illinois Issues/7


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