Cook County Democrats recaptured the sheriff`s office in Tuesday`s election and retained the County Board presidency, but Republican Jack O`Malley won a big victory in the race for state`s attorney.
There was little good news in the results for the Harold Washington Party, which had targeted five other county Democrats for defeat but saw only one of them, Cecil Partee, actually go down.
However, O`Malley`s victory over Partee was so overwhelming that he would have won even if Washington Party candidate Janice Robinson had not been on the ballot.
Surviving the splintering effort of the Washington Party were Democrat Richard Phelan, a Winnetka attorney, who handily won the County Board presidency, and Chicago Alderman Michael Sheahan, who soundly defeated Sheriff James O`Grady.
Others who triumphed despite the Washington Party challenge were Cook County Assessor Thomas Hynes and Board of (tax) Appeals member Wilson Frost.
The Washington Party also failed to win any of the 10 County Board seats it had contested in Chicago. Democrats swept to victory in that race.
With nearly all of the vote counted countywide, these were the results of the major races:
– In the race for Cook County Board president, with 90 percent of the vote counted, Phelan had racked up a 56 percent majority in downing his Republican challenger, State Sen. Aldo DeAngelis, and Washington Party candidate Barbara Norman. In doing so, Phelan kept control of the office for the Democrats, succeeding George Dunne, who has been board president for the last 21 years.
In remarks to reporters following his victory statement, Phelan pledged to serve a full, four-year term, but refused to comment on his political ambitions beyond that. He also indicated that, among his first moves, there would be changes at Cook County Hospital, which had been a major focus of his campaign. However, he declined to be more specific.
Phelan also won a suburban seat on the 17-member County Board, only the second Democrat to win a suburban seat there in the last half century. He needed to win a seat on the board to be able to cast a vote in board decisions.
DeAngelis, who lives in Olympia Fields, also won a suburban board seat, but said during the campaign that, if he didn`t win the presidency, he probably would resign the board seat and return to the state senate, where he has been an assistant GOP minority leader for the last decade.
DeAngelis said the election might have changed if he listened to advice
”to come out harder, come out stronger and spend more money. We faced an uphill fight after the primary election. We were not prepared to spend the kind of money to get our message across. But I am what I am. And it`s not worth changing now.”
– In the contest for sheriff, Sheahan, a Chicago alderman since 1979, won 56 percent of the vote in beating O`Grady and Washington Party candidate Tommy Brewer.
”Help is on the way,” Sheahan said in his acceptance speech, referring to rising problems with suburban crime, gangs and drugs.
At a press conference in his Bismarck Hotel suite following his acceptance speech, Sheahan, from the Southwest Side 19th Ward, pledged to depoliticize the sheriff`s office and said he would work to alleviate jail overcrowding and suburban crime and would review procedures in releasing jail inmates on personal recognizance bonds. He also said he would form a gang unit and decentralize the sheriff`s police and cut the size of beats.
O`Grady campaign spokesman Larry Horist blamed the incumbent`s defeat on the suburban vote. ”We did not expect to lose in the suburbs,” he said.
He added that O`Grady failed to break the ”perception of corruption” in the sheriff`s office. ”We couldn`t break the public mindset, the allegations that seemed to stick,” he said.
– In the state`s attorney`s race, O`Malley, a 39-year-old former Chicago police officer, won the two-year term remaining from that of Richard Daley. Partee had been appointed to succeed Daley last year after Daley was elected Chicago`s mayor. O`Malley won with 54 percent of the vote.
In conceding defeat, a saddened Partee said: ”We not only faced a very well-financed Republican opponent, but we also encountered a third party which took away the base of my support from my own community”-a reference to the all-black Washington Party slate.
Striking a bitter note, Partee continued: ”It`s ironic, however, that after this point in my life and campaign in government, I would have this kind of end, growing out of activities of persons who did not expect to win, but expected to punish someone else. . . . I think it`s unfortunate.”
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Partee, 69, a former Chicago city treasurer, had said before the election that he would retire from political life if defeated.
O`Malley, after reeling off a long list of thank-yous to his relatives and giving his wife, Terry, a long kiss, said: ”I recognize the enormous responsibility the voters of Cook County have placed in me. With the help of the hundreds of fine assistant state`s attorneys, I will be up to the task.” ”There will be very difficult decisions to make in the next two years, but we can work together to make the county a safer place.”
Other county winners included Assessor Hynes and Treasurer Edward Rosewell, both incumbents, and Chicago Ald. David Orr (49th), who will succeed Democrat Stanley Kusper as county clerk.
Not even the Washington Party`s titular head, former Judge R. Eugene Pincham, was able to win a seat on the County Board.
Democrats won all 10 city seats on the County Board. The winners were Jerry ”Iceman” Butler; John Stroger; Ted Lechowicz, whom Phelan defeated in the March primary election; Maria Pappas; Danny Davis; Bobbie Steele; Charles Bernardini; Irene Hernandez; Frank Damato and Marco Domico.
Suburban seats on the board went to Phelan, DeAngelis, Mary McDonald, Carl Hansen, Richard Siebel, Herbert Schumann and Allan Carr.
Voter turnout was meager-53 percent in Chicago, an all-time low there for a non-presidential election, and between 52 and 55 percent in the suburbs, according to election officials. Turnout in the black wards of Chicago was even lower.
Failing to materialize were the long lines of voters and election-day chaos many had predicted as a result of confusing ballot procedures put into effect to accommodate the court-ordered reinstatement of the Washington Party. The election was seen as a critical test of the Washington Party`s ability to muster sufficient support among black and other voters in Chicago to end the Democratic stranglehold on the city`s black wards and make the Washington Party a force to be reckoned with in the 1991 mayoral and aldermanic elections.
Robert E. Pincham Jr. said: ”I don`t think there was much we could have done differently given the extraordinary effort by the Democratic Party to eliminate competition. We aren`t going to lay down and cry about it. The people won`t let us go away. We`re going to be here for many, many, many elections.”
No Washington Party candidate took more than 13 percent of the vote countywide. And political observers cited the relatively low turnout in black wards as evidence that the Washington Party had failed to energize the black community.
Phelan, an attorney who founded the law firm of Phelan Pope & John 16 years ago, came out of almost nowhere to win a four-way slugfest in March`s primary election for the Democratic nomination for the board presidency.
In the primary, he spent $2 million, chiefly on a media campaign to build name recognition and to create for himself an image of a reformer who would shake up a county government on the brink of disaster.