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John Zimmerman
Posted Sunday, November 12, 2006

Daily Herald

Guess who got the most votes, overall, in DuPage County on Tuesday? Your instincts might lead to you surmise it’s Judy Baar Topinka. That’s what you’d logically expect in a Republican stronghold like DuPage County.

And you would be wrong.

Topinka’s 127,810 votes weren’t enough to give her the title of top vote-getter.

So you say it’s Topinka’s running mate, DuPage County State’s Attorney Joe Birkett.

Perhaps. Birkett is a well-known, home-grown candidate who quite expectedly did very, very well in DuPage County in his unsuccessful bid for Illinois attorney general four years ago. Problem is, vote totals for the lieutenant governor candidates are not tallied separately.

So who did get the most votes in DuPage?

The person who defeated Birkett in 2002: Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan.

A Democrat got the most votes — 167,778 of them — in DuPage County on Tuesday.

Granted, voters knew little or nothing about Madigan’s Republican opponent Stewart Umholtz. And Madigan certainly didn’t suffer from lack of name recognition in her campaign.

Still, you would think Umholtz would have gotten more than 31 percent of the vote in DuPage County. In the 2002 elections, Kristine O'Rourke Cohn, also a lesser-known candidate — at least lesser known than her Democratic Party opponent for Illinois secretary of state, Jesse White — got 44 percent of the vote.

You say Topinka’s vote totals in DuPage would have been stronger in the absence of a third-party challenger that voters turned to in protest of their choices? But even if you give Green Party Rich Whitney’s 25,417 votes to Topinka, Madigan still comes out way ahead.

In fact, Topinka didn’t even finish second in the contest for top vote-getter. That honor went to Jesse White. He had 141,406 votes to GOP opponent Dan Rutherford’s 103,782.

The most popular candidates on Tuesday in DuPage, where the GOP has been around since the good Lord took his seventh day to rest, were both Democrats.

So what does this all mean?

Well, that Madigan and White are well liked and well known. That more Democrats are making their home in DuPage County. That the results might have been different if there were strong Republican challengers for statewide offices, a real problem these days for the state GOP.

Or that Democrats in DuPage County have some reason to cheer and have hope for the future in the wake of the Great Democratic Hope Tammy Duckworth losing to Peter Roskam.

I know one Democrat who has to have a smile on her face. Lisa Madigan. Especially if she has any serious thoughts about higher office. Like governor. It’s a pretty big deal, getting that much support in Republican DuPage County.

DuPage GOP leaders, on the other hand, might say don’t pay attention to those vote totals for Democrats for statewide office. Look, they’ll add, what we can do when there is a genuine threat to Republican dominance on the local level. The Democrats did everything they could to take the 6th Congressional District out of Republican hands. They fielded a pretty good candidate. They gave her lots of support. They gave her campaign lots of money. As far as I know, never before has a Democratic candidate for an office in DuPage County received this kind of backing from the national Democratic Party.

And Duckworth still lost. Not by much. But the bottom line is she lost. So did all Democratic candidates for DuPage County board and DuPage County Forest Preserve Commission.

Democrats will say Duckworth’s tiny margin of defeat is something to build on.

Republicans will say Duckworth’s loss is a knockout punch.

We’ll see in 2008.