Chicagoist's "Top 10 of 2010:" #3 - Election 2010
By Chuck Sudo in News on Dec 29, 2010 8:00PM
If Pat Quinn campaigned through the primary and general election with the urgency and tenacity he displayed in the gubernatorial campaign’s final weeks, he might have beaten Bill Brady by a wider margin than he did. The Senate campaign, meanwhile, was distilled to one issue: who did voters trust more? Did they trust the congressman who embellished his military record? Or the Golden Boy who oversaw a bank that failed and may have made loans to alleged mobsters? Ultimately, voters chose the former.
Voters went into the general election splitting their ballots: voting Quinn for Governor and Kirk for Senate. Scott Lee Cohen also had a hand in taking votes away from Brady in the governor campaign with a late-hour third-party run organized after he won the Dem nomination for Lieutenant Governor, from the ticket when news of his past history surfaced.
Nationally, the anti-incumbent fever that spread across the nation led to a sea change in the House of Representatives, with Illinois’ congressional delegation becoming deep red. But don’t call it a “tsunami.”
Then there was Joe Berrios, who, despite not being endorsed by a single newspaper, easily won election as County Assessor over Forrest Claypool, the Charlie Brown of Cook County politics. Berrios went ahead and started his tenure as Assessor by hiring his son and sister to the office.