It’s been nearly three decades since Cook County voters elected a Republican to lead the state’s attorney’s office, but Democratic candidate Eileen O’Neill Burke says she’s running like the underdog in the race.
“I am running like I am losing,” she told the Sun-Times in a recent interview. “We are out in every community every single day. We’re working long days.”
Burke is a former prosecutor, law division judge and appellate court justice who says her decades of experience in the courts give her unique insight into how the criminal justice system works — and doesn’t work.
Former Ald. Bob Fioretti is challenging her this year as the Republican candidate after last running for the office as a Democrat in a failed bid to unseat progressive State’s Attorney Kim Foxx during the 2020 primary. Fioretti finished fourth overall.
A private defense attorney twice elected to represent Chicago’s 2nd Ward, Fioretti has since unsuccessfully run for several other offices, including mayor and Cook County board president.
In switching to the Republican ticket, Fioretti says he believes he’ll be propelled by voters who also feel left behind by the Democratic Party and want to move away from Foxx’s progressive policies.
“The Democratic Party has left me, as it has left hundreds if not thousands of people in Cook County. They’ve got too far in terms of their approach,” Fioretti said.
But while Fioretti promises he’d be tough on criminals, he has also burnished his image as a former civil rights attorney — even hitting Burke over her prosecution in the ‘90s of an 11-year-old Black boy who was later exonerated for the murder of a elderly white woman.
In large part due to that case, Fioretti recently picked up a big endorsement from the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who urged otherwise Democratic voters — particularly Black voters — to split their ballot this year and vote for the Republican.
“We need Bob Fioretti as Cook County State’s Attorney,” Jackson wrote in his endorsement. “This is not about party labels. This is about electing our community’s best State’s Attorney, who will temper justice with mercy.”
In an interview, Burke waved off Jackson’s endorsement, saying “I respect the fact that they are old friends.” But while the former Rainbow Push Coalition head’s backing of Fioretti may seem odd, the endorsement also highlights Burke’s struggle to find support in the city’s majority black wards.
Winning a bruising primary battle against university lecturer Clayton Harris III by only the narrowest of margins, Burke decisively lost Chicago’s majority Black wards on the South and West sides.
In endorsing Fioretti, Jackson wrote Burke “railroaded an eleven-year-old African-American boy with a coerced confession she knew or should have known was false. During the trial, she called this innocent child, ‘A whole new breed of criminal.’ To our community, this racist statement is disqualifying.”
Despite having had 10 months since that issue was first raised during the primary — at which time she issued a statement saying that said her “views on juvenile justice have evolved” — Burke has no interest in addressing it further.
“I’ve already said anything I want to say about that case,” she told the Sun-Times.
Voter turnout was low in the primary in majority Black wards, an analysis by WBEZ found. Had it been slightly higher, Harris could have easily won.
With former President Donald Trump on the ballot again in November, it could bring a surge in both Republican and Democratic voters to the poll, as it did during the 2020 election.
Asked if she was concerned that she could lose to Fioretti in the same wards that she lost to Harris, O’Neill Burke replied “No, I’m not concerned about that at all.”
Still, Fioretti appears to know that sharing a party with Trump, who remains deeply unpopular in Cook County, is an albatross on this campaign.
Asked if he had voted for Trump previously and whether he would support the former president this year, Fioretti repeatedly evaded answering the question.
“I support the Republican Party and the Republican ticket,” he said, but later added “I’ve had split tickets my whole life.”
Fioretti is also at risk of seeing his votes diluted by Libertarian candidate Andrew Charles Kopinski’s presence on the ballot, whose views largely either align with or are to the right of Fioretti.
Alternatively, Burke said she would be “enthusiastically” supporting Vice President Kamala Harris, as “the first woman president who was also a career prosecutor.”
While the issues of the presidential race can seem far removed from the daily minutiae of the county’s criminal court system, who wins could have significant impact on local issues.
Sensing the importance of the abortion issue this election, Burke has made establishing a “choice protection unit” a centerpiece of her campaign.
Illinois is among the most progressive states on the right to an abortion and it has seen an huge increase in people traveling from state’s to obtain medical care from surrounding states where the procedure has been banned or severely restricted.
Burke said the unit would aggressively defend the Cook County health system in lawsuits that could seek to target abortion services and said they would prosecute people who try to interfere with a woman seeking abortion services by charging them with everything from noise violations to stalking.
Fioretti struggled to answer questions about the issue. Asked if he was pro-choice, Fioretti paused for several seconds before saying “it wasn’t an issue in this race.” He declined repeatedly to say his position, saying instead that “abortion is legal and it’s never gonna change in this state.”
Immigration is another issue that could have significant local impact if Trump is elected again. The former president has promised to conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” He has also threatened to withhold federal funding from sanctuary cities.
Chicago, Cook County and Illinois have all passed similar provisions that protect undocumented immigrants. The county, for example, does not alert the federal government when a noncitizen is processed through the court system.
If elected, Fioretti said he disagreed with that policy and would cooperate with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Fioretti says his own family entered the county “through a legal route.”
In an interview, O’Neill Burke said it was an issue between the sheriff’s office and federal government and said she “would stay in her lane on that.” The campaign later clarified that “She supports and would of course uphold local laws that make Chicago a sanctuary city, and would not support Trump’s expanded deportation plan.”
Both candidates say they want to make gun crime a priority in their administrations, with O’Neill Burke calling it the most important issue facing the office.
She had cited the state’s new assault weapons ban as an important tool in her approach, despite it facing constitutional challenges and a lack of evidence that it is even being enforced by authorities in Illinois.
A year into the state’s landmark pretrial criminal justice reforms, Fioretti has slightly softened his criticism of the SAFE-T Act, which made Illinois the first state in the nation to eliminate cash bail.
Under the reforms, prosecutors must first file a petition to hold someone in custody pending trial and present evidence they are a safety or flight risk before a judge can order them detained.
Fioretti said he supports changes to the law that would let a judge act independently to detain someone. Burke said she supported the act as written.
“If we do our jobs right as state’s attorneys, the SAFE-T Act is an excellent tool, so we’re gonna make sure we do our jobs right,” she said.
But both candidates are running in a sprint toward the ideological center and walking a line that they hope will have wide appeal without alienating their bases and still acknowledges their predecessor’s success in two elections on an unabashedly progressive platform.
For Burke that has meant speaking in tough-on-crime language that still embracing many of Foxx’s policies, including her commitment to expanding restorative justice practices in Cook County.
Fioretti, likewise, says that unlike Foxx he’ll “support the police,” while also claiming that “a lot of” people who have been exonerated “have come to support me.” Foxx has made reviewing “wrongful conviction” cases a priority of her administration.