The Cook County state’s attorney’s race pits a former prosecutor and judge against a former alderman who failed to win the office four years ago.
Eileen O’Neill Burke, the Democratic candidate, said her decades of experience as an assistant state’s attorney, law division judge and appellate court justice give her unique insight into how the criminal justice system works — and doesn’t work.
Her Republican opponent is former Ald. Bob Fioretti. He ran for the office as a Democrat in a failed bid to unseat State’s Attorney Kim Foxx during the 2020 primary. Fioretti finished fourth.
Fioretti swaps parties to run, endorsed by Rev. Jesse Jackson
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 said 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 gone 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 O’Neill Burke over her prosecution in the ‘90s of an 11-year-old Black boy who was later exonerated for the murder of an older white woman.
In large part due to that case, Fioretti 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.”
O’Neill Burke waved off Jackson’s endorsement, saying: “I respect the fact that they are old friends.”
O’Neill Burke’s struggle to court Black voters
While the former Rainbow PUSH Coalition head’s backing of Fioretti may seem odd, the endorsement also highlighted O’Neill 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, O’Neill Burke decisively lost Chicago’s majority Black wards on the South and West sides.
In endorsing Fioretti, Jackson wrote O’Neill 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 that said her “views on juvenile justice have evolved” — O’Neill 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.
How the presidential race could impact who wins state’s attorney seat
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 was 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.
By contrast, O’Neill Burke said she would be “enthusiastically” supporting Vice President Kamala Harris, as “the first woman president who was also a career prosecutor.”