Kim Foxx Cant Run Again Oponemt

by Kumar Ramanathan, Tom Ogorzalek, and Bianca Varlesi

One of the many features of Democrats' success in the 2020 ballot was the maintenance or strengthening of the party'due south dominance in urban areas. This dominance, yet, masks the ideological complexity of the party'due south metropolitan coalition. Because they combine so many dimensions into one ballot conclusion, the results of presidential elections lone cannot teach us much nigh the "big tent" of the Democratic Party base. To learn more, we demand to compare voters' back up for the summit of the ticket to their preferences on detail issues. The 2020 election in Melt County gives us the opportunity to make such a comparing. Downballot from the presidential election, voters had the opportunity to express their preferences on criminal justice reform through their vote for Melt County Country'due south Chaser, where incumbent Kim Foxx has run on a reform platform. They besides expressed their preferences on progressive tax in the "Fair Tax" plebiscite. On both criminal justice and fiscal redistribution, the coalition was fractured.

Foxx won re-ballot as Cook County Land'due south Attorney comfortably, defeating her Republican opponent Pat O'Brien by a 14.nine-bespeak margin. Her 54.1% share of the vote, however, lagged far behind Joe Biden's 74.3% vote share in Cook County. What's driving that twenty-point gap? We can dig into precinct-level election returns to analyze where this gap between Biden and Foxx emerged. The precinct returns show that the Biden-Foxx gap is widest in the majority-white neighborhoods on Chicago'southward N Side and in suburban Melt County.

Foxx initially ran as a challenger in 2016, every bit part of an emerging wave of "progressive prosecutors" who promised to use their offices to reduce mass incarceration and pursue criminal justice reforms. She won the 2016 Democratic master with 58.3% of the vote, upsetting incumbent Anita Alvarez. She and so cruised to victory in the November 2016 general election with 72.1% of the vote, nearly matching the 73.9% that Hillary Clinton received in the same ballot.

Subsequently four years of Foxx'due south tenure equally Land's Attorney, the 2020 election serves as a test of Cook County's ambition for a progressive prosecutor. Foxx won the March chief election comfortably against iii challengers, but her overall share of the vote dropped to 50.2%. In a precinct-level analysis comparing the two primary elections, we establish that Foxx retained overwhelmingly strong support in Black neighborhoods beyond the canton and moderate back up in most of the metropolis's Latino neighborhoods, but lost support in white neighborhoods past nearly 10 points.

In this November's general election, Foxx'south base of support was rooted in similar parts of the canton. Unlike 2016, however, many Democratic voters in areas where Foxx struggled in the principal were willing to defect from the party and vote for her Republican opponent Pat O'Brien. To examine these patterns more than closely, we calculated estimates of each precinct's racial demographics using Census information. Even though no indigenous or racial group makes up a majority of Cook County residents, because of segregation virtually half of precincts have ane racial group comprising over 75% of their population. Comparing these dissimilar places lets us see how segregated communities made choices beyond their election. The figure below compares the vote share received by Biden, Foxx, and the Fair Taxation referendum in precincts with a majority Blackness, Latino, or white population.

For details on estimation procedures for precinct racial demographics and plotting smoothed averages, please see footnotes 2-four here.

In the majority-Blackness neighborhoods on the West and South Sides and southern suburbs, Foxx retained sky-high support and trailed only a few percentage points behind Biden. In bulk-Latino neighborhoods, Foxx consistently won a majority just trailed well-nigh 15 points behind Biden. Foxx'due south losses were full-bodied in white-bulk neighborhoods, where she trailed Biden by around 25 points.

The defection of Democrats in white neighborhoods is stark on Chicago's Due north Side and its flush suburbs. Across the city'south Due north Side, Biden won about 80% to 85% of the vote but in white-majority precincts, Foxx simply won most 50% to 55%—a gap of well-nigh 30 points. In suburban Cook Canton, the drop-off from Biden to Foxx is pronounced in the lakefront areas n of the metropolis. In many other white-majority suburbs, the driblet-off is smaller considering Biden'south performance was less dominant, coming closer to the lower levels of support Foxx garnered here.

Nosotros can likewise meet this pattern of downballot defection in the plebiscite on the Fair Taxation, which would have replaced the country'south flat revenue enhancement rate with a progressive tax with college rates on those with higher incomes. While the Fair Tax was broadly supported by Democratic Political party officials and was a top priority of Governor J.B. Pritzker, the referendum dramatically underperformed Joe Biden on the ballot. This downballot defection, once once again, was full-bodied in segregated white neighborhoods. In the white-bulk precincts, the Fair Tax trailed Biden by 15 points, while it just trailed by five to 10 in Black and Latino-majority precincts.

These results suggest that the increasingly Democratic metropolitan coalition is a precarious one when it comes to certain key bug. The gap between national partisanship and support for Foxx was very loftier in the lakefront suburbs north of the city, which is an expanse of farthermost affluence. Foxx did no meliorate there than in more working-class predominantly white suburban precincts where voters were more likely to choose Trump over Biden likewise. By dissimilarity, while Biden's support is stronger in more than affluent white suburban precincts, support for progressive revenue enhancement was much lower there.

Foxx's position is different from some of the other high-profile progressive prosecutors in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Brooklyn, where the primal city and county boundaries are the same. Suburbs in those places do not have a say in the primal city'due south efforts at reform. Conversely, about half of the Cook County electorate lives in suburban communities where large-urban center challenges of public safety and police misconduct are far less firsthand (but perhaps no less salient due to a shared local news media market). While affluent suburbanites may have been repelled by Trump, on issues such as criminal justice and tax, it is not clear that they are all comfortable with actual policy changes meant to address ongoing racial injustices.

Beyond foreshadowing standing local debates nearly how to manage public condom and law enforcement in the nation's second-largest county, these results highlight the fragility of the national Democratic coalition: while they appear to exist more and more than supportive of Democratic candidates, they may be far less supportive of the actual economic and ceremonious rights policies that are the modern party'due south biggest difference with the GOP.

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Source: https://sites.northwestern.edu/chicagodemocracy/2021/01/31/kim-foxx-democratic-defection-2020/