Dan Proft, a consultant to Republican Cook County Board presidential candidate Tony Peraica, tries to answer the question: “In hindsight, do you think it was a good idea to lead your supporters in a march on the county building in the wee hours of the morning on Nov. 8?”
Remember the context. The election literally hung in the balance.
For more than three hours, we had no update of the suburban Cook County vote total. When Peraica and his supporters left the Hotel Intercontinental, only 48 percent of suburban Cook County precincts had reported with Peraica leading in suburban Cook by a margin of approximately 62 percent to 38 percent.
Peraica’s numbers in the city were holding at 31 percent of the vote and, as we said repeatedly, anything over 30 percent of the vote in the city gave Peraica a real shot at victory. He needed to pull in the high 60 percentiles in suburban Cook (depending on turnout) and we were being told at the time by suburban Republican township committeemen that some of our key townships, like Palatine Township, had not yet reported.
The election outcome was clearly in doubt and the Stroger camp knew the same thing we did.
That may or may not have justified serious concern, but Proft never comes out and says exactly why the absurd middle of the night political theater was the right thing to do, particularly since there were allegations that some of Peraica’s stormers may have broken seals on boxes containing ballot data once they got there.
He finishes with this:
We ultimately lost the race not because of what happened on Tuesday evening but because we were not able to secure the margin of victory we needed in suburban Cook County. The massacre of the GOP statewide candidates and a few key legislative candidates in northwest Cook County negatively impacted Peraica just enough to make Stroger the victor.
Peraica lost by about 100,000 votes.