LGBT Voters Help Put Quinn Over The Top

Chicago's LGBT voters played an important role in Gov. Pat Quinn's (D) surprising come-from-behind reelection win Nov. 2.

Quinn confounded pundits and pollsters, some of whom had him losing by as much as 13 points, in his defeat of conservative Republican state Sen. Bill Brady. Quinn won by about 19,000 votes and a look at voting patterns in Chicago's heavily gay North Side wards shows where many of those votes came from. In those wards Brady, who took hard-line positions against LGBT rights in the campaign and in his 17-year legislative career, badly trailed fellow Republicans such as Judy Baar Topinka and Dan Rutherford, who won their statewide campaigns.

In the Lake View-based 44th Ward, Topinka won just over 42 percent of the vote, while Brady got only 28 percent. In the Uptown/Buena Park-based 46th Ward, Topinka captured 32 percent of the votes, compared to Brady's anemic 19 percent. In the Edgewater-based 48th Ward, Topinka also won 32 percent, while Brady got only 17 percent. And in the Rogers Park-based 49th Ward, Topinka walked away with 25 percent of the votes, and Brady captured less than 13 percent.

The pattern was similar all over the North Side, meaning that Topinka, a Republican who, unlike Brady, has supported nondiscrimination laws and civil unions for gays and lesbians for years, won thousands of votes from voters who did not vote for Brady. And Rutherford, who defeated Democrat Robin Kelly in the race for Illinois Treasurer, also outpolled Brady by significant margins in those wards.

Rutherford, a longtime Republican state legislator, has taken far more moderate positions on LGBT issues during his career than Brady, supporting discrimination protections for LGBTs and telling LGBT advocates that he will vote for civil unions. Brady, on the other hand, has a history of sponsoring anti-LGBT legislation, including a proposed constitutional amendment to ban marriage equality, civil unions and domestic partnerships for gay couples that he filed just days after winning the Republican gubernatorial nomination in February.

"I know I sound like a broken record," said Equality Illinois Director of Public Policy Rick Garcia. "But again, it looks like the only two Republicans left standing statewide are the moderates, Judy Baar Topinka and Dan Rutherford."

The Quinn campaign capitalized on Brady's record on LGBT rights and other social issues such as abortion rights, which Brady also strongly opposes, and Quinn made a number of appearances at LGBT events to remind voters of the difference between his positions and Brady's. In contrast, Brady never once campaigned at an LGBT event in Chicago.

Equality Illinois, the state's leading LGBT advocacy group, also played a critical role. On election night, with most of the vote counted, Quinn held a narrow lead, less than 9,000 votes, over Brady, with some 20,000 absentee ballots still to be counted. But those ballots came in heavily for Quinn, almost doubling his lead in the days after the election.

That was no surprise to Equality Illinois CEO Bernard Cherkasov, who knew that the group's wildly successful Vote Naked Illinois campaign had distributed hundreds of thousands of absentee ballot applications in the six weeks leading up to the election.

"We distributed in Cook County alone more than 450,000 absentee ballot applications," Cherkasov said.

EI teamed up with Rock The Vote and Roosevelt University on Vote Naked Illinois, which featured catchy ads, including a web ad that attracted national attention. Beyond the ads, the effort benefited from a well organized network of volunteers put together by EI.

"I have no doubt that the effort Equality Illinois and our partners and volunteers undertook made the difference," Cherkasov said. "We're so proud of the impact we were able to have."

Equality Illinois and LGBT voters are hoping that effort pays off soon with passage of a civil unions bill that's pending in Springfield. Officials with another group, The Civil Rights Agenda, also said they made 65,000 contacts with LGBT voters to get out the vote.

Brady held off on conceding to Quinn for several days, but finally gave in Nov. 5, telling reporters, "After days of counting ballots and looking at potential outcomes, we came to the conclusion that Gov. Quinn won this race. He worked hard for it, and you can't take away his effort in this endeavor."

Brady's remarks came just minutes after he telephoned Quinn to congratulate him. Quinn emerged from his office at the Thompson Center downtown shortly after that for a press conference.

"Pollsters don't vote. The people do, and I'm sure glad of that," Quinn said. "They had me down 13 points. I never really believed that."

Quinn urged Republican and Democratic legislators to come together to work out solutions for the state's budget crisis and to continue to regain jobs that have been lost in the recession. Illinois has had the strongest job growth in the Midwest in recent months, and Quinn stressed that continued investment in education and infrastructure is key to maintaining and enhancing that job growth.

"My job is to put Illinois to work, and I want to do that everyday," Quinn said. "There are no such things as Democratic jobs or Republican jobs. They're Illinois jobs."

Quinn indicated he'd keep pushing reluctant legislators to pass a 1-percent state income tax increase, which he backed during the campaign, to help balance the budget.

"I think getting elected on Tuesday, despite the odds, shows people in the Legislature that I know where I'm going," Quinn said.

He also said Nov. 5 that he's already talked with U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood about getting $800 million in federal funding that was earmarked for Wisconsin to spend on building high-speed rail. Wisconsin put that project on hold last week after Republican Scott Walker won the governor's race there. Walker is a Tea Party conservative who is philosophically opposed to federal spending for high-speed rail. The federal money was already allocated to fully pay for completion of high-speed rail between Milwaukee and Madison, with plans to expand it eventually to Minneapolis. With Wisconsin's rejection, the money goes back to the federal government for spending on rail projects in other states. Quinn is a big advocate for creating high-speed rail links between Chicago and St. Louis and other places in Illinois.