Nearly eight years after Kim Foxx took office vowing to “rebuild a broken criminal justice system” as Cook County state’s attorney, the Democratic primary that will likely decide her successor was still too close to call Wednesday morning as retired Appellate Justice Eileen O’Neill Burke held a slim lead over former prosecutor and government official Clayton Harris III.

On Tuesday night as election results came in, O’Neill Burke sounded an upbeat tone but stopped short of declaring victory.

“We are cautiously optimistic, but we have to make sure all the votes are counted,” O’Neill Burke told supporters late Tuesday at her campaign party in River North. “But I know that we can agree that this has been a hard-fought campaign.”

Just minutes later, Harris greeted his backers with a similar message.

“Everybody here in Cook County, all of our communities matter,” he told the crowd of dozens at his campaign party. “So we’re going to wait and we’re going to count all the votes.”

After the polls closed, Chicago Board of Elections spokesman Max Bever said 109,975 mail-in ballots remained outstanding. All of those will not be returned, some will not be Democratic primary ballots and those that are Democratic ballots may not have votes cast in the state’s attorneys race. Bever expects most of the mail-in ballots to come back by Friday, though the results won’t be official for weeks.

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who also heads the county’s Democratic Party that backed Harris, said late Tuesday that she is hopeful votes “will swing his way,” claiming votes yet to be counted are in precincts that are likely to be strong for Harris and that mail-in ballots could end up being the deciding factor.

“There’s a lot at stake in this race,” she said.

City election numbers Wednesday morning showed Harris with a 51% to 49% lead over O’Neill Burke — about 6,000 votes — while Cook County suburban numbers showed Burke had amassed about 15,500 more votes in the suburbs as she lead there 54% to 46%.

O’Neill Burke’s tight lead followed Foxx’s two terms in which she helped lead the national prosecutorial reform movement and was praised by some for revamping the office’s procedures on alleged police misconduct and wrongful convictions but was frequently hammered by critics for being too soft on defendants. Throughout the evening, Harris began picking up Chicago voters.

The race for the county’s next top prosecutor was in many ways a referendum on Foxx, a Preckwinkle protégé who rode into office on a wave of discontent following Laquan McDonald’s murder by a Chicago police officer.

Tuesday’s winner will have a major advantage in the November general election in heavily Democratic Cook County. The Democratic nominee will face former Chicago alderman and attorney Bob Fioretti, who ran for state’s attorney previously as a Democrat but this year is running as a Republican, and Libertarian Andrew Charles Kopinski. Cook County has not elected a Republican to the office since 1992.

During the campaign, Harris leaned on his own experience as a Black man raising a family on the city’s South Side, as well as his management skills from years in government, lobbying, and as an instructor on race and policing at the University of Chicago.

On the trail, he described a dual fear of gun and gang violence but also being profiled by police and told voters he would bring that insight and balance to the office. Over the weekend while campaigning, he told campaign volunteers that the state’s attorney could prosecute violent criminals without unilaterally “rounding up Black and brown bodies.”

The next state’s attorney, he said, had to change the perception of how aggressively the office has and will prosecute cases so “that people know that we take crime seriously, that we’re not living in a lawless society.”

But O’Neill Burke leaned on a theme of prosecuting the county’s most dangerous defendants much more forcefully. She pledged that those arrested with an assault weapon or accused of threatening anyone with a weapon or involved in violent crime would be held without bond “each and every time,” while also underscoring that she had more experience in the criminal justice system than her opponent.

“I know how the justice system works,” she told the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board in February. “Mr. Harris is a lovely man, but he hasn’t been in a courtroom for 30 years.”

Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza, who endorsed O’Neill Burke, said at her campaign party, “when it comes to people doing carjackings that go with zero accountability or gun violence with zero accountability, I want that to stop.”

At Harris’ election night gathering, state Sen. Robert Peters described the candidate as energetic, collaborative and “almost too smart” and said Harris would take a targeted approach to tackling crime, not a “broad brush” that could send Chicago back to failed tough-on-crime policies of past decades.

Big fundraising advantage

Though Harris had the backing of the Cook County Democratic Party and the Chicago Teachers’ Union, O’Neill Burke had support from other unions, some top local lawyers and arrived on Election Day with a significantly sizable fundraising advantage over Harris. She reported raising nearly $3 million since the start of the year, more than three times what Harris raised during the same period.

With the help of her husband, Ice Miller attorney John Burke, O’Neill broke the campaign fundraising caps, which allowed unlimited contributions to flow into both campaigns in the race’s final weeks.

Several wealthy Chicagoans — including a group who gave to a mix of more centrist Democrats as well as conservative Republicans — made six-figure donations to O’Neill Burke. She was able to fund an aggressive mail and TV campaign to paint Harris as anti-union and having ties to those opposed to abortion rights, charges he denied.

Other races

Cook County voters also fanned out to the polls Tuesday to decide the race for Circuit Court Clerk, Board of Review, and, on the West Side and some western suburbs, to fill the seat on the Cook County Board vacated by Brandon Johnson when he was elected Chicago’s mayor.

Incumbent Circuit Court Clerk Iris Martinez, meanwhile, lost her bid for a second term to Water Reclamation District Commissioner Mariyana Spyropoulos, according to the Associated Press. Martinez and Preckwinkle have had a terse relationship going back years and the county Democratic Party backed Spyropoulos, who largely self-funded her campaign.

In the normally low-key race for the board that hears property tax appeals, 20-year incumbent commissioner Larry Rogers led upstart challenger Larecia Tucker. Her bid received a boost thanks to more than $750,000 in campaign contributions from Assessor Fritz Kaegi.