A process for helping you vote better, whatever your choice

This Sunday, the Daily Herald will begin another cycle in an activity that has long been a staple of the newspaper’s election efforts, endorsements in contested elections for public office.

Time and various circumstances have had an impact on the number and type of races our Editorial Board examines, but we continue to believe that the hard work our team undertakes to study the candidates in our highest-priority campaigns offers a service that promotes thorough examination of the issues and the people wanting to influence them in government.

Some critics raise valid concerns about the audacity of presuming to tell people how to vote. I counter that the issue depends on how the activity is framed.

We are not telling you how to vote in the races where we endorse candidates. We are offering our conclusions about what most impresses us about the candidates we have studied. And that study is not insignificant. It includes watching and sometimes attending candidate debates, carefully reviewing policy statements and social media accounts, reading diverse accounts of their campaigns and meeting with candidates face-to-face to assess their qualifications and their ability to work effectively in the roles they are seeking.

To that point, it’s important to note that our objective is not to advance the objectives of one party or another, but to identify candidates who offer engaging views and promising potential to address issues that matter. This is especially true in the primary campaigns we are evaluating now. With the purpose of the primaries being to identify the candidates who will go on to seek election in the fall, voters throughout the suburbs confront a vast array of situations.

There are some seats featuring competition for the nomination in one party while the nominee in the other party is already determined because only one candidate is on the ballot. Meanwhile, there are some where both parties have competition and some where neither have it, and the diverse circumstances are sprinkled at every level on the ballot - from U.S. Senate and Congress, to state executive offices and legislative seats to county leaders and board members.

So, for instance, there will be cases in which we endorse a Republican for the party’s nominee for a position but offer no endorsement on the Democratic side. But the reason will not be that we favor Republicans; it will be that there was no competition on the Democrat side. Of course, the opposite situation will occur in certain other races where there is competition on the Democratic side but not the Republican. Be careful about what you derive from all such cases.

Aside from purely partisan concerns, it bears repeating that the purpose of our endorsements is not to promote certain candidates so much as to promote the thinking about all the candidates, hopefully enriching the community’s conversations about the races whether one agrees with the conclusions we express or not.

To that end, I hasten to add that invariably our editors encounter fields in which the strengths of two or more candidates are such that identifying a single winner is a humbling, imprecise task. In such cases, we often acknowledge the difficulties we face and then concisely describe the factors that led to our endorsement. Indeed, we invariably are encouraged to find many races with multiple highly engaged, strongly competent candidates willing to enter the fray and accept the immense demands of public service at every level. They cannot all win.

Thus, there will be many cases where exceptionally qualified individuals remain even though we have endorsed other exceptionally qualified individuals. Just as when the election smoke clears and only one winner is left standing, may other deserving challengers are left to reflect on their campaigns and consider the possibility of a next time.

Through it all, we strive to provide reasonable guidance in sorting through all the combinations and cases. We are not trying to tell you how to vote, but we do hope and believe that the process helps you vote better.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher. His book “To Nudge The World” has been named a Book of the Year by the Chicago Writers Association and is available at eckhartzpress.com.