As Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle is poised to win her fifth term, she eyes a successor
During her 2018 campaign, Toni Preckwinkle said her third term as Cook County Board president would be her last. She’s now on the verge of winning her fifth.
Preckwinkle, 79, faces only token opposition Nov. 3 from Libertarian Michael Murphy after trouncing downtown Ald. Brendan Reilly, her well-funded challenger, 69% to 31% in the March Democratic primary. If she serves another full four-year term, she will have led the county for two decades, second only to George Dunne, who held the job from 1969 to 1990.
She has worn the long tenure lightly. Asked at a recent news conference how she felt about the upcoming election, Preckwinkle gave a small chuckle. “I’m actually on the ballot,” she said, as if it were an afterthought. Asked why she is running again after saying she would quit after her third term, Preckwinkle told the Tribune, “The pandemic (in 2020 and 2021) kind of upended things.”
“Government at all levels continues to feel the impact of the pandemic and the economic catastrophe that followed. I’m hopeful that we’ll have gotten through that almost entirely by the time we’re at the end of this term and on a much better footing, both financially and in terms of how people feel about the world,” she said.
Preckwinkle told fellow Democrats in August 2025 she intends to serve her entire term, and previously said even if she wasn’t in office, she’d still want to be involved in some kind of public service.
“She’d be a great professor. She loves teaching. But I just think she loves government,” said longtime colleague John Daley, the chairman of the county board’s Finance Committee. Daley has held on to his board seat since 1992, citing a similar love of the game.
Preckwinkle won the board presidency after almost two decades representing Hyde Park on the Chicago City Council. She also has led the Cook County Democratic Party since 2018. Despite her lopsided loss in the 2019 Chicago mayoral race, she won reelection to the board in 2022 and helped expand the Democratic majority to all but one commissioner.
This year, she hopes to flip the board’s last Republican seat in the 17th district. Democratic Lyons Township Clerk Elyse Hoffenberg is facing off against Republican Elizabeth Doody Gorman, a former commissioner, to replace Sean Morrison, the board’s lone Republican, who is not running for reelection.
Murphy is not expected to mount a serious challenge in the board president’s race. He had less than $500 on hand at the start of October and won 6.4% of the vote for Cook County clerk in 2024 and 2.3% for county treasurer in 2022.
As board president, Preckwinkle corrals not only the 17-member board but also the county’s often fractious separately elected officials, who run their own offices but depend on the board for money. Balancing the budgets of the county’s vast court, health and property tax systems will likely require tough choices in the coming term.
The biggest threat is in Washington. Cook County Health accounts for about half of the county’s roughly $10 billion budget. An estimated 400,000 patients across the state are expected to lose coverage under the Medicaid work requirements and more frequent eligibility checks congressional Republicans passed and President Donald Trump signed into law last year, unless they are reversed or delayed.
The direct and ripple effects are expected to cost the health system hundreds of millions of dollars in the coming years. Next year alone, CCH expects to lose $138 million in patient revenue and shoulder more than $100 million in new charity care costs. That makes the battle for control of the U.S. House and Senate a matter of the system’s survival.
Preckwinkle has spent years avoiding major tax increases. The county’s base property tax levy hasn’t risen since the 1990s, and its sales tax rate has been flat since 2016. In 2017, the board quickly repealed her sweetened beverage tax after a public revolt. But she has hinted that taxpayers may have to pay more next year through higher taxes or fees.
“We cannot pretend this year’s approach will be enough forever,” Preckwinkle said when introducing her 2027 budget earlier this month, which closed a roughly $550 million shortfall with reserve dollars and various trims. “In the years ahead, we will need to consider additional revenue to preserve the health care safety net, public safety and other essential services our residents depend on. I believe residents deserve to hear from us now, not after the storm hits.”
Throughout the campaign, she often pointed to her record of straightening out county finances. After the 2016 sales tax hike, the proceeds of which went largely toward pensions, the retirement funding steadily improved. Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act helped the health system become largely self-sustaining while its care rankings improved.
The county was financially sound enough during the pandemic to hold off on emergency spending and gather community feedback on how to spend its $1 billion share of federal relief money. Its reserves grew so much that the board created special funds for disaster relief ($96 million) and equity and inclusion initiatives ($127 million), and to sustain programs launched with federal dollars once that money ran out ($158 million).
Now Preckwinkle is tapping some of those reserves to close the budget gap. The pressure comes from the Medicaid changes and from a costly legal loss to a coalition of transportation groups over how the county spent “lockbox” transportation dollars. The decision from a county circuit court judge at the start of this year meant roughly $250 million the county had been spending annually on public safety offices and others that enforce the “rules of the road” were ineligible costs. Budget officials are holding that money back pending an appeal.
The primary was Preckwinkle’s toughest race in years. Reilly attacked her in TV ads and on the debate stage over crime, her ties to former Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, and her “mismanagement” of the county’s bungled property tax system upgrade.
“Harold Washington always used to say that politics in Chicago’s a blood sport,” she said this week.
To counter Reilly’s prodigious fundraising and TV ad spending, Preckwinkle lined up endorsements and money from across the state’s Democratic establishment. Gov. JB Pritzker gave $150,000 in January and another $100,000 in February through his trust, and Illinois Senate President Don Harmon gave just over $103,000. Longtime ally SEIU gave $272,800 through its Illinois State Council PAC between the summer of 2025 and just before the primary, and other unions gave almost $300,000 combined. Progressive groups including Personal PAC, Equality Illinois, the immigrant rights organization ICIRR Action and the Sierra Club also contributed.
During the campaign and since, Preckwinkle has leaned on her progressive credentials, attacking Trump’s health policies, cuts to food assistance and the federal immigration crackdown. Last fall, she signed an executive order banning the use of county property for civil immigration enforcement. She has called for abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and she urged Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke to prosecute the federal agents involved in the killing of Silverio Villegas González and the shooting of Marimar Martinez.
State Sen. Robert Peters, a longtime Preckwinkle mentee and one of the more progressive members of the General Assembly, said he hopes Preckwinkle keeps her focus on pressing criminal justice reforms, increasing trust in government and building out her “unbelievable coaching tree,” which he argued includes former President Barack Obama, U.S. Senate nominee Juliana Stratton and Christian Mitchell, who is Pritzker’s current running mate.
In a sea of drama in Washington, at the Chicago City Council and school board, “what makes Cook County stand out and Toni stand out is that it’s just been stable, that even when there’s a blip, it’s relatively small compared to so many other places,” Peters said, in part because of Preckwinkle’s ability to navigate tension and bridge gaps between the party’s more moderate and leftist wings to get things done.
Peters said he learned how to be a “transformational incrementalist” watching her work. “She has a bigger picture and a lot of patience.”
After the primary, Preckwinkle took several weeks off, admitting later to reporters that she “kind of exhausted” herself and needed to say “no” to events more often. Still, she ran for and was reelected head of the party earlier this year.
“It was a really hectic campaign, then I decided to move afterwards,” she told reporters in April. “As a public servant, I always thought it was really critical to be as many places as you could and to be as supportive of many organizations as you possibly can, but sometimes that leads you to kind of grind yourself down.”
While she might be moving slower, Peters said Preckwinkle remains a workaholic. “An MVP athlete at 25 and 35 are very different people and need more recovery time, but who she is and the way she’s able to process and think through things is just still the same.”
Looking ahead, Preckwinkle said she is focused on finding someone willing to succeed her despite having to potentially “subject themselves to garbage” like the attack ads roiling Ohio’s U.S. Senate race.
“Who in their right mind would want to run?” she said.
Murphy, 33, an IT professional living in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, said voters are expressing “fatigue” with elected officials “seeking three or four or five terms.”
He’s likewise campaigning on alleviating property taxes, growing the county’s population, and opposing the growth of AI-fueled surveillance and data center construction.
“Things are always going to get more expensive, but we have to manage the shrinking population,” he said. “We have to have businesses here; we need to have residents here to pay property taxes, to pay the sales taxes. Without them, services are going to be hurting for even more money and the quality of services are going to have to go down.”
aquig@chicagotribune.com