the Democratic Party has a racism problem

 Sen. Heather Steans (D-Chicago) announced she would resign from her seat in the Illinois Senate today (January 19, 2021). The district is mostly in Chicago with a small piece of Evanston. In accordance with Illinois law, the Democratic Party committee persons from that state senate district will convene and cast a weighted vote for Steans' replacement.

Alex Nitkin did the work to calculate the weighted vote of each Democratic Party committee person.

Summarized:

Ward/township	Committee Person	Percentage of vote in Legislative District 7
48	Harry Osterman	27.00%
40	Maggie O'Keefe	23.20%
49	Kelly Cassidy	22%
47	Paul Rosenfeld	14.50%
46	Sean Tenner	10.30%
Evanston	Eamon Kelly	1.60%
	Ram Villivalam	0.80%
50	Deb Silverstein	0.40%
33	Iris Martinez	0.30%

Now I'm going to include the demographics of the district:

Illinois Senate districts are two adjacent House districts. To combine those numbers:

District	Total population	White VAP %	Black VAP %	Asian VAP%	Hispanic VAP%
7	217,468	52.99	16.69	12.1	16.69

"VAP" = "voting age population, so the shorties and crumb catchers are removed for the the arithmetic.

To replace a state senator where the district is 53% white (by the 2010 Census), the weighted vote goes to committee persons who are 99% white. And to the extent Clerk of the Court Martinez and Sen. Villivalam will be at the table... they were only elected in March, 2020. The Democratic Party is much more favorable to advancing the candidacies of People of Color when they can be used to knock off or push out progressives and the Left, but... that's another blog entry.

And I'm going to point out that the 16.7% Black, 12.1% Asian and 16.7% Hispanic numbers understate the % of the Dem voters in the district.

There are some misguided... oh, it's my blog, I won't mince words... there are Republican voters, racists. They aren't a huge number, but they ain't insignificant. They are largely white. So, once Republican voters are removed from the pool, the percent of white people within those who vote Dem in general elections is problem under 50%.

(I could crunch the numbers to get a better idea, but the argument doesn't ride on the specific amounts.)

So, perhaps someone who feels loyalty to the Democratic Party can explain why, in a district where People of Color provide the votes in the general election why white people get to decide with minimal input who the replacement state senator is.

BTW, fixing the process isn't some "far out there" magic.

The Democratic Party is designed for political insiders to hand off elected positions from one generation of political insiders to the next generation of political insiders.