Editorial: A timely courtroom rebuke for dirty campaigning

Chicago Tribune

2 days ago

Unflattering attacks are common in politics — but a court just ruled that one campaign went too far.
Cook County Commissioner Toni Preckwinkle's 4th Ward Democratic Organization and Lamont Robinson's aldermanic campaign have been ordered to pay $1.475 million in punitive damages over a series of attack ads sent during Robinson's 2023 race against Ebony Lucas for the City Council. (In a statement, the 4th Ward Democratic Organization and the Lamont Robinson for Alderman Corp called the verdict an 'unprecedented misapplication of the law' and said they are confident it will be reversed on appeal.)
Among other smears, the mailers labeled Lucas a 'bad landlord' who 'can't manage her own business' — a collection of accusations a jury deemed defamatory. The mailers also claimed Lucas 'doesn't care about doing the right thing,' a particularly broad and insulting claim.
Preckwinkle previously defended the mailers, saying, 'They were carefully footnoted, so lots of luck to her.'
In campaign mailers, the bold print does the damage — not the fine print. Any political operative knows that. Voters see the headlines, not the citations.
We empathize with Lucas and all candidates who face baseless, harmful personal attacks as a consequence of running for office. As Lucas told the Tribune, she is a wife and mom of three. Her kids saw these mailers. Their friends and neighbors and teachers saw these mailers.
Perhaps this can be a turning point, because our political culture certainly needs one.
Political ads that spread hateful, demeaning rhetoric attack people's humanity and do nothing but fuel people's worst impulses when it comes to how they view anyone with whom they disagree.
You can have a different point of view from someone on public policy and still treat them with respect. It's unfortunate we even need to point that out.
Partisanship has become so toxic that people are cutting off family members, shunning neighbors, and labeling political opponents as either stupid or evil. We've seen that ugliness on the national level — and it's infecting local elections, too.
We all felt it leading up to November 2024's presidential election. During that cycle, mailers for the Chicago school board races went negative, with candidates not backed by the Chicago Teachers Union hit with ads calling them 'right wing' and 'MAGA,' inaccurately tying many candidates to political beliefs and causes they in no way espouse. Board member Ellen Rosenfeld was one of the candidates who dealt with those ads. She's a Democrat and her husband is the 47th Ward Democratic committeeman.
But this animosity and culture of distrust and disrespect lingered into 2025. We wrote about this phenomenon during endorsement season for local elections, as exemplified in a bitter mayoral race in Orland Park between two former neighbors.
Because of the personal nature of local politics, it usually breeds a healthy dose of decorum and respect. Not so in this race, during which former Mayor Keith Pekau was attacked with ads calling him and his wife racist.
'Dirty politics makes bad policy,' Lucas wrote in a Facebook post after the ruling. 'When voters are inundated with false information about candidates, we lose out on electing the best and most qualified.'
We agree. In addition to spreading falsehoods and increasing vitriol, hateful campaigning is one of the reasons people check out of politics altogether, a problem that weakens our political system.
We hope the Lucas decision has a chilling effect on the kind of nasty, ad hominem attack ads that all too often end up in our mailboxes and on our TVs, finding their way into our kids' hands and ruining our enthusiasm for our representative democracy. Voters deserve campaigns that respect truth and dignity, not ones that poison the well of public trust.