Where, oh where, will Harold go now; where, oh where, will she be?

Perhaps it’s evidence that I don’t know everything; I was amongst those who thought there was a chance that Republican partisans might be able to band together with enough votes for one statewide victory – that of Erika Harold to be Illinois attorney general.

HAROLD: She didn't even win her home county

Harold spewed her share of rhetoric about having one Republican constitutional officer to serve as a watchdog, of sorts, over all the Democrats who won all the other offices.

INSTEAD, HAROLD WENT down to defeat just like all her other colleagues. It seems that being of the same political party as Bruce Rauner and Donald Trump was just too much to overcome.

Which now puts her in the category of political people whom we can speculate on for their future.

The one-time Miss Illinois who represented our state, and won, at the 2003 Miss America Pageant, ultimately went on to law school and has often expressed political aspirations of her own. Yet she’s never been successful in actually winning electoral office.

Election Day 2018 is the closest she ever came to victory – taking 43 percent of the vote to 54 percent for Kwame Raoul; the state senator from Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood who now will serve as state government’s legal counsel.

Lar Daly used the flag imagery to tout his campaigns, ...

IS THIS DEFEAT enough to kill off the 38-year-old’s political aspirations? Will she run again? Will she be credible in future campaigns? Or is she destined to become the fringe nut, so to speak, of Illinois politics?

A perpetual name on the ballot, something along the lines of Lar “America First” Daly or Ray “Spanky the Clown” Wardingly. Perhaps Harold could play off her Miss America persona of two decades ago while campaigning for office and trying to spread the word on her personal issues of interest – while going down to defeat.

Not that I seriously expect to see a sash & tiara-wearing candidate in the future. That would be just a tad ridiculous.

… here's hoping Erika doesn't dig up this old Miss America costume

But it has me wondering if Harold is determined enough to keep running for office until she can find one that she wins!

HAROLD IS THE woman from Champaign, Ill., who has often talked of running for office – usually focusing her attention on a seat from Congress around her home area.

In the 2014 election cycle, she went so far as to file nominating petitions and get herself on the ballot. Only to lose the Republican primary to Rep. Rodney Davis, R-Ill. – who, by the way, was the representative who nearly lost Tuesday night to Democrat Betsy Dirksen Londrigan.

Then, she resurrected herself this year as an attorney general candidate; getting Bruce Rauner to kick in significant funding for her political operations and also use his political influence to dissuade any other Republican from thinking of running for the post.

Harold can count Rodney Davis and … 

Rauner liked the image that Harold brought to the Republican ticket – that of an African-American woman who didn’t come off as so dark that she’d scare all the rural white people across Illinois whom he was counting on for votes for himself.

THAT RACIAL ASPECT is always what hurt her chances of winning when she ran for central Illinois-based political posts. Insofar as considering a move to Chicago where race wouldn’t be considered a negative, that might not be realistic.

None other than Barack Obama himself in his earliest days in politics ran into opposition from local activists who didn’t like the idea that he wasn’t native-born South Side (remember he’s from Honolulu?) and that he was moving in to take a post away from “one of our own?”

… Kwame Raoul on her list of defeats

Harold would have the same problem. She’s a Republican because of her birthplace (Urbana, Ill.), but her political aspirations may be limited. Which is why this might well be her final (if not only) serious chance at winning electoral office.

Besides, there’s one other fact to consider – in Tuesday night’s vote tallies, she not only got whomped in Chicago and surrounding suburbs, she lost six downstate counties, including her own home of Champaign County. It’s hard to win an election when 51.07 percent of the votes in your home base go for the opposition.

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