Darryl Brackeen and Pat Dillon.
Darryl Brackeen Jr. won’t be mounting a Democratic primary challenge for a state representative seat after all, but he’s still eyeing the seat. He is now turning his campaign sights to November, after failing to gather enough qualified petition signatures to force an August Democratic primary against State Rep. Pat Dillon.
On Thursday, city Democratic Registrar of Voters Shannel Evans confirmed for the Independent that Brackeen did not submit enough qualified petition signatures of registered Democrats by the Tuesday, 4 p.m., deadline to trigger a Democratic primary for the 92nd General Assembly District seat held by Pat Dillon, who is running for reelection.
Brackeen, who is currently an Upper Westville city alder, submitted 342 qualified signatures. He needed 367 to force a primary.
That means that Dillon — who has represented the 92nd district since 1984, and who won the state Democratic Party’s endorsement unopposed at a convention earlier this year — won’t face a Democratic primary challenger this August.
November may be a different story.
Brackeen told the Independent on Thursday that he now plans on petitioning his way onto the November general election ballot. That means he’ll be doing so as an unaffiliated candidate, even though he personally is still a registered Democrat.
“We’re going all the way,” he said. “We will be collecting signatures and head on to the general election.”
In order to qualify for the November general election as an unaffiliated candidate, Brackeen must collect petition signatures from registered voters in the district equal to 1 percent of the total votes cast in the last election in that district. He has until September to gather enough qualified petition signatures. In 2020, Dillon won reelection unopposed with 8,307 votes of support. That means that Brackeen will have to collect 83 qualified petition signatures.
“I run one way or the other,” Dillon responded when asked for comment Thursday. “It’s really up to me to go out and make my case to the voters.” She said she’s been doing just that, attending community management team meetings and other neighborhood-specific get togethers and talking with constituents.
“They trusted me with their votes two years ago, and I’m accountable to them,” she said. And while she was prepared for “a full-blown primary” in August, Dillon said, she’ll now pivot towards preparing for a contested general election in November.
Brackeen first announced his bid for the 92nd General Assembly District seat in late May, after ending an exploratory bid for secretary of the state. (Click here to read a previous story about the issues he and Dillon are running on.)
The state House district currently includes the West River, Westville, Edgewood, Dwight, Hill North, and Beverly Hills/Amity neighborhoods.
If Brackeen had succeeded in his Democratic primary petition drive, the primary would have been held on Aug. 9.
Asked on Thursday about his coming up short on primary petition signatures, Brackeen acknowledged that only 342 of the signatures his campaign gathered ultimately qualified for the primary petition.
He said he submitted between 380 and 390 petition signatures in total to the registrar’s office.
“We realized that many of the registered voters that submitted signatures were booted out of the system. They’re now unaffiliated,” he said. “Many were long-term Democratic voters. We believe that there’s an issue that’s beyond our control, I believe it’s beyond local control, that’s moving inactive voters into an unaffiliated status.” He also said he has already qualified for the public-financing Citizens’ Election Program based on contributions raised by an exploratory committee he originally set up to consider a run for secretary of the state.
Evans told the Independent that her office may count only qualified signatures of registered Democrats in the district for a spot on a primary ballot. The total number of qualified signatures submitted by Brackeen, she confirmed, was 342.
How could the alder miscount signatures? Absurd.