Election night started out feeling slow for Ian Holzhauer.
The Naperville City Councilman arrived at Go Brewing in Naperville about 7 p.m. Tuesday for an election party attended by fellow Democrats like state Rep. Janet Yang Rohr, a Naperville resident seeking for another term representing District 41, and Erica Bray Parker, of Wheaton, running for the District 47 House seat.
Holzhauer described the atmosphere as “positive.” Everyone was in agreement that no matter the results, there would be full support for all the Dem candidates come the November general election.
Whether that would include him, though, was still in question.
“I was just relieved to know that I’d given it my all and the results were going to be whatever they would be, but I would get to sleep easily that night with whatever the result would be,” said Holzhauer, one of three Democrats vying for a DuPage County Board District 5 primary win.
Once the results started rolling in, he started to feel better.
“There was a pretty comfortable margin,” he said. “We had an amazing early vote turnout, and I knew that going into the evening because I’d seen how many people had voted early. Our campaign really focused on trying to teach people, first-time voters, first-time early voters, that they can (vote) very early at city hall.”
By the end of the night, Holzhauer emerged victorious. Incumbent Sadia Covert and fellow candidate Marylee Leu called to congratulate him on his win.
Holzhauer will now face Chris Jacks, a Naperville Park Board member who ran unopposed for the Republican nomination. When asked how he felt about his chances against Jacks in November, Holzhauer laughed and said “good.” Beyond that, he declined to speculate.
Should Holzhauer win, he will step down from the council seat to which he was reelected just last year.
“I was really humbled by the gracious outreach by my two opponents in this race,” he said. “I think we elevated the conversation and all three candidates set an amazing example. I actually had a grad student come up to me at one of the forums I’d had with the other two county board candidates and he said, ‘I didn’t realize politics could be this civil.’”
Official vote counts are still being tallied for the election, but unofficial results as of Friday afternoon showed that Holzhauer had 9,136 votes to Covert’s 6,531 and Leu’s 2,721.
District 5 covers large portions of Naperville and Aurora. Generally, Holzhauer performed better within Naperville proper while Covert, also a Naperville resident, picked up more votes in areas outside of the city.
Covert, who has served on the DuPage County Board since 2018, will complete her term in December. The results from Tuesday left her “a little shocked,” she said.
“I don’t know what happened there but we gave it our best and we ran a great campaign,” Covert said.
Her strategy, she said, did not differ from what she had done in previous years — door knocking, phone banking and sending out mailings to voters. She received more than 30 endorsements, including nods from state Sen. Laura Ellman, D-Naperville, the Daily Herald and Naperville City Councilman Ashfaq Syed.
Holzhauer, on the other hand, said he did not seek endorsements.
“We just ran totally different campaigns. We have totally different bases,” he said. “She has a county-wide angle. She performed really well in some of the areas outside of Naperville. I think I did really well in precincts in the city of Naperville, which I was proud of, because that’s obviously the area I spent a lot of time in the last five years.”
As for his own campaign, Holzhauer said letter writing was a major part of his strategy, sending out thousands of personal notes in which he included his cell phone number and details on what he has done on the Naperville council, including his positions on the city’s future electricity contract and mental health services. The “Jeopardy”-themed stamps he used were a nod to his brother James, who gained national noteriety for his 32-game winning streak on the show.
“So it may not have been glossy and shiny but those envelopes were stuffed with love, and I think they meant a lot for a lot of the people who received them,” Holzhauer said.
Following her loss, Covert said she received a flood of text messages and phone calls from voters telling her how much she will be missed on the board. Reflecting on her time as a District 5 representative, she said she is proud of the different streams of revenues she helped create, such as the cannabis initiative and the diversity and inclusion imperative.
“I was there during the first Trump administration and I’m serving right now in Trump’s second administration, and I just had a feeling there would be cuts to our social service programs or to our budget,” she said. “It was always a risk. … Today, I see the results of the contributions that I made. We are in a surplus, and we did really well and we’re doing great on the county board.”
She is not sure what comes next for her, including whether she might try to land Holzhauer’s spot on the Naperville council.
When asked if there was anything she would have done differently in her campaign, Covert said she felt like she did everything she could.
“I was the woman incumbent who was serving for the last seven years and worked really hard, but the voters have spoken so that’s OK,” she said.
cstein@chicagotribune.com
