Gov. Quinn won four counties. He won partly because of the Libertarian, Lex Green. Quinn beat Brady by about 20,000 votes, and Green got about 34,000 votes. If Green didn’t run, the majority of his supporters would have voted for Brady, and Brady would have won.
I would blame “Independent” Scott Lee Cohen more than Lex Green. Most of us didn’t see the threat coming until it was too late. Everyone assumed Cohen would take more votes than Quinn instead of Brady because Cohen is a Chicago RAT, but Cohen ran as an “independent reformer” and a bunch of stupid “conservative” combiners like Jim Tobin were touting Cohen’s promise not to raise taxes and bashing Brady (by the way, according to Tobin’s OWN scorecard, Brady has the second HIGHEST “pro-taxpayer” score in the entire state Senate, yet Tobin ran anti-Brady ads in the Governor’s race. Hmmm. ). He got 135,705 votes, which was higher than Lex Green. Pretty much all of Cohen’s votes were ignorant, uniformed swing voters who were upset with the current Illinois government (Quinn & the RATs) and wanted to “reform” Government, but were hesitant to vote GOP. They probably would have held their nose for Brady if that idiot Cohen hadn’t been in the race. In fact, the ONLY poll that showed Quinn tied with Brady had Cohen at a ridiculously high 14%. All the other polls showed Brady ahead by 6-12% (which gave Brady a clear lead above the margin of error)