Illinois Treasurer's Race Is Still Too Close to Call

There is still no winner in Illinois' 2014 treasurer race.

As of Sunday night, unofficial counts in the Illinois state treasurer's race had Republican Tom Cross leading Democrat Mike Frerichs by 646 votes.

You read that correctly.

Only 646 votes out of nearly 3.5 million votes cast. That's .018 percent. Eighteen one-hundredths of one point. One in 5,555 voters.

There are potentially still thousands of votes left to count, most of which coming from the Chicago area, which has tended to favor Frerichs, so the winner is anyone's guess.

See more analysis on this tight race at Reboot Illinois.

A 2014 political race that wasn't so tight? The Illinois governor's election. Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner beat Gov. Pat Quinn by about 5 percentage points. What did Quinn do wrong so that voters did not want him to see another term? Capitol Fax editor Rich Miller has a few thoughts:

In the end, Gov. Quinn was just too unpopular after six years of not producing enough results on the economy and the budget, and was likely too overly reliant on negative campaign ads.

One of Quinn's few positive messages was about raising the minimum wage, but that campaign issue - bolstered by a statewide, non-binding referendum - failed to spark Democratic turnout and may have worked against Quinn with suburban women, to whom "minimum wage" is a stigma and something to be avoided.

Check out more of Miller's reasons for why Quinn didn't win at Reboot Illinois.