Grafton Township Board turns blue as voters also deliver change to Huntley District 158 school board
For the first time in recent memory, the Grafton Township board in McHenry County is slated to be run by Democrats.
Voters in the township also appear to have helped boost Huntley Unit School District 158 candidates who were backed by the teachers union and a grass-roots group seeking a new direction for that board.
In the District 158 school board race, incumbents Paul Troy and Sean Cratty appear headed for another four-year term. Challengers Melissa Maiorino and Rich Bobby also appear poised to win seats, though results remain unofficial.
The four candidates and Andrew Fekete, who ran for a two-year seat on the school board, received support from the grass-roots Candidates for All Kids group and the endorsement of the Huntley Education Association. Fekete is leading incumbent Dana Wiley.
During the campaign, the District 158 candidates addressed DEI and other social issues and taxes.
Meanwhile, the election was disappointing for the Grafton Township Republican Party. All but one Republican appears to have lost on the township board, and all the candidates the party backed for District 158 school board — Wiley, Corine Burns and Andrew Martin — are trailing.
Cratty ran for both school and township boards and was on pace to win both elections. He’s the only Republican who appears to have won a seat on the township board, with the Democratic slate of Diane Oltman Ayers, Corinna Sac and Chris Lawrence on track to be the top vote-getters.
Incumbent Republicans Tamara L. Lueth, Dan Ziller, Jr. and Matthew Cooper all appear to have lost their seats.
Ayers, who has lived in the Grafton Township area since 1995, said each of the candidates on the slate had their own reason for running. She said there wasn’t a strategy to sweep townships. Now that she’s set to be on the board, Ayers wants to make sure the township is putting its resources to the best use. She said she didn’t think that was a partisan thing.
Grafton Township GOP Chairman Orville Brettman said some of the Republicans didn’t work as hard as they could have this time around.
He said the GOP knocked on thousands of doors during the 2023 election and campaigned “day and night.” He said those efforts didn’t happen this cycle.
Brettman said Wednesday he believes Democrats have been “energized” by their anger over the outcome of the presidential election, adding the GOP is going to have to up its game. He said he hadn’t talked to anybody about the results yet, so he could only speak for himself and not the party.
Grafton Township includes portions of Huntley, Algonquin, Lake in the Hills, Crystal Lake and Lakewood.
Despite the shift to blue on the Grafton Township board, McHenry County remains red overall, though deeply divided, with President Donald Trump performing better in 2024 than he did four years before, winning 52% of the vote in November and just under 50% in 2020. The McHenry County Board also expanded its Republican majority in November.
This cycle, in most of the county’s townships, no Democrats ran for office, nor did the party run anyone for Grafton Township supervisor or other offices, which remain Republican-held.