[4] The racial makeup of the county was 73.5% white alone, 18.8% black or African American alone, 4.1% Asian alone, 0.4% American Indian alone, .1% Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone, 3.1% listed two or more races, 5.1% Hispanic or Latino, and 69.4% were white and not of Hispanic or Latino origin.

[13] In terms of ancestry, per the 2010 US Census, 28.3% were German, 14.8% were Irish, 10.4% were English, and 5.5% were American.

[20] The County also elects an Auditor, Circuit Clerk, Coroner, County Clerk, Sheriff, State's Attorney, Regional Superintendent (Education), and Treasurer to four-year terms.

Usually, it only voted for Democratic Party presidential candidates when they won nationally by a landslide.

It began trending away from the GOP in the mid-1980s, as evidenced when Ronald Reagan only carried it with 55 percent of the vote in 1984 even as he was winning reelection in a landslide nationally.

From 1992 onward, the county has backed the Democratic candidate in every presidential election, though never by a margin greater than 10 percent aside from 2008 when Illinoisan Barack Obama won it by nearly 14 points.

This relative closeness in results was most evident in 2004 when the county backed John Kerry over George W. Bush by only 70 votes.