Alex Seith was the 1978 Democratic

Democratic Party (United States)

The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. The party's socially liberal and progressive platform is largely considered center-left in the U.S. political spectrum. The party has the lengthiest record of continuous...

 nominee for the United States Senate

United States Senate

The United States Senate is the upper house of the bicameral legislature of the United States, and together with the United States House of Representatives comprises the United States Congress. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Each...

 from Illinois

Illinois

Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...

. A complete newcomer to electoral politics, he nearly pulled off one of the greatest upsets in Senate history when he narrowly lost to nationally renowned incumbent Republican

Republican Party (United States)

The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...

 Charles Percy

Charles H. Percy

Charles Harting "Chuck" Percy was president of the Bell & Howell Corporation from 1949 to 1964. He was elected United States Senator from Illinois in 1966, re-elected through his term ending in 1985; he concentrated on business and foreign relations...

 by eight percentage points. According to Statistics of Congressional Election of November 7, 1978, (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978) the margin of defeat was 250,000 votes. Seith went to Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

 and Harvard Law School

Harvard Law School

Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...

.

Prior to running for the Senate, Seith's political career had been limited to appointed positions, including service on a regional santiary district board and, most notably, the Cook County Zoning Board of Appeals. http://www.lib.niu.edu/ipo/1977/ii771212.html Though at heart a mainstream member of the Democratic party, with associated positions on most issues, Seith's campaign emphasized his hard line positions in foreign policy

Foreign policy

A country's foreign policy, also called the foreign relations policy, consists of self-interest strategies chosen by the state to safeguard its national interests and to achieve its goals within international relations milieu. The approaches are strategically employed to interact with other countries...

.

Percy managed to salvage his office by means of a televised mea culpa

Mea Culpa

Mea culpa is a Latin phrase that translates into English as "my mistake" or "my fault". To emphasize the message, the adjective "maxima" may be inserted, resulting in "mea maxima culpa," which would translate as "my most [grievous] fault."...

in the final week of the campaign, but Seith's campaign may have been dealt a blow some days earlier, when popular Chicago Sun-Times

Chicago Sun-Times

The Chicago Sun-Times is an American daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois. It is the flagship paper of the Sun-Times Media Group.-History:The Chicago Sun-Times is the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the city...

columnist Mike Royko

Mike Royko

Michael "Mike" Royko was a newspaper columnist in Chicago, who won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for commentary...

 informed readers that Seith had served as a character witness in the trial of a mob

Mafia

The Mafia is a criminal syndicate that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in Sicily, Italy. It is a loose association of criminal groups that share a common organizational structure and code of conduct, and whose common enterprise is protection racketeering...

 figure some years earlier. http://www.lib.niu.edu/ipo/1979/ii790232.html

Seith unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in 1984, but was defeated by Paul Simon

Paul Simon (politician)

Paul Martin Simon was an American politician from Illinois. He served in the United States House of Representatives from 1975 to 1985 and United States Senate from 1985 to 1997. He was a member of the Democratic Party...

who went on to beat Percy in the general election.

Seith later went on to co-own a number of radio stations with Thom Serafin, including WSDR/WSSQ in Sterling, Illinois. They also owned the Illinois News Network, a statewide radio network.

Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s he provided on air commentaries for WLS (Channel 7) television in Chicago, the ABC network affiliate.

In his later life, Seith lived and worked in Chicago, where he was an attorney and lobbyist, specializing in real-estate law.