With Dunne's support, he received the Democratic nomination. Dever tied his candidacy to Busse's reelection effort in the coinciding mayoral election and to the municipal ownership/traction issue. His Republican opponent was William H. McSurely. McSurely refused to take a stance on the traction issue, due to the fact that the court might soon review the Settlement Ordinances. Dever lost by a margin of roughly 13,000 of the nearly 340,000 votes cast, a result mirroring that of the coinciding mayoral race. In the spring of 1908, Dever ran a spirited race against seven candidates in the Democratic primary for Cook County state's attorney. He was supported by the Dunne wing of the party. Dever's key opponents were Sullivan wing candidate J.J. Kern (former State's Attorney) and Harrison wing candidate Maclay Hoyne. Kern won the primary with 28% of the vote, defeating Dever (who came second) by several thousand votes. During Dever's 1910 aldermanic reelection campaign, Stanley H. Kunz, political boss of the neighboring Sixteenth Ward and Chicago's most prominent Polish American politician, slated prominent Polish American lawyer Stanley Walkowiak to primary Dever in an effort to expand Polish American political influence in the city. Dever narrowly won this primary. After this, Kunz initially attempted to get the Republicans to replace their nominee, C.J. Ryberg, with a Polish American colleague of his, before instead deciding to have Walkowiak run as an independent. Dever was backed by Carter Harrison Jr., Edward F. Dunne, J. Hamilton Lewis, John Traeger, Joseph Le Buy (president of the Polish Businessmen's Democratic Club), the Chicago Commons caucus, and the Municipal Voters League. Dever won with 2,692 votes (44%) to Walkowiak's 1,886 (31%) and Ryberg's 1,483 (25%). Judicial career Dever had been considering running for mayor in the then-upcoming 1911 Chicago mayoral election before being slated by Roger Sullivan on the Democratic ticket for Superior Court of Cook County in the 1910 elections. It took some persuading for Sullivan to convince Dever to run for judge. Dever was elected, resigning from City Council to assume his judgeship. Dever declined calls to run for mayor in 1915. In 1916, due to the duration of a trial of William Lorimer for misappropriation of funds and conspiracy to defraud, which lasted two months before reaching acquittal, Dever had only three weeks to run a reelection campaign. Nevertheless, he won handily. Several months into his second term on the Cook County Superior Court,