Some Republicans Don't Seem to Care About Winning
Allies of conservative Sen. Darren Bailey (R-Xenia) are doubling down the future of the GOP.
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OPINION
There has been plenty of blame to go around in Republican circles since the epic pummeling the GOP took in the November election. Many Republicans have interpreted the results to show that a right wing, Bible thumpin’ conservative can’t win statewide, especially if they can’t raise any money, don’t have a professional early vote and GOTV operation, and spend the entirety of the General Election campaign insulting 2.7 million people who live in the state’s largest city.
But clearly, not everyone has gotten the message.
The delirious members of the so-called “Eastern Bloc” in the Illinois House, which have now rebranded themselves after the goofballs in the Washington “Freedom Caucus” had an op-ed in Thursday’s Chicago Tribune that wasn’t just devoid of logic, it seemed as if they were living on another planet.
From the piece:
Suburban Republicans are not only losing state elections; they are also losing at the local level. This is a trend that predates Bailey and even Donald Trump. Contrast that with downstate, where we worked hard to flip our counties from reliably blue to ruby red. Perhaps suburban Republicans should be doing more self-reflection on how they have lost the support of their voters over the same time period.
That just simply isn’t true. In communities all across the suburbs you’ll find Republican (or conservative if they’re non-partisan) Mayors, city councils, township officials, and so on. A Republican Mayor in Naperville or Palatine or Orland Park are all nearly exclusively represented by Democrats (or, at least, will be next month.)
To compare the Republican results in downstate Illinois to the suburbs is folly. In recent years, downstate counties have gotten smaller and older. Many of the blue collar manufacturing jobs that have deserted downstate communities have been a part of the exodus. Meanwhile, the suburbs are growing. They’re more diverse and are getting more people fleeing the city in hopes of lower crime or better schools. The suburbs aren’t as white and homogenous as they were twenty years ago.
Look at DuPage County. Once a Republican stronghold and the second largest county in the state, Bill Brady won it by 45,000 votes in 2010. Socially moderate Bruce Rauner won the county by 70,000 votes in 2014. His trash administration and pathetic 2018 campaign cost him DuPage County for the first time ever, losing DuPage to JB Pritzker by about 8,000 votes. Darren Bailey lost DuPage County by 52,000 votes.
And it’s not like Bailey was significantly better than Brady downstate. Bailey improved on Brady by about two points in Adams and Madison counties, two good barometers downstate. Bailey lost McLean County, a traditional Republican stronghold. Brady won Rock Island County, Bailey lost it. Rauner won all of those counties in 2014. Bailey did not improve the GOP standing downstate.
That’s a complete rejection of his far-right conservatism.
There is a path for Republicans to keep rural voters and win in the suburbs. Gov. Ron DeSantis has been doing it in Florida for four years. He stands alone as the only Republican at the national level who did something about school closings, gender ideology and progressive policies that were being forced on students and businesses.
Florida is to Illinois as Olympic wrestling is to WWE.
The arrogance and condescension displayed at the recent State Central Committee meeting is illustrative of how far we need to go to unify our party. People who gave their time to knock on doors, attend rallies and put up signs to get Republican candidates elected were treated with disdain when they drove hundreds of miles to attend this meeting and express their points of view. This is unacceptable.
A carnival barking conservative website has tried to rally the “grassroots” to believe that State GOP Chairman Don Tracy is to blame for the losses. Tracy can be criticized for not raising enough money, but he wasn’t running Bailey’s campaign.
Oh and that “disdain” was allowing the public to speak for four hours at a meeting where they aren’t legally required to take public comment.
The State Central Committee is a paper tiger and has nothing, literally nothing to do with why bad GOP candidates won their primaries and got slaughtered in November.
The base of our party is tired of being ignored. Yes, we need donors to get our message out, but more importantly, we need an actual message.
Has anyone actually heard a message from these guys? I’ll wait…
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Republicans had no message, that’s true, and they did a pathetic job of fighting back on the abortion issue. But Darren Bailey did more to scare off suburban women for positions on social issues that were more akin to 1952 than 2022.
Republicans can be pro-life without scaring off suburban voters. Republican can be for lower taxes and smaller government without leaving the most vulnerable in our communities on the streets.
Post-election polling shows that 48% of voters consider themselves Democrats, but only 26% of voters consider themselves “liberal.” That means there are heaps of moderate voters out there who have simply ruled out voting for the Donald Trump/socially driven/out of touch current vision of the GOP.
If Republicans want to win, they need to nominate more candidates that won’t scare away suburban women. They need a real economic message, and they need someone who can raise some money instead of begging a crazy billionaire to bail them out. It also means someone who can convince primary voters that winning in November is the point of primaries. That doesn’t mean socially liberal, it just means someone who can talk about the issues without sounding like, you know, the Eastern Bloc.
Taking advice on how to win in the suburbs from these four guys is not a lesson in victory anytime soon.