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GOP Woes In Illinois

Dennis Byrne has a different explanation for the loss in IL-14: It is a measure of the moribundity of the Illinoisʼ Republican Party, whose national consequences seem not to be fully appreciated by the GOPʼs national proprietors. The once proud and powerful party of the late senators Everett McKinley Dirksen and Charles Percy, and more […]

Dennis Byrne has a different explanation for the loss in IL-14:

It is a measure of the moribundity of the Illinoisʼ Republican Party, whose national consequences seem not to be fully appreciated by the GOPʼs national proprietors. The once proud and powerful party of the late senators Everett McKinley Dirksen and Charles Percy, and more recently former Gov. Big Jim Thompson, has sunken to such depths it didnʼt even bother to field token candidates in the populous Cook County.

It’s true that the Illinois GOP, the people who have recently given you such outstanding standard-bearers as George Ryan, Jack Ryan and Alan Keyes (or “Allen,” as Byrnes would have it), is in miserable shape since the corruption of the Ryan administration turned the state party into a shambles, and it has been in decline longer than that.  Nominating Oberweis didn’t help matters.  Even so, the deplorable state of the Illinois GOP didn’t start recently, and cannot fully account for the failure in this special election.  Suburban and ex-urban districts have started trending towards the Democrats, especially in Illinois, and that has as much to do with the national party’s failures as it does with the state party’s implosion.  The problem for the Congressional GOP is that the same moribund Illinois party that just failed in IL-14 has to defend at least three other vulnerable seats in the fall.  Even if the IL-14 loss has no greater significance for how the GOP fares in the Midwest or nationwide, it does have significance for how Republicans will fare in closely contested suburban districts across Illinois.  In the same way that Byrne explains away IL-14 by focusing on state party collapse Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania Republicans could explain away the decimation of their House incumbents by talking about the loss of confidence in state party leadership.  The consequences remain the same: more Democrats winning House seats.

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