Candidate quality matters. In New York, a solidly Democratic state from top to bottom, Republican congressman Lee Zeldin is closing rapidly with incumbent Democratic governor Kathy Hochul in the polls on the back of a terrible national environment and the economic, drug, and crime issues plaguing the state. It’s unlikely that Zeldin will win — if he does, it would be the supreme mark of an inconceivably good election night for the GOP — but his strong performance at the top of the ticket looks likely to have significant downballot effects (Sean Patrick Maloney, call your office . . . now).
So spare a moment of pity for Illinois, America’s punching-bag state (it competes with New Jersey, and somehow manages to triumph each time). Incumbent governor J. B. Pritzker (heir to the massive Pritzker family fortune), who has presided over the continuing bleed-out of Illinois state finances, a massive crime wave affecting Chicago, and the aftermath of the state’s regionally divergent but generally extremely heavy-handed Covid-19 regulations (which have savaged downtown Chicago in particular), currently leads his Republican challenger Darren Bailey by (according to at least one recent poll) by 22 percentage points.
How did this happen? Why, when the Republicans are making runs at the governor’s mansion in New York, Oregon, New Mexico, and elsewhere, is the party so hapless in Illinois? The Illinois GOP in particular is torn asunder by the seemingly incurable upstate/downstate divide between its voters. The state itself geographically extends all the way from the Great Lakes region down to an area that, while not quite “The Old South,” shares many of its demographics, folkways, and cultural values. As one might imagine, the center of gravity lies in Chicago and its suburbs (two-thirds of the entire state population-wise), and yet the majority of Republican primary voters live downstate. The two cultures are fundamentally incompatible politically, oftentimes more on an aesthetic than substantive level . . . but aesthetics matter.
And Illinois Republican voters (with massive help from Pritzker’s campaign itself, which spent $22 million in the Republican primary to ensure his victory) committed the aesthetic and substantive offense of nominating Darren Bailey to challenge Pritzker. Bailey is an obscure state senator from southern Illinois (in Illinois, the hammerlock Democratic legislative supermajority in both houses has turned state-level politics on the GOP side largely into a toddler’s sandbox for cranks). He dabbled in Trumpist election trutherism back in 2021, but ironically that is the least of his problems. His problem is that he running as an overt evangelical Christian with an extremely bizarre southern-tinged accent and was most known prior to this for cosponsoring a resolution literally calling for Chicago to become a separate state from Illinois.
I am both emphatically Christian and emphatically pro-life, and, as a Chicagoan, can lament our decline. But the problem here is obvious: You cannot win an election if you actively revolt the persuadable voters whose votes you desperately need to even have a chance of getting over the top statewide. No Republican will ever win statewide in Illinois unless he or she can speak to the sorts of socially moderate voters (particularly in Chicago’s collar counties) who want nothing to do with a candidate that leads with their chin on abortion and who also openly wishes to saw Chicago off and send it drifting on an ice floe out into Lake Michigan.
Candidate quality matters. I start with that assertion and end with it, as a lament.