It’s a tough time to be a Republican in a blue state.
The off-year elections that took place in parts of the U.S. provided fodder for talking heads, with voters sending clear messages. A majority in purple and blue states rejected President Donald Trump in marquee contests: They’re yearning for a return to moderation. Affordability is still the issue of the day: Republicans tapped into that ahead of the 2024 election, but Democrats showed they’d better figure it out this time around. (We applauded the return of centrist messaging from Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger, who won gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, respectively).
But if you ask Republicans in Illinois, they already know all of this.
And while many among the chattering classes are in a tizzy trying to make sense of what happened on the coasts, some Republican folks in the trenches here in the middle of the country say they were unsurprised. Virginia and New Jersey are purplish-blue states, they said, and they unsurprisingly elected Democrats.
Asked whether Tuesday’s results spell doom for Illinois Republicans, House Minority Leader Tony McCombie told us “no.”
Here, Republicans already face an uphill battle in 2026 given our state’s extreme gerrymandering. McCombie said her goal at this point is to maintain.
“It’ll be hard to crawl out of the hole we’re in now until we fix the state legislative maps here,” McCombie said of Illinois’ notoriously rigged state legislative maps. “I’m optimistic we can keep the 40 (House seats) we have now.”
“But it’ll depend on where we are with the economy,” she added.
Democrats have twice as many seats as Republicans in the General Assembly, relegating conservative lawmakers to the outskirts of policy influence.
Adding to Republican difficulties: It is hard to recruit candidates when people know how stacked the deck is here.
That helps explain why the Illinois GOP couldn’t field a challenger to Illinois Treasurer Mike Frerichs, the man who arguably tanked Pritzker’s progressive tax by admitting it opened the door to taxing retirement. McCombie had no qualms about admitting that lack of a candidate was an embarrassment. Still, it’s a hard environment to excite people to run for office on the minority party ticket when they’re more likely to be a sacrificial lamb than a strong contender.
So if the Republicans are doomed to the minority until the maps change, what purpose does the party serve?
McCombie likened Republicans’ current job here to watchdog work.
“Our job is to hold the majority party accountable,” McCombie said. “We’re there to expose and oppose bad legislation. We need to hold this line until we can get to a new map.”
That likely won’t happen for years — Illinois redraws its state legislative districts once every 10 years, after the decennial census. The most recent maps were approved in 2021. Last month we wrote about a bipartisan plan to fix Illinois’ broken political maps, which we strongly support — though we’re not holding our breath.
So people who believe in fiscal sanity, who want to keep taxes low and shrink the size of government will have to keep plodding and playing the long game.
We hope Illinois Republicans can find the fortitude to be disciplined and focus on Illinois’ financial issues and its economy, the issues — along with crime in the Chicago area — that will continue to be top of mind for the foreseeable future. Voters want those addressed now.
Illinois Democrats have all the power, and yet they often refuse to make hard decisions to fix our problems. Look no further than the crop of novel taxes Democrats recently dreamed up as part of the so-called transit bailout, at least until Gov. JB Pritzker restored some sanity.
If they were smart — or not beholden to government union financial support — Illinois Dems would take a page out of Spanberger and Sherrill’s book. Even New York City’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, read the room, albeit with a socialist twist, realizing that the single biggest issue of the moment among the electorate is the simple fact that everything feels too expensive.
While Democratic Socialists’ version of affordability — free stuff — is simple to understand and appealing to many, the “affordability” pitch isn’t so easy for fiscal conservatives, who rightly point out there’s no such thing as a free lunch. For Republicans, the better term is “responsibility” — namely, reining in spending to make sure we can provide high-quality services at a reasonable cost, and trimming the fat taxpayers don’t want or need. Those fixes typically don’t yield fruit in a single election cycle.
So what do the Tuesday elections mean for Illinois Republicans? The national blue wave isn’t necessarily instructive for Illinois because Republicans here are already operating under worst-case conditions.
Still, you can’t win if you don’t play the game. You also can’t win if you have the wrong message. Former Gov. Bruce Rauner succeeded in 2014 because he tapped into Illinoisans’ frustration over the state’s fiscal mismanagement, high taxes and corruption — by the time he lost in 2018, he’d strayed far from what got him elected.
And most importantly, Tuesday proved Republicans on the MAGA boat can’t win here. The suburban conservatives Republicans need for competitiveness will not vote for MAGA-aligned candidates, and the Illinois GOP has to accept that.
We’ve heard lately from some moderate Republicans that they look around and don’t recognize some members of their own party. We know firsthand that many fiscally conservative suburbanites can’t get behind Republicans, partially because of the social stigmas that come with being surrounded by Democrats, but also because they can’t stomach much of what comes from the MAGA dominance of the party.
Nothing that happened Tuesday really changes the fundamentals for Illinois Republicans. They remain badly outgunned, and boxed in by gerrymandered maps and a governor with limitless resources. What they can control is discipline: sticking to the bread-and-butter issues voters actually care about, rejecting the MAGA theatrics that repel moderates and proving they can be responsible stewards of taxpayers’ money.
If they do that — if they become the credible alternative on affordability and competence — then whenever Illinois’ political lines are finally redrawn, they’ll be ready to compete again.
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