As President Donald Trump champions conservative values across America, the ideological rift between Illinois’ northern liberal districts and the southern conservative farming communities continues to grow, fueled by decades of partisan policymaking.
Kent Redfield, emeritus professor of political science at the University of Illinois Springfield, said two major changes in policy have had the greatest effect on creating the Democratic supermajorities in the Illinois House and Senate: the removal of cumulative voting for Illinois House members and the gerrymandering of legislative district lines.
Illinois’ cumulative voting allowed voters to cast three votes for Illinois House candidates. Voters could cast all three for the same person, split them two and one or give one vote to three different candidates. Each of the state’s 59 legislative districts were represented by three House members, which allowed Republicans the chance to cut into the Chicago area and other northern districts while also giving Democrats the ability to win seats downstate.
In 1980, political activist Pat Quinn, who would later become governor, led a successful effort to change the Illinois Constitution –with the so-called “cutback amendment” – to eliminate cumulative voting and reduce the size of the Illinois House by one-third.
The cutback, coupled with the district maps Democrats have redrawn, which Redfield describes as a “monstrosity,” has left little power in the hands of Republicans to influence policy at the Statehouse. Now, Republicans are in a superminority position in the Illinois legislature, with 40 Democrats to 19 Republicans in the Senate and 78 Democrats to 40 Republicans in the House of Representatives.
“We’re stuck with the map until 2032, we’ve gotten rid of that cumulative voting and it really looks like we’re at the bottom of the hole and how do you get out of that?” says Redfield.
Politicians also need money to succeed, but the amount of funding needed to continue their efforts has exploded in cost, and the traditional manufacturing base downstate, once a reliable political funder, isn’t what it used to be, says Redfield.
“They [Illinois Republicans] are in a state of disadvantage because of the atrophy of their traditional manufacturing companies,” Redfield said. “Things like the Retail Merchants Association and so on don’t hold the power that they used to. They [Republicans] must shift focus from what their base is because they used to have these hard-working blue-collar people that were in the farming industry, but that’s not as strong of an industry anymore…Money follows power, and it doesn’t care whether it’s an R or a D.”
A feeling of isolation from political power is felt by Republicans down to grassroots organizations. Dianne Barghouti Hardwick, chair of the Sangamon County Republican Party, says the exclusion from policymaking decisions removes the feeling of representation in her own state. She also feels that individuals from the northern parts of the state look down on her constituents as uneducated farmers and fail to acknowledge the agricultural support Illinois farms provide to the northern districts.
“It’s the lines that are drawn, it’s the Cook County versus the rest of the state and a feeling that when people who get elected from the upper part of the state, downstate doesn’t feel very represented anymore,” said Hardwick. “In Illinois, you have a big difference between the feel of Chicago and the suburbs in the northern area and the main farmlands that you see down south. If it weren’t for our agriculture, you couldn’t have a city like Chicago.”
This alienation, fostered by Democratic influence and complacency on issues conservatives feel are important, is what is driving Republicans to support Trump. Former Cass County Republican Party chair Terry Blakeman says that, while not all Republicans support Trump, the president is the one finally speaking up on issues conservatives have been thinking about.
“I think that most of us feel like the country was moving away from its core values in almost every area,” said Blakeman. “What put Trump over the top is that he was bold enough to get out there and talk about issues and just say, ‘Look, this isn’t right, you know?’ Enough people are thinking it, but a lot of them were being quiet, sitting in the back and on the sideline just not getting really involved.”
Blakeman compared the situation to when he was a Republican county board member before becoming the chair. He cited times when it only took one person to speak up before others came forward in support.
“Once one person or board member stands up against something, then that encourages the others, even though they’ve been thinking it themselves, to then follow suit and do the same thing,” said Blakeman. “So sometimes it just takes someone to bring that issue to the forefront and I think that’s what Trump did.”
This article appears in Home and Garden.
