GOP Hoping For A Scott Brown Victory In Illinois

Fresh Off a Massachusetts Victory, G.O.P. Aims at Illinois


Republicans in Illinois hold no statewide offices, are minorities in both chambers of the State Legislature and struggle some years to recruit viable candidates even at the top of the ballot.

But the election last week of a long-shot Republican, Scott Brown, to the Senate in Massachusetts, a similarly blue state, has invigorated Republicans here.

Next Tuesday’s statewide primaries — the first in the nation this year — have suddenly turned into a pep rally for November and could provide a window into what is to come nationally as the 2010 primary season unfolds.

“Illinois is next,” said Pat Brady, chairman of the state Republican Party. “The political environment is worse here for Democrats than it was in Massachusetts.”

Representative Mark Steven Kirk, the front-runner in the Republican primary for the Senate seat once held by President Obama, has even taken to echoing Mr. Brown’s campaign remarks.

“No one should make the mistake by calling this the Obama seat,” he said in an interview. “This is the seat of the people of Illinois.”

Democratic leaders here discount direct comparisons to Massachusetts — for starters, the race there was a special election, not a primary — and point out distinctions in this state’s candidates, voting blocs and alliances. And perhaps most of all, they mention their sense that Illinois voters still carry a special allegiance to Mr. Obama.

Still, the message from Massachusetts is resounding among Democrats, too (in interviews, several candidates quickly proclaimed themselves “outsiders”). The party is trying to hold on to the Senate seat, the governor’s mansion and a few House seats that Republicans say they are especially confident about winning.

A televised forum last week among the three top Democrats in the Senate race seemed to become a scuffle over which one would be the least likely, come November, to lose in an upset similar to the one in Massachusetts. (Along the way, they struck notes that made them sound not so unlike Mr. Brown.)

One candidate, Cheryle Jackson, who led the Chicago Urban League, said the Massachusetts vote had reflected the lack of jobs and the suffering of people — “precisely,” she added, “the reason I have decided to run.”

And another candidate, David Hoffman, a former inspector general for the City of Chicago, offered this pitch for himself as a way to dodge a Massachusetts outcome: “We need to make sure that we have a nominee who is as independent as possible.”

Some argue that Mr. Kirk, as a five-term congressman and a moderate Republican with centrist-leaning views that have irked conservatives, may not benefit from voter unrest. (Democrats also have their eyes on his House district in Chicago’s northern suburbs.)

“In a key way, Illinois is Massachusetts in reverse,” said Kathleen Strand, a senior adviser to Illinois for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “Here, the Republican candidate is the Washington insider that voters are angry at, not the Democrat.”

In the view of some conservatives, Mr. Kirk, who supports abortion rights, fits right in with the Democratic candidates. They say that while he might gain unhappy Democratic voters and center-leaning independents, he will lose the votes of a different segment — some who consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement, abortion opponents and others.

Conservatives often cite Mr. Kirk’s vote in favor of cap-and-trade legislation intended to reduce carbon emissions; he has since reversed course, criticizing the legislation and saying he would vote against it as a senator. They also do not appreciate what they see as his effort to swerve to the right; some mocked his campaign for trying to win supportive words from former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska when she was in Chicago recently.

“Mark Kirk has absolutely no Tea Party support,” said Diane Benjamin, an organizer of a Tea Party group in McLean County, about 90 miles southwest of Chicago.

In the primary, there are several lesser-known candidates, including Patrick Hughes, who has drawn praise from some conservatives and Tea Party supporters (though not Ms. Benjamin). But analysts say that opposition to Mr. Kirk has not amounted to a movement unified and motivated enough to defeat him; a Chicago Tribune poll released on Monday showed Mr. Kirk with a wide lead in the primary race. (Of those Republicans polled who said they agreed with the Tea Party movement, 48 percent favored Mr. Kirk, the newspaper said.)

Some of the turmoil here is particular to Illinois. This is the first election for governor since Rod R. Blagojevich, a Democrat, was ousted after prosecutors charged him with secretly trying to sell the Senate seat that is now up for grabs. Senator Roland W. Burris, whom Mr. Blagojevich appointed to the seat, announced months ago that he would not run for election.

Democrats are queasy (and Republicans giddy) over the spectacle of Mr. Blagojevich’s federal corruption trial, which is scheduled to begin here in June, the middle of campaign season.

Gov. Patrick J. Quinn, the lieutenant governor who was elevated to the state’s top job in the aftermath of the scandal, and Dan Hynes, the state comptroller, who is from a longtime Chicago political family, are battling in the Democratic primary for governor.

The Republican field is vast and relatively strong, in part, as one political analyst here said, because they “see blood in the water.” The Republicans include Andy McKenna, former chairman of the state Republican Party; Jim Ryan, a former state attorney general; and two state senators, Kirk Dillard and Bill Brady.

The economy is a theme heard everywhere, but it is more pronounced here in every race. Residents complain about vanishing jobs (the state unemployment rate, at 11.1 percent, is higher than the nation’s), and the state’s failure to fix its budget, which has a deficit that some estimate at $13 billion. Illinois is failing to pay all sorts of bills and has $80 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, signs some experts cite when they put the state in a class not so distinct from California.

“What we learned is that voters are incredibly angry,” said Alexi Giannoulias, the state treasurer and a friend of the president who, according to Monday’s Tribune poll, holds a double-digit lead over other Democrats vying for the Senate seat. (Mr. Obama has made no endorsement in the primary.)

“They’re angry at what’s happening with our economy, with our lack of jobs,” Mr. Giannoulias said. “They’re angry because they feel like they’re being ignored by Washington, D.C. — ignored by Democrats and Republicans.”

Politics in Illinois was not always overrun by Democrats. When Mr. Blagojevich was elected in 2002 (after a scandal that sent the Republican governor to prison), he was the first Democrat in the job in three decades. By the mid-2000s, the picture had become lopsided enough that Peter G. Fitzgerald, the state’s most recent Republican senator, announced that he would not seek re-election, noting that Illinois had become a “staunchly Democratic state.”

It is hard to know exactly how many of the state’s 7.5 million registered voters consider themselves Democrats or Republicans because voters do not register by party here; still, estimates from both sides say Democrats outnumber Republicans.

But at Democratic campaign events, ordinary voters say Mr. Obama remains enormously popular. The loudest complaint is that he does not come home enough. Yet some said they believed that people, even here, might separate their feelings about him from their frustration with Washington.

“After Massachusetts, you can’t be sure of anything,” said Doris Conant, 84, a Democrat from Chicago. “I hope it mobilizes people to get out and support their candidate. If we lose the Obama seat, it would be heartbreaking.”



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Sources: NY Times, The Victory Group, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google Maps