Pat Quinn lost Downstate by 24 points in 2010 and still managed to eke out a narrow victory, after all.
Pritzker lost it by 10 points four years ago.īut the increase in Republican identification in the region has not been enough to make up for its falling vote share and the party’s more recent disadvantages in the suburbs. Obama won it in 2008 by four points but lost Downstate four years later by seven, an 11-point flip. No statewide Democrat except Secretary of State Jesse White has won the region for the past 10 years. The collars have leaned Democratic during presidential years since Barack Obama’s national bid in 2008 and gradually started trending more Democratic in off-year races, culminating in Pritzker’s three-point collar county win over Bruce Rauner in 2018 and historic county-wide Democratic wins in the region both that year and in 2020.ĭownstate has become much more reliable for Republicans. Edgar won them by 18 points back in the day, but J.B. The difference, though, is the Cook County suburbs are now firmly in Democratic control. He lost Chicago by 33 points, won suburban Cook by 18, won the collars by 27 and took Downstate by 3, winning overall that year by just under 3 percentage points.Įdgar focused intently on the suburbs, campaigning on a promise to cap local property taxes and highlighting his strong support of abortion rights, among other things the voters in that region cared about.īy 2018, Chicago and suburban Cook County made up almost the same percentage share of the total vote for governor as in 1990, declining only by about a percentage point. In Edgar’s first gubernatorial election in 1990, that’s just what happened. Jim Edgar about something else shortly after seeing those numbers, and when I brought it up he said in those days, Republicans would figure on being stomped in the city, but they’d win Cook and the collar county suburbs and then the margin Downstate would wind up being pretty close to the statewide spread. I happened to be talking with former Gov.
When you expand the definition of the collar counties to include some in the Chicago metro region that had previously been considered more rural, the Downstate figure drops to 31% and the share of the collar county vote rises to 29%. In 1990, 42% of the total vote for governor came from Downstate counties, while a mere 17% came from the suburban collar counties outside Cook.īy 2018, just 36% of the total vote for governor came from Downstate and 25% was from the collars. We all know that Downstate has lost a significant amount of its political importance, but the numbers really help illustrate this decline. I was looking for something else recently on Scott Kennedy’s Illinois Election Data website and noticed he had voter turnout numbers from statewide races since 1990.
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