Few Illinois campaign watchers — including Republicans — dispute the conventional political wisdom that the GOP could have a tough election year in 2012 because of new political maps.
When GOP state Sen. Bill Brady of Bloomington lost his race for governor in 2010, Republicans knew they had tough years ahead. Brady’s loss meant Democrats — who already controlled the state House and Senate — won exclusive control of mapmaking powers for legislative districts. And despite their objections and lawsuits, the GOP didn’t expect to be shown much mercy.
They weren’t.
Since the maps became public last summer, Republican incumbents wanting to remain in the Illinois General Assembly have had to play a high-stakes game of musical chairs: switching districts and chambers, challenging each other and dropping out, all in an effort to try to maximize their election prospects within a map drawn by Democrats.
Though the courts upheld the legality of the new Illinois political map for the General Assembly, it is the ultimate political document, an attempt by Democrats to maintain control of the House and Senate, not just in 2012 but until 2022.
And while the effects of the new map will linger and influence elections for 10 years, its impact might be most pronounced in the coming months, as incumbents run rare races against each other and a new map creates more races than usual where there is no incumbent. Those open-seat races often are among the most hotly contested every year.
The Democrats’ strategy, says Kent Redfield, an emeritus political scientist at the University of Illinois Springfield, is three-pronged, much like the state’s political geography.
Downstate, Democrats need to try to cut their losses, Redfield says. Their numbers have faded as Republicans made big gains in recent years.
Democrats also need to play defense in Chicago, their most obvious stronghold. The city has seen population losses, so to avoid losing seats, Democrats expanded their legislative districts on the edges of the city, snaking their way out into the near suburbs.
It’s the suburbs where Democrats can try to be most aggressive, capitalizing on the changing nature of an area that was once a Republican bastion. Many of the Democratic pickups over the past 10 years have been suburban seats.
The only district in Illinois where an incumbent Democrat and incumbent Republican are set to square off in November is in northern Cook County and Lake County.
Rep. Sidney Mathias, a Republican from Buffalo Grove, and Rep. Carol Sente, a Vernon Hills Democrat, both live in the new 59th House District. Even though neither has primary election opponents, both have begun their November campaigning activities already, realizing their race could be a tough one.
Even as the map was released, both talked publicly about their mutual respect for each other and good working relationship as lawmakers. When Mathias had heart surgery in late 2011, Sente called him and sent a card. Mathias expressed sympathy when Sente’s father died earlier this year.
“I’m just hoping that our relationship will influence us to run positive campaigns,” Mathias says.
Still, Mathias says the new district he lives in is about 90 percent different from his old one, making him a clear Democratic target. It’s not the first time he’s been targeted in a remap year — he was similarly targeted in 2002, when what would become his new district also was vastly different from his previous one. The key to victory, he says, was old-fashioned retail campaigning.
“I just reached out to constituents in my new district,” he says. “I walked door to door.”
That can work for a longtime lawmaker and former mayor like Mathias in the suburbs, where the legislative districts aren’t that geographically large and name recognition carries over from district to district.
But before contests like Mathias’ and Sente’s get going, other Republican incumbents will see big races in the March primary, where tough decisions have forced many GOP lawmakers to switch gears or run against each other.
Or both.
In DuPage County, under the new map, freshman Republican Rep. Chris Nybo of Elmhurst lives in the same House district as veteran GOP lawmakers Rep. Patti Bellock of Hinsdale and Rep. Dennis Reboletti of Elmhurst. The 47th District was the only new district in the state that included three incumbents. That one tricky district forced some tough decisions by more than a half-dozen GOP lawmakers, and this is where the musical chairs come in.
Next door, in the 45th District, live GOP Reps. Franco Coladipietro of Bloomingdale and Randy Ramey of Carol Stream. Coladipietro decided not to run in 2012, and Ramey turned his attention to the Senate, where he’ll challenge incumbent Republican Sen. Carole Pankau of Itasca.
With the 45th District now incumbent-free, Reboletti decided to run there. That leaves Bellock and Nybo.
“I have to run against one incumbent or another,” Nybo says of his decision-making.
Bellock is staying put. Nybo, a freshman, decided also to stay put but jump to a Senate race against longtime Sen. Kirk Dillard of Hinsdale. “I’m not the kind of person who’s going to move for politics,” Nybo says. Instead, he’ll take on what could be a strenuous primary race against a former — and possible future — candidate for governor.
Dillard says that on the stump in 2010, he talked often about how the race for governor was critical because a loss would give mapmaking powers solely to the Democrats. Now, as a result of that map, Dillard faces a tough primary race.
The fallout in that area alone means the guaranteed loss of three GOP incumbents. Coladipietro dropped out. Either Pankau or Ramey will lose. And either Dillard or Nybo will lose.
There are similar examples throughout the state. “The deck is so stacked against us,” Dillard says of the GOP.
The musical chairs aren’t just being played in the suburbs, either. And even in the opening month of 2012, it’s clear that competing incumbents — current colleagues — might not be scared to use tough campaign tactics against each other.
Downstate, GOP Sens. Kyle McCarter of Lebanon and John O. Jones of Mount Vernon were poised for a primary contest. That was until McCarter supporters challenged that Jones didn’t have enough petition signatures to be eligible to run. After that challenge, Jones dropped out.
And Republican freshman Rep. Jason Barickman of Champaign is running a primary campaign for Senate against Sen. Shane Cultra of Onarga. If Barickman had taken a run at the House again, he would have likely faced a primary campaign against fellow House freshman Adam Brown of Decatur. Instead, he chose to run for the Senate in a district that more closely resembles the House district he represents now.
“It was clear that I would have a primary no matter what I did,” Barickman says.
It’s also clear that the race might get testy, with reports in January questioning Barickman’s residency after he bought a $405,000 house in Bloomington. He insists it isn’t his primary residence.
In Brown’s case, he won’t be running in the district he lives in, choosing instead to run for the House from a district next door. In making that move, the Republican Brown avoids running in a House district that — while free of another incumbent — includes both much of Decatur and the east side of Springfield, two areas heavy with Democrats. Three Democrats and two Republicans have filed for that race.
The new map creates several similar districts that have no incumbents. That means the halls of the Capitol — no matter how various elections go — will be home to more fresh faces than usual when the new General Assembly takes the oath of office in the opening weeks of 2013.
Often, such open-seat races are the most hotly contested because the absence of an incumbent makes it easier for a challenger to get a foothold. True to form, this year, those districts often have primary matchups set, and the general election races might cause fireworks.
Evidence that the primary races might be at the front of lawmakers’ minds can be found in the House and Senate schedules for the year, which include only one day of session in January, as well as more full weeks off in subsequent months than is typical.
And all of this election action doesn’t even include Congress. Races to represent Illinois in Washington, D.C., have their own well-documented dramas already brewing as a result of the new map. Perhaps the highest profile congressional contest is the Republican primary battle between longtime U.S. Rep. Don Manzullo of Egan and freshman U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Manteno.
On the Democratic side, former Congressman Bill Foster of Naperville is running again in a new district after losing to U.S. Rep. Randy Hultgren of Winfield in the 2010 Republican wave. Foster has primary opponents, and all hope for a chance to challenge U.S. Rep. Judy Biggert of Hinsdale.
And Iraq war veteran Tammy Duckworth of Hoffman Estates and former Illinois comptroller candidate Raja Krishnamoorthi will square off in a primary for a Democratic congressional nomination, too. The winner will take on Republican U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh, a McHenry Tea Party-backed candidate who made news when he switched districts to avoid a primary race against Hultgren.
While it’s easy to see what the big conflicts will be for both the congressional and legislative maps in 2012, the electoral picture can get hazier as the map gets older. Over the next 10 years, the demographics of the state will change, so mapmakers had to try to predict what kinds of changes are coming and how they might affect candidates years from now.
“You’re making your tradeoffs between incumbents and winning the next election and what the demographics are going to look like 10 years from now,” Redfield says.
“There’s science here. And art.”
Predictions could have been especially tough this time. Mapmakers can use statistics from previous elections to try to understand where Republican and Democratic voters live. But the last 10 years have brought a number of wave elections, where one party or the other received uncommonly strong support that could skew the numbers.
In 2006 and 2008, Democrats rode national Democratic waves to big wins in both legislative and congressional races in Illinois.
In 2010, the wave went the other direction, leading to big Republican gains in the Illinois House downstate and several seat pickups in Congress. Those waves are reminders that mapmaking, as Redfield says, isn’t infallible.
Democratic Sen. Kwame Raoul of Chicago took a lot of the criticism from opponents who called the new maps too geared toward getting Democrats elected at the expense of Republicans. He sponsored the legislation to draw the maps.
Raoul expects his fellow Democrats to do well in 2012. “But the map doesn’t have everything to do with that.”
Mike Riopell covers the Statehouse for the suburban Chicago Daily Herald.
Illinois Issues, February 2012
