Illinois

The Republican and Democratic parties have been the only major political groups in Illinois since the 1850s. Illinois is a closely balanced state, with a slight Republican predominance from 1860 to 1930 giving way in seesaw fashion to a highly competitive situation statewide. In Chicago and Cook County, an equally balanced division before 1930 gave way to heavy Democratic predominance forged during the New Deal.

The Democrats, organized by patronage-hungry followers of President Andrew Jackson in the 1830s, dominated state politics to the mid-1850s. They appealed to subsistence farmers, former Southerners, and poor Catholic immigrants. Though they advocated minimal government intervention, Democratic officials were eager for the patronage and inside deals available in a fast-growing state. Their outstanding leader, Stephen Douglas, became a major national figure in the 1850s, but never lost touch with his base of support. After Douglas died in 1861, many Illinois Democrats began to oppose the conduct of the Civil War and became stigmatized as "Copperheads." The success of the Republican war policies left the Democrats in confusion in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Negative attitudes toward blacks, banks, railroads, and prohibition kept a large minority of Illinoisans in the Democratic fold, while the influx of Catholic immigrants replenished the party's voter base. However, the administration of Governor Altgeld (1893–97), coinciding with a deep depression and labor unrest, split the party, and only one other Democrat held the governorship between 1852 and 1932. The intraparty balance between Chicago and downstate changed with the rise of the powerful Cook County Democratic organization in the 1930s. Built by Mayor Anton Cermak and continued from 1955 to 1976 by six-term Mayor Richard J. Daley, the Chicago Democratic machine totally controlled the city, dominated the state party, and exerted enormous power at the national level. However, the machine lost its clout with the election in 1979 of independent Democrat Jane Byrne as Chicago's first woman mayor, and again in 1983 when Harold Washington became its first black mayor. Although Richard Daley's son, also named Richard Daley, won the mayoralty in 1989, the machine has never recovered the power it once enjoyed. Richard Daley was elected to his fifth consecutive term as mayor in 2003.

The Republican Party, born amid the political chaos of the 1850s, brought together most former Whigs and some Democrats who favored industrialization and opposed slavery. Abraham Lincoln, aided by many talented lieutenants, forged a coalition of commercial farmers, businessmen, evangelical Protestants, skilled craftsmen, professionals, and later, patronage holders and army veterans. Ridiculing the Democrats' alleged parochialism, the GOP called for vigorous prosecution of the Civil War and Reconstruction and for an active policy of promoting economic growth by encouraging railroads and raising tariffs. However, such moralistic crusades as the fight for prohibition frequently alienated large voting blocs (especially the Germans) from the Republicans.

In the early 20th century, Republican politicians built their own ward machines in Chicago and succumbed to corruption. William "Big Bill" Thompson, Chicago's Republican mayor in the 1910s and 1920s, openly allied himself with the gangster Al Capone. Moralistic Republicans, who were strongest in the smaller towns, struggled to regain control of their party. They succeeded in the 1930s, when the Republican political machines in Chicago collapsed or switched their allegiance to the Democrats.

Since then, the Republicans have become uniformly a party of the middle and upper-middle classes, hostile to machine politics, welfare, and high taxes, but favorable to business, education, and environmental protection. Although the GOP has a stronger formal organization in Illinois than in most other states, its

Illinois Presidential Vote by Political Parties, 1948–2000

YEAR	ELECTORAL VOTE	ILLINOIS WINNER	DEMOCRAT	REPUBLICAN	SOCIALIST LABOR	PROHIBITION	COMMUNIST	SOCIALIST
* Won US presidential election.
1948	28	*Truman (D)	1,994,715	1,961,103	3,118	11,959	—	11,522
1952	27	*Eisenhower (R)	2,013,920	2,457,327	9,363	—	—	—
1956	27	*Eisenhower (R)	1,775,682	2,623,327	8,342	—	—	—
1960	27	*Kennedy (D)	2,377,846	2,368,988	10,560	—	—	—
1964	26	*Johnson (D)	2,796,833	1,905,946	—	—	—	—
						AMERICAN IND.
1968	26	*Nixon (R)	2,039,814	2,174,774	13,878	390,958	—	—
						AMERICAN
1972	26	*Nixon (R)	1,913,472	2,788,179	12,344	2,471	4,541	—
						LIBERTARIAN		SOC. WORKERS
1976	26	Ford (R)	2,271,295	2,364,269	2,422	8,057	9,250	3,615
					citizens
1980	26	*Reagan (R)	1,981,413	2,358,094	10,692	38,939	9,711	1,302
1984	24	*Reagan (R)	2,086,499	2,707,103	2,716	10,086	—	—
1988	24	*Bush (R)	2,215,940	2,310,939	10,276	14,944	—	—
					NEW ALLIANCE		IND. (Perot)	POPULIST
1992	22	*Clinton (D)	2,453,350	1,734,096	5,267	9,218	840,515	3,577
1996	22	*Clinton (D)	2,341,744	1,587,021	–	22,548	346,408	—
					GREEN		(Buchanan)
2000	22	Gore (D)	2,589,026	2,019,421	103,759	11,623	16,106	—

leading candidates have exuded an aura of independence. Republican James R. Thompson, elected to the governorship in 1976 and reelected in 1978 and 1982, served in that office longer than any other. Thompson was followed by Republican Jim Edgar in 1990. In November 1998 Illinois voters elected Republican George H. Ryan for governor, but his administration was dogged by controversy surrounding licensing of truck drivers when Ryan served as secretary of state, and he served only one term. Democrat Rod R. Blagojevich was elected governor in 2002.

The Whigs usually ran a close second to the Democrats from 1832 to 1852. Taken over in the 1840s by a group of professional organizers under Lincoln's leadership, the Whigs simply vanished after their crushing defeat in 1852. Notable among the smaller parties was the Native American ("Know-Nothing") Party, which controlled Chicago briefly in the 1850s. The Prohibitionists, Greenbackers, Union Labor, and Populist parties were weak forces in late-19th-century Illinois. The Socialist Party, strongest among coal miners and central European immigrants, grew to a minor force in the early 20th century and elected the mayor of Rockford for many years.

Illinois provided two important leaders of the national GOP in the 1860s—Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. The only major-party presidential nominee from the state between 1872 and 1976, however, was Governor Adlai Stevenson, the unsuccessful Democratic candidate in 1952 and 1956. In 1980, three native-born Illinoisans pursued the Republican Party nomination. The first, US Representative Philip Crane, was the earliest to declare his candidacy but failed in the primaries. The second, US Representative John Anderson, dropped out of the GOP primaries to pursue an independent candidacy, ultimately winning more than 6% of the popular vote nationally and in Illinois, but no electoral votes. The third, Ronald Reagan, a native of Tampico, won both the Republican nomination and the November election, becoming the 40th president of the US; he was elected by a heavy majority of Illinois voters in 1980 and reelected in 1984.

In the 2000 presidential election, Democrat Al Gore won 55% of the vote, Republican George W. Bush received 43%, and Green Party candidate Ralph Nader garnered 2%. In 2002 there were 7,043,557 registered voters; there is no party registration. The state had 22 electoral votes in the 2000 presidential election.

In 1996 Democratic Senator Richard J. Durbin won the race to succeed retiring US Senator Paul Simon; Durbin was reelected in 2002. Republican Peter G. Fitzgerald was elected to the US Senate in 1998. In the 1994 elections, the once powerful chairman of the US House Ways and Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski, was defeated by a relative unknown, Michael P. Flanagan. Rostenkowski, an 18-term Chicago Democrat, had been indicted on corruption charges, a fact that did not go unnoticed by an electorate already in an anti-incumbent mood. In the 2002 elections, Illinois voters sent ten Republicans and nine Democrats to the US House of Representatives. In mid-2003 there were 32 Republicans, 26 Democrats, and one independent in the state senate, and 66 Democrats and 52 Republicans in the state house. Illinois elected its first black female senator, Carol Moseley Braun, in 1992. In 2003, Braun was a candidate for the presidency.