Downstate Illinois's Chicago Blues

2019 marks the 60^th anniversary of Alaska’s admission into the Union as the 49^th state and Hawaii’s admission into the Union as the 50^th state.  1959 marks the most recent time that the United States of America admitted a new state into the Union.  Since then, the number of states has stood at 50; leading to the number of Senators remaining constant at 100.

The number of states grew on an almost constant basis between 1791 and 1912 as the United States continued to expand west to the Pacific.  For the most part, people did not take politics into account when creating the thirteen original colonies and the subsequent 37 states; usually relying on rivers as boundaries. However, the admission of Maine and Missouri into the union roughly a year and a half apart had an explicitly political purpose, designed to balance the number of slave states and free states. 

60 years after the 50-state nation became a reality, new efforts have popped up to add some new states into the Union. Since the United States has not acquired any new land recently, only by admitting one of the United States’ several territories into the union or by breaking up an existing state could the number of states increase. 

As I wrote about earlier this year, many folks in upstate New York have had enough with New York City’s domination of their state’s politics.  As such, they sought to create a bill that would split the state into three distinct regions while keeping a skeleton of the state government intact to deal with a limited number of issues such as sales taxes, and state and Federal elections. 

A proposal introduced by Republican State Representative Brad Halbrook would separate the rest of Illinois from the metropolis of Chicago, which dominates politics in the Land of Lincoln.  As The New Republic pointed out in an article called “The 61 States of America,” if Chicago became its own state, it would have voted for President Obama by a margin of nearly 50 points in 2012.  The rest of Illinois, on the other hand, would have supported Mitt Romney by a margin of 3.4 percentage points.  The New Republic’s definition of the new state of Chicago appears to include all of Cook County, which contains Chicago, and would boast 9 electoral votes.  The state of Illinois would contain the “collar counties” that surround Chicago as well as the more conservative “downstate region” and would boast 13 electoral votes.

In the 2016 Presidential Election, Hillary Clinton improved on President Obama’s performance in Illinois simply by increasing her margin in Cook County, which she won by more than 50 percentage points. Removing Cook County from the equation would have enabled President Trump to win the new state of Illinois by a margin of roughly 6.35 percentage points; making the state almost as Republican as Ohio.

Dick Durbin, one of the state’s two Democratic Senators would likely not go down without a fight if Illinois should ever decide to separate from Chicago.  Despite the fact that the Windy City furnishes the votes he needs to win his elections, Durbin hails from Springfield, the Illinois state capital, located in the southern part of the state.  Durbin could still win a statewide election in the newly configured Illinois; although Republicans, conservative Republicans would finally have a fighting chance.

Republicans have won elections in Illinois recently.  In 1998, as the Democratic Party picked up seats in three other states, Republican Peter Fitzgerald defeated first-term Democratic Senator Carol Moseley Braun in a state that had voted for President Bill Clinton twice. The tables turned in 2004, when Fitzgerald opted not to run for a second term.  Future President Barack Obama ended up winning the open seat, which he served in for four years before becoming President.  Roland Burris served as a seat-warmer until the 2010 election, where liberal Republican Congressman Mark Kirk emerged victorious over his Democratic challenger.

That same year, Republicans felt optimistic about flipping the Governor’s mansion red for the first time in eight years; as polling showed Democratic Governor Pat Quinn consistently trailing his Republican challenger, conservative State Senator Bill Brady. However, Quinn ended up pulling off a victory despite winning only four of the state’s 102 counties.  Those four counties included, you guessed it, Cook County. Despite Republicans’ failure to retake the governorship, they ended up holding 11 of the state’s 19 seats in the House of Representatives heading into the Republican majority 112th Congress.

The Democrats did their best to give themselves a huge advantage in the state’s Congressional delegation following the 2010 Census and the redistricting that went along with it.  Following the 2012 election, the state’s delegation went from 11-8 Republican to 12-6 Democratic. While Republicans picked up two House seats in the 2014 election, they lost one of their pickups in 2016 and the 2018 election saw Republicans lose two seats in the Chicago metropolitan area; giving the Democrats 13 of Illinois’s 18 seats in the House of Representatives in the 116^th Congress.

Even as the Republican Senate candidate lost to Durbin in 2014, Republicans finally recaptured the governorship; as Republican Bruce Rauner defeated Governor Quinn as he sought a second full term in office. Rauner won by nearly four percentage points, capturing every single county except for one: Cook County.

Two years later, Senator Kirk lost his re-election bid by double digits as his Democratic challenger, now-Senator Tammy Duckworth, likely benefitted enormously from Crooked Hillary’s presence at the top of the ticket.  During his tenure in the Senate, Kirk became part of the group Ann Coulter called “the 14 GOP traitors who voted for Rubio’s amnesty.”  In addition, Kirk received a 0 percent rating from Illinois Right to Life, voted against defunding Planned Parenthood, voted against banning abortions after 20 weeks, and co-sponsored an earlier version of the recently passed “Equality Act.”  In spite of his effort to pull off the “moderate Republican in a liberal state” game, Kirk still lost.

As for Rauner, conservatives quickly soured on him as soon as he signed into law Senate Bill 1584, which “requires all doctors to refer anyone requesting an abortion to a doctor who will provide one; even if it goes against their religious beliefs,” as I pointed out in one of my very first blog posts. Rauner also had to deal with a Democratic legislature, making it very difficult for him to reverse the state’s disastrous economic policies.  Rauner suffered from low approval ratings leading up to his re-election bid and barely made it out of the primary without losing to a conservative challenger.  Not surprisingly, Rauner lost by double digits to now-Governor JB Pritzker in the general election; giving Democrats complete control of the state government once again. 

Going back to the bill introduced by Halbrook, it notes that “the majority of residents in downstate Illinois disagree with City of Chicago residents on key issues such as gun ownership, abortion, (and) immigration.” Based on pure mathematics, the aforementioned “City of Chicago residents” win these battles every time.  18 of the state’s 59 Senate districts are located entirely within Cook County and every single one of them has a Democratic Senator.  In addition, 11 additional State Senate districts contain at least part of Cook County.  Only two of these districts have Republican State Senators and these districts have an infinitesimal portion of the county.  In other words, without Chicago and Cook County in the picture, the Democrats’ 40-19 edge in the Illinois State Senate would shrink considerably.  The same would likely apply to the State House, where Democrats currently enjoy a 74-44 advantage over Republicans. Halbrook himself noted that “our traditional family values seem to be under attack at every angle.”  The two most recent Republicans elected statewide, did very little to uphold those “traditional family values.”

Halbrook’s bill has attracted eight cosponsors so far, all Republicans. Splitting up Illinois and Chicago would have ramifications for both the Electoral College map as well as the makeup of the United States Senate.  The number of Senators would increase from 100 to 102, as the Constitution requires that every state have two Senators regardless of population.  That would in turn increase the number of electoral votes to 540 from the current 538; making 271 the magic number to clinch the Presidency.  Practically speaking, an Illinois independent from Chicago would likely give Republicans 13 additional electoral votes that they would not otherwise receive.  In other words, President Trump could win re-election simply by winning every state Mitt Romney won plus Florida, Ohio, Iowa, and Illinois. 

But none of this will likely go into effect in time for the 2020 Presidential Election, if at all. The bill notes that “Article IV, Section 3 of the Constitution of the United States provides in part: ‘New states may be admitted by Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.”  Halbrook’s bill has a long way to go in terms of securing the support of the Illinois State Legislature.  As for the Democrats in Congress, they will likely not go down without a fight; as they want to preserve their “blue wall,” which includes Illinois’s 20 electoral votes.  In addition, Newton’s Third Law of Motion may apply here; the second the Democrats see that conservatives have decided to admit new states into the Union for political reasons, they will surely demand that Republicans help them rebuild and expand their “blue wall” by giving statehood to Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia and maybe even go further than that by splitting up California into seven safe Democratic states.  While making the District of Columbia a state would have no effect on the Electoral College calculus, it would give Democrats two safe Senate seat and another safe seat in the House of Representatives.  Adding Puerto Rico to the Union would likely help the Democrats in the Electoral College, the Senate, and the House of Representatives; although the island’s voting preferences remain unclear since it has never voted in a Presidential election; unlike the District of Columbia.

Considering the fact that this article deals with the prospect of state secession just like the article I wrote earlier this year about “Three New Yorks,” it makes sense to end it the same way; while changing just one word, highlighted in bold: Regardless of whether or not Halbrook’s proposal ends up taking off, it remains perfectly clear that the battles between big cities and small towns, globalism and nationalism, conservatism and liberalism, establishment and anti-establishment will continue at the state, national, and even global level.  These battles will take place as part of the broader culture war that has engulfed America and western civilization as a whole for the past half-century.