President-elect Donald Trump has delivered one of the best Republican showings in Illinois in recent memory, with several key trends driving the progress.
While Vice President Kamala Harris won Illinois in Tuesday's election, her margin of victory was the smallest for a Democrat in decades. With 91% of precincts reporting, Harris was up by 432,880 votes, an 8.2-point lead, according to NBC News.
The margin is the smallest of any winning candidate in Illinois since George H.W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis in the 1988 election, winning by just over two points.
Bush's win also marked the last time a Republican won a presidential race in Illinois, where Bill Clinton's 1992 win led to a string of nine straight Democratic victories in the state.
Trump captured three Chicago-area counties, with McHenry, LaSalle and Kankakee each carrying majorities in his campaign.
House Republican Leader Tony McCombie expressed pleasure with Trump's performance in Illinois and nationally, and pointed to Harris' rise to the nomination ahead of the Democratic National Convention as something likely to anger liberal voters.
“She did not outperform Biden in any part of the country,” she said. “They should have had an open primary, and that didn't happen. There are a lot of disenfranchised Democrats, and they're making a point.”
Chicago Ald. Nick Sposato, who displayed a Trump flag in City Council chambers on Wednesday, echoed those sentiments, echoing conversations he had with Democrats in the run-up to the election.
“I think they are tired of the four years of Biden and Harris,” he said. “I don't think they believe in them.”
In addition to low voter turnout on the Democratic side, the younger demographic has turned strongly toward Trump.
“I think this reflects the fact that we have young conservative women and men living in a different ecosystem than their counterparts on the liberal side,” said strategist Jordan Abudayyeh. “Especially with men, I think they're not affiliated with a particular party. I think what they're describing is the podcasts and social media that they consume that tell the story of being a stronger man or providing for a family, which are things they don't think they can do in this current economy.”
Those economic concerns helped drive voters to the polls in the 2024 election, and McCombie said concerns about Trump's reckless behavior and his high-profile clashes with Democrats and the media did not trump those concerns about kitchen table issues.
“The federal side takes up a lot of the room, but we have things we have to work on here in Illinois. Whether it's President Trump or Harris, it doesn't impact our property taxes,” she added. “We have to focus on that, because those are the three most important “Issues in the state, and sometimes we have to leave behind the noise, because we have to pay attention to what's going on here.”
Economic issues may also have helped push Latino male voters to Trump's side, as the president-elect boosted his performance in that group by more than 15% during the 2020 election, Abudayyeh said.
“The Latino community is not a monolith. Just as we have educated and uneducated white voters, and suburban and rural voters, we have that in the Latino community, and sometimes when you talk to the Latino community, you talk to them as one entity,” she said.
