“Illinois is next,” Pat Brady, chairman of the state Republican Party, declared. “The political environment is worse here for Democrats than it was in Massachusetts.”
Representative Mark Steven Kirk, the front-runner in the Republican primary for the Senate seat once held by President Obama, has even taken to talking like Mr. Brown.
“No one should make the mistake by calling this the Obama seat,” he said in an interview. “This is the seat of the people of Illinois.”
Democratic leaders here discount direct comparisons to Massachusetts — for starters, the election there was a special election, not a primary — and cite distinctions from this state’s candidates, voting blocs and alliances. And perhaps most of all, they mention their sense that Illinois voters still carry a special allegiance to Mr. Obama.
Still, the message from Massachusetts is resounding among Democrats, too (in interviews, several candidates quickly proclaimed themselves “outsiders”), as the party tries to hold onto the Senate seat, the governor’s mansion and a few House seats that Republicans say they are especially confident about winning.
A televised forum among the three leading Democrats for the Senate last week seemed to transform into a scuffle over which one would be least likely, come November, to repeat what happened in Massachusetts. (Along the way, they struck notes that sounded not so unlike Mr. Brown.)
One candidate, Cheryle Jackson, who led the Chicago Urban League, said the Massachusetts vote had reflected the lack of jobs and the suffering of people — “precisely,” she added, “the reason I have decided to run.”
And another candidate, David Hoffman, a former inspector general for the city of Chicago, offered this pitch for himself as a way to dodge a Massachusetts outcome: “We need to make sure that we have a nominee who is as independent as possible.”
Some argue that Mr. Kirk, as a five-term congressman and a moderate Republican with centrist-leaning views that have irked conservatives, may not benefit from voter unrest. (Democrats also have their eyes on his district in Chicago’s northern suburbs.)
“In a key way, Illinois is Massachusetts in reverse,” said Kathleen Strand, a senior adviser to Illinois for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “Here, the Republican candidate is the Washington insider that voters are angry at, not the Democrat.”
In the view of some conservatives, Mr. Kirk, who supports abortions rights, fits right in with the Democratic candidates, and, they say that while he may gain unhappy Democratic voters and center-leaning independents, he will lose the votes of a different segment — some who consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement, anti-abortion advocates and others.
Conservatives often cite Mr. Kirk’s vote in favor of cap-and-trade legislation intended to reduce carbon emissions; he has since reversed course, criticizing the legislation and saying he would vote against it as a senator. They also do not appreciate what they see as his effort to swerve to the right; some mocked his campaign for trying to win some supportive words from Sarah Palin when she was in Chicago recently.
“Mark Kirk has absolutely no Tea Party support,” said Diane Benjamin, an organizer of a Tea Party group in McLean County, two hours southwest of Chicago.
In the primary, there are several lesser known candidates, including Patrick Hughes, who has drawn support from some conservatives here and some Tea Party supporters (though not Ms. Benjamin), but analysts say opposition to Mr. Kirk has not amounted to a movement unified and motivated enough to defeat him; a Chicago Tribune poll released Monday showed Mr. Kirk with a gaping lead. (Of those Republicans polled who said they agreed with the Tea Party movement, 48 percent favored Mr. Kirk, the newspaper said.)
Some of the turmoil here is particular to Illinois. This is the first election for governor since Rod R. Blagojevich, a Democrat, was ousted as governor after prosecutors charged him with secretly trying sell the Senate seat that is now up for grabs. Senator Roland W. Burris, whom Mr. Blagojevich appointed to the seat, announced months ago that he would not run.
Democrats are queasy (and Republicans giddy) at the spectacle of Mr. Blagojevich’s federal corruption trial, set to begin here in June, coming in midcampaign.
Gov. Patrick J. Quinn, the lieutenant governor who was elevated to the state’s top job in the scandal’s fallout, and Dan Hynes, the state comptroller from a longtime Chicago political family, are battling in the Democratic primary. The Republican field is vast and relatively strong, in part, in the words of one political analyst here, because they “see blood in the water.” Among the Republicans are Andy McKenna, former chairman of the state Republican Party; Jim Ryan, a former state attorney general; and two state senators, Kirk Dillard and Bill Brady.
The economy is a theme heard everywhere, but is more pronounced here in every race. Residents complain about vanishing jobs (the state unemployment rate, at 11.1 percent, is higher than the nation’s), and about the state’s failure to fix its budget, which has a deficit some estimate at $13 billion. Illinois is failing to pay all sorts of bills and has $80 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, signs some experts cite when they put it in a class not so distinct from California.
“What we learned is that voters are incredibly angry,” said Alexi Giannoulias, the state treasurer and a friend of the president, who, according to Monday’s Tribune poll, holds a double-digit lead over other Democrats vying for the Senate seat. (Mr. Obama has made no endorsement in the primary.)
“They’re angry at what’s happening with our economy, with our lack of jobs,” Mr. Giannoulias said. “They’re angry because they feel like they’re being ignored by Washington, D.C. — ignored by Democrats and Republicans.”
Politics in Illinois was not always overwhelmed by Democrats. When Mr. Blagojevich was elected in 2002 (after a scandal that sent the Republican governor to prison), he was the first Democrat in the job in three decades. By the mid-2000s, the picture was lopsided enough that Peter G. Fitzgerald, the state’s last Republican United States senator, announced he would not seek re-election, noting that Illinois had become a “staunchly Democratic state.”
It is hard to know exactly how many of the state’s 7.5 million registered voters consider themselves Democrats or Republicans because voters do not register by party in Illinois; still, estimates from both sides say Democrats outnumber Republicans.
But at Democratic campaign events, ordinary voters say Mr. Obama remains enormously popular. The loudest complaint is that he does not come home enough. Yet some said they believed people, even here, might divorce their feelings about him from their sense of frustration about Washington.
“After Massachusetts, you can’t be sure of anything,” Doris Conant, 84, a Democrat from Chicago, said. “I hope it mobilizes people to get out and support their candidate. If we lose the Obama seat, it would be heartbreaking.”
Emma Graves Fitzsimmons contributed reporting. |
