DuPage County was ALWAYS reliably Republican and a big "counter vote" to Cook, even when the rest of the state went RAT. Due to nonstop Obama-is-the-messiah propaganda and Obama having the advantage as the sitting Senator from Illinois, he managed to win DuPage over McCain in 2008. Obama got 54% and McCain got 44%. At the time, a lot of DuPage Republicans swore up and down that the numbers were fixed and there was NO WAY Obama did so well in DuPage.
8 years later in 2016, Hilderbeast (who is NOT an incumbent politician hold office in Illinois and was nowhere NEAR as "popular" as Obama was in 2016 and even a lot of Illinois RATs were sick of her) won DuPage handily and crushed Trump 54%-38% in DuPage. I predicted Hilderbeast would win statewide easily, I DID NOT predict she'd win DuPage easily. Pretty much every county office there is held by a Republican, the national equivalent would be Hilderbeast winning Alabama by 10 points or something. Look at Naperville Township, that's pretty much as GOP as it gets for a big populated area of Illinois (lots of conservative young families living out there). Hilderbeast beat Trump 2-to-1 there.
Lake County was just as bad, it was about 60%-Obama, 40%-McCain during the RAT high water mark of 2008, after nonstop Obama-is-the-messiah love fests in Illinois. Contrast that to 2016, and the far LESS popular Hilderbeast beat Trump by nearly a 20-point margin there, he barely mustered 36% in Lake. Go back to the early 2000's, and both Al Gore AND John Kerry failed to beat Bush in Lake County.
I sincerely hope that the collar counties love for Hilderbeast is a one-time fluke and not some future pattern for statewide elections. I'd hate to see the likes of J.D. Prickler's "best numbers" coming from "Republican" DuPage next year. The collars are big population centers of the state and if we lose them, we can forget about winning statewide. We pretty much need all five of 'em to offset the RATs carrying Crook easily.
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The vote is always fixed in Illinois, I’m sure Romney actually carried DuPage. But Obama’s margin in 2008 was too large for him not to actually have carried it.
Kirk didn’t win DuPage or Lake either. He would have if he wasn’t getting eaten alive. These counties are trending rat, but Republcians in competetive races still win them. Munger won them, but her margins were not impressive, less than 5 points in Lake, 11 in DuPage. 3 in Will (which trended GOP in the POTUS race). We need to make some recovery in these White collar burbs. If Trump can do that nationwide and hold his blue collar gains, he’s reelected.