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The collar counties, which got the once rabidly conservative Tribune, and were outside the control of the Daley machine, and hated it, tended once to be once of the most GOP places in the US. The Trib has gone liberal, the Daley machine has gone soft and fuzzy and large non corrupt, with a more upscale cultural image, and the collar counties no longer give those mega GOP margins, to check Cook County, and thus Illinois has become rock solid Dem. The Chicago metro area now votes like the Philly metro area, in fact a bit more lib, so it has a bit of NYC metro area mixed in. It is so over for the GOP in Illinois, until the matrix of salient issues changes.