ELECTION 2004: Illinois

DFU

[doug from upland]

Put info and links about Illinois here.

[Fu-fu2]

There were no Dem signs by us either, nor the usual suspects in front of the polling place handing out literature. I have a lifetime of experience with Cook County Dem politics, they would never leave anything to chance. I think they have all been bused up to Wisconsin and Michigan for the day. Alot of new election judges this year. Maybe they've been left behind to "take care of things."

[labral]

Literature? I don't know about...they usually put it on my front door, which I never use. I had a 'call' from Laura Bush and one from Ray LaHood, however.

I work at a school in Pekin that is a polling place. There's been a huge turnout today (I can watch the cars pull in and out) mostly do to a tax referendum, but still....I can only hope

[justshutupandtakeit]

NW side Chicago- There is a remarkable lack of RAT signs in the area not even 1/10th of what is there in other elections. No precinct captains coming around no literature left at front door.

From all evidence Daley doesn't know there is a presidential election underway. Have not heard one peep from him about this election, no endorsement of Kerry nothing. Very odd.

Will vote this afternoon so can't tell about turnout. Overcast weather but not raining at the moment.

[stlnative]

Yes I am Chester (well outside the city limits) - I am a registered democrat - but switched parties after 9/11, so I am another party jumper here in Illinois - I voted Bush, as well as republican for the rest on the ballot today!

I love W and I am ashamed that I was ever a Democrat! (9/11 and FreeRepublic has really opened my eyes, plus maturing over the years has helped.)

I am really surprised by all the Bush and Republican signs I am seeing here in Randolph County. I am hoping for a big surprise on the outcome of popular vote in Illinois. I would love to see BUSH win IL. (but I am not holding my breath.)

BTW - I am a transplant in IL, I grew up in St. Louis and moved here in 1994 due to my husband being transferred here. We are going back to STL after he retires in about 5 years.

I go down to Carbondale all the time and cut through Murphysboro.

It is nice to meet, ya!

[EternalVigilance]

You're right.

And our folks on the NW side have done a real good job.

[MossbergPump]

Voted - Chicago River North Area 42nd Ward
Huge, slow line... 1.5 hour wait.
Punchcard system, but instructions warn about chad.
No ID required.
Ignored the "Verification of Registration" card I brought with me.
They just compared my signature to the one on file from registration... seems kinda loosey goosey to me.
No ghouls standing in line, so they must have voted absentee.

[MomwithHope]

I'm in Michigan but I just got off the phone with my 82 year old Republican mom in Chicago. My brother took her to the polls, he is a liberal college professor who voted for Nader last time. HE VOTED FOR BUSH! All I can say is if he voted for Bush there is hope in Illinois. Just had to share that.

[cookcounty]

Des Plaines (last few years 50-50 area), no lines, but steady-stream.

We voted using the choice of Cook Coubty Democrats:

THE BUTTERFLY BALLOT

[justshutupandtakeit]

Will be leaving in a few minutes to vote. WoooHooo.

[EternalVigilance]

That's great! Hope he voted Keyes as well...

[BlessedBeGod]

Voted about 1:15 in Palatine (NW suburb), which is Republican territory. Just a handful of voters there. Seemed very disorganized, unlike previous elections. Didn't recognize any of the election judges, but I've always voted in the evening in the past so maybe another shift will have come on by then. No B.S was going on outside.

[Chi-One]

Just voted in Skokie. Very heavily dem,socialists, nearly all senior citizens. In & out in 20 min.Just showed my voters reg card and signed.

Go Bush!

[Chani]

Illinois bump :)

[bubbleb]

Was told we have record breaking turnout in my little predominantly Republican village of "Most Beautiful Homes";) It is great!

[Velveeta]

Thanks to the Texan for the Illinois bump. :-)

[Chani]

I'm slummin in lots of other states. ;)

[MomwithHope]

I know my mom voted for Keyes.

[unspun]

Thanks, Doug<

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/election2004/story/5B1BBFF1D6D10A7A86256F410051D4DD?OpenDocument&Headline=BARACK+OBAMA%3A+Democrats%E2%80%99+rising+star+has+rousing+victory++

BARACK OBAMA: Democrats&#8217; rising star has rousing victory

By Kevin McDermott

Post-Dispatch Springfield Bureau

11/03/2004

CHICAGO - Barack Obama, the Harvard-educated son of a Kansas mother and a Kenyan father, will become America's only black U.S. senator next year, after an apparently unprecedented election triumph Tuesday over conservative Republican firebrand Alan Keyes.

With 83 percent of Illinois' precincts reporting, Obama was leading statewide with 71 percent of the vote, to Keyes' 26 percent.

Obama's geographic sweep was almost complete, with Keyes poised to win just 11 of Illinois' 102 counties - most of them in the lightly populated rural area of southeastern Illinois. Voters in both Madison and St. Clair counties were supporting the Democrat by more than 2-to-1 in partial returns.

The Obama-Keyes battle made history even before the polls opened, as the first Senate contest in United States history in which both major-party candidates were black. In his victory speech from the Hyatt Regency in Chicago on Tuesday night, Obama reminded supporters that people early on were skeptical that "someone who looked like me" could reach the Senate.

"Now . . . we stand here as one people . . . proclaiming ourselves to be one America," Obama told about 2,000 cheering supporters. "What a magnificent gift that is to the nation."

The seat was opened up by the decision of incumbent U.S. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, R-Ill., not to run for a second term. Keyes, a nationally known conservative radio commentator from Maryland, moved to Illinois this year to run for the seat, with a campaign that touted social views far right of traditionally moderate Illinois voters.

For months, the heaviest support for Keyes' campaign could be seen in forests of yard signs that dotted the farmland throughout of Southern Illinois. Partial election returns indicate that most of the support Keyes did receive came from a swath of heavily rural counties in southeastern Illinois, including Clay, Cumberland, Effingham, Richland and Wayne counties.

In his concession speech to supporters at the Chicago Hilton, Keyes ended the campaign with the same heavily religious themes he began it with this summer, when he promised "a victory for God."

"We have fought the good fight, we have finished the race, we have kept the faith," Keyes said. He thanked supporters who worked for him "not because there was something in it for them, but because there was something in it for God."

According to exit polling, Obama's overwhelming victory cut deep into subsets of voters who traditionally favor conservatives. Even voters who identified themselves as Christians - people Keyes fervently wooed in his openly Christian-based campaign - went to Obama 61 to 38 percent.

Perhaps most telling was that Keyes got just 59 percent support from people who voted Tuesday for Republican President George W. Bush.

"Normally, you get (at least) 30 percent of the vote (in Illinois) if you just stick anybody on the ballot as a Republican," said Kent Redfield, political scientist the University of Illinois at Springfield. Keyes, he said, "effectively has driven away half of what would normally be the Republican base."

Moderate Republicans had warned for months that Keyes' relentless focus on conservative social issues would hurt him with the state's generally moderate Republicans. Judy Baar Topinka, Illinois' Republican state party chairwoman and a moderate critic of the party's decision to draft Keyes, said Tuesday that his disastrous showing should be a signal to her party's conservative wing.

"They wanted this guy, because they thought he would energize the base . . . I don't think that happened," Topinka said in a televised interview. "It leaves us, ultimately, with the knowledge that you have to be center-right to win in the Republican Party" in Illinois.

Obama will become the fifth African-American senator in history, and the third to be seated since Reconstruction. He will assume the Senate seat that was held in the mid-1990s by Carol Moseley Braun - who also is black - and will be the only African-American currently in the Senate.

That status will make Obama one of the nation's top voices for racial issues, "whether he wants to accept that or not," predicted Redfield, the political scientist.

But Obama's political capital as he heads for Washington extends beyond race. His well-received keynote speech to the Democrat National Convention in Boston last summer put him in the national spotlight as one of the party's rising stars. As a result, in the final weeks of the campaign, he was invited all over the country to stump for follow Democrats running for office in other states and for the Kerry-Edwards presidential ticket, a role unheard of for a candidate who hadn't won a major office.

"It's unusual," U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., a political mentor to Obama during the campaign, said late Tuesday in Chicago. "All the senators know him . . . He has reached out to help so many senators. He'll walk through the doors with a lot of friends."

There has been a notable role of luck in Obama's rise, with missteps by opponents all around him. "We've had some good breaks in this campaign, there's no doubt about it," Obama told his supporters in Chicago late Tuesday.

Obama decided to run for the office early on, before anyone knew that Fitzgerald would step down after one term, opening up a scramble for the seat. The state GOP's top names, including Topinka, all declined to run for various reasons, leaving the Republican field to lesser-known candidates.

One of them, Chicago millionaire Jack Ryan, won the GOP nomination and appeared to be growing into a formidable candidate. But he was forced to leave the ballot amid claims in his divorce file that he had tricked and coerced his ex-wife, actress Jeri Ryan, into attending "bizarre" sex clubs.

In the Democratic primaries, the support of one-time front-runner Blair Hull evaporated after claims arose that he had hit his ex-wife. That and a surprisingly lackluster campaign by state Comptroller Dan Hynes, the favorite among Democratic Party leaders, cleared the way for Obama's nomination.

Later, state Republican leaders, hoping to match the star power Obama was gaining after his convention speech, recruited Keyes to move here and oppose him.

But Keyes' stated strategy of garnering free media attention by making provocative public comments backfired several times. In New York for the Republican National Convention, he briefly derailed the GOP's message of unity by calling Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter a "selfish hedonist" because she is a lesbian. He suggested that even gun laws against automatic weapons are invalid, and that the constitutional separation of church and state is a myth.

On Sunday, he created a last-minute firestorm by saying that any Roman Catholic who voted for Obama was committing a mortal sin because of Obama's support of abortion rights.


Reporter Kevin McDermott
E-mail: kmcdermott@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 217-782-4912&#63640;

[doug from upland]

I hope these threads for each state helped everyone. It allowed me to keep checking state by state to see what was happening.