Your best bet for getting grassroots power to change the laws in Illinois will be downstate, I think. Once you get south of Urbana/Normal the state is heavily conservative, except for Carbondale. Even Paul Simon hardly ever got any votes downstate, even in Makanda. His power base was Carbondale liberal professors at SIU and the Daley machine in Chicago.
Many of the downstaters are waiting for the Republican party to run a real Republican candidate instead of the RINOs that have been running for the last 30 years.
I know that my grandparents have been holding their noses to vote Republican for a long time now.
Knitebane