Democrats mull next steps after GOP makes gains nationally and in Illinois
In Illinois, President-elect Donald Trump accomplished a feat no Republican presidential candidate has in more than 30 years: He turned the state a lighter shade of blue.
Illinois has voted for a Democrat in every presidential election since 1992 and did so again this year, according to NBC News projections. Democrats have won the state by double-digits in each of the previous eight elections, but this year could be different, as with 92% of the vote counted, Vice President Kamala Harris leads Trump by eight points.
Nationwide, it wasn't his win that surprised politicians and analysts, but more so the margins by which he won. In Chicago, for example, the president-elect improved his city vote from 2020 when it was just 12%. This year, it rose to 22% of the votes cast.
Trump also won the same Illinois counties this year as he did in 2020, and also flipped Winnebago County red. He improved his margins in Cook County and suburban counties like Will, Kane, DuPage, Lake, McHenry and Kendall.
During a news conference Thursday, Gov. JB Pritzker downplayed Trump's advances and pointed instead to the down-ballot races won by Democrats in Illinois.
"Democrats won every seat in the General Assembly that (we) already had, and we won in races that I think people didn't expect: county board races, taking control of the McLean County Board, for example, coroner's races. Literally, if you look, people clearly bifurcated and made decisions different down the ballot than they did at the top of the ballot," Pritzker said.
House Minority Leader Tony McCombie, a Republican from Savanna, offered a different take, pointing to what she called "disenfranchised Democrats" statewide.
"Here in Illinois, voters are exhausted over decades of one-party control. People are voting with their pocketbook," McCombie said.
Post-election, Pritzker is reluctant to suggest what Democrats must do going forward, sidestepping questions about whether the party needs to shift more toward the center and why the "Blue Wall" - which included battleground states Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania - crumbled. Trump won all three states in 2016, only to have President Joe Biden flip them in 2020. They were considered "must-win" states for Harris this year, but instead, Trump flipped them back to red, despite efforts from Illinois surrogates like Pritzker to campaign for Harris in those areas.
"I don't think we can make an analysis about ideology or some particular issue at this point," Pritzker said. "I think we'll all have some answers over the next month or two, having looked at the data and seeing why people voted as they did. But it's really a hard judgment to make a day and a half after the election."
However, his chief of staff, Anne Caprara, offered her thoughts on what's next for the Democratic Party during an event Thursday at the City Club of Chicago.
"Let's just be honest, folks: It was time for a generational shift in our party. I love Barack Obama, I love Hillary Clinton, I love the people that have built the party, but there are a lot of young new people who run different kinds of campaigns, who talk about different kinds of campaigns, who talk about different kinds of issues, who understand how to get at different elements of our electorate," Caprara said.
She added that she thought Harris ran a good campaign and her criticisms weren't aimed at her.
"One of the good things about losing is that sometimes, that forces that conversation when maybe in other circumstances it wouldn't have," Caprara said.
Certainly one of the biggest questions being asked around the country is whether Biden stepping aside sooner would have made a difference for Harris' campaign. Polls leading up to the election showed voters still reported wanting to learn more about her policies.
"Look, 107 days - I think that's how many days that Kamala Harris had to run that campaign - and so that's an extraordinarily short amount of time. She did an extraordinary job of making it as competitive as she could, but more time would have been better," Pritzker said.
When asked if she thought Democrats could learn lessons from this election, McCombie had this to say:
"(Harris) didn't outperform Biden, from what I've heard, in any part of the nation. I think that is a testament. When you're talking about democracy, they should have had an open primary. You should have let the voters choose who was the candidate and that didn't happen."
