Tom Kacich: Champaign County GOP hits its nadir

Nov. 17—Champaign County Republicans have seen the heights and now the depths.

For most of the county's history, the GOP was so dominant that it held virtually all of the countywide offices, controlled the county board of supervisors and later, the county board, and regularly sent Republicans to the Statehouse and Capitol Hill.

In the aftermath of this month's election, however, Republicans will hold no countywide offices (the coroner's office, in recent years the only GOP-held office, has gone to Democrat Laurie Brauer), and will be a small minority on the county board. That's never happened before in the county's 181-year history.

In the 1960s, Republicans in Champaign County were as commanding as Democrats are today.

In 1968, Republicans had an enormous advantage on the old 50-member county board of supervisors and held every countywide office.

Those officeholders — all White males — were Republican county Clerk John Hill, Circuit Clerk Virgil Burgess, Recorder Robert Martin, Sheriff Russ Chaney, State's Attorney John Bresee, Treasurer William Baker, Auditor Donald Harry and Coroner Charles Heath.

Further, the area's representative in Congress was William Springer, a Republican from Champaign. (Illinois' two senators were Republicans Everett Dirksen and Charles Percy). Republican Virgil Wikoff, later a state representative, was mayor of Champaign. Republican Stan Weaver, later a state senator, was mayor of Urbana.

The four local state legislators were Republican state Sen. Everett Peters of St. Joseph and state Reps. Charles Clabaugh and Edwin Dale, both Champaign Republicans, and Paul Stone, a Democrat from Sullivan. Stone broke up the all-Republican club only because at the time, Illinois had three representatives for every House district, and one had to be a member of the minority party.

Little by little, mostly the result of women finding a welcome home in the Democratic Party and, to a lesser degree, the influence of University of Illinois students, the Republican hold on political offices in Champaign-Urbana and Champaign County began to erode.

A Democratic state's attorney, Larry Johnson, was elected in 1968. Later came Democratic auditors and recorders. Democrat Julia Rietz was elected state's attorney in 2004. In 2018, three offices — sheriff, clerk and treasurer — switched from Republican to Democrat. The circuit clerk's office flipped in 2020, and the coroner's office followed this year.

Champaign County's political reversal is much like the change that has occurred in suburban Chicago. Counties that were solid red 40 or 50 years ago are solid blue today. Ronald Reagan won every metro Chicago county in 1980, including 58 percent in Lake County. (He got 51 percent in Champaign County). This year, Kamala Harris won every suburban county except McHenry. In Lake, she got about 60 percent, the same as Champaign.

Republicans can recover in these Illinois counties, but the change won't come overnight. Nor will it start while the GOP is the party of Trump.

Election nitty-gritty

Champaign County Clerk and Recorder Aaron Ammons said he's done "a little bit of debriefing" following the election and had these thoughts:

* He was pleased with the number of early votes cast but still would like to see more vote-by-mail ballots cast in Champaign County. The unofficial total vote stands at 90,653. There were 39,831 early in-person votes, 32,899 Election Day votes and, as of now, 17,923 votes cast by mail.

"About 55,000 voted early or by mail," Ammons said. "The 39,000 or so who voted early was tremendous. I thought the turnout would be between 96,000 and 97,000. I was hoping we would eclipse the 96,000 (in 2020). But the turnout was down everywhere, especially for Democrats.

"But I'd like the vote-by-mail numbers to be higher. I heard from a lot of people standing in line to vote that they regretted not voting by mail."

* He hopes to work with the University of Illinois and student groups to expand voter-registration opportunities among students so that registration bottlenecks can be avoided both on Election Day and in early voting.

"I have been working with the university where we were trying to get more students to register during Quad Day or welcome day," he said. "But we only got a couple hundred people registered that day. We don't really get to the thousands that we need to get to in order to avoid these same-day registration bottlenecks.

"If you're already registered in Champaign County and you go to an election judge and give them your name and address, that whole process might take two minutes. (With same-day registration) I have to find your address, see your ID, put in all the information we have to put in, that process turns into four or five minutes. Or it can take longer if you have an election judge who is new and isn't comfortable with this process. The average age of our election judges is 67 to 70 years, so they're not born into IT the way that some others are."

The bottleneck at some campus polling places was so bad that people stayed in line for hours to vote on Election Day and the process finally ended after 10:30 p.m., Ammons said.

* Those long lines at the campus precincts are the reason Ammons does not release partial returns on Election Day as past county clerks have. Champaign County didn't report any election results until after 11 p.m.

"I was told with this election by an attorney who does election law not to post any results until the last person in line has voted," he said. "You don't want a situation where a voter in line could be influenced by hearing" the early returns.

* The county is still short of Republican election judges.

"There were numerous polling locations that had only one Republican judge," he said. "Over the years, we've put the responsibility of finding election judges on the clerk's office. That's where we've fallen off. These other civic organizations and the political parties have to make a more concerted effort to recruit election judges and understand the significance of that."

Election judges are paid $220 for all their Election Day work.

"I don't believe election judges do this for the money," he said. "They appreciate the stipend, but the vast majority are not doing it for the money. They enjoy the work and doing something for the community."

* He believes the county will not have a recurrence at next spring's consolidated election of the problem that led to a complete shutdown of voting for about 90 minutes at the start of Election Day. The problem was with the county's voter-registration vendor, Platinum Technology Resources, based in Batavia.

"I want the voters to understand that regardless of whether it was the vendor issue, I have to hire the vendors, I take full responsibility," Ammons said. "And I've already started the process of correcting that and making sure that we don't have that issue again."

The county's contract with Platinum expires May 31.

Harris has the record

With another batch of mail-in Champaign County ballots counted this week, Kamala Harris became the county's all-time leader among Democratic presidential candidates — on a percentage basis.

Harris' vote total increased to 54,047 (behind Joe Biden's 57,067 in 2020), but on a percentage basis, Harris is now at 60.13 percent, greater than Biden's 59.71 percent four years ago and Barack Obama's 57.57 percent in 2008. Before Obama, the best a Democratic presidential candidate had done in Champaign County was Franklin D. Roosevelt's 53 percent in 1932.

And Donald Trump's percentage in Champaign County this year has dropped to 36.58, close to the 36.42 percent he pulled in 2016.