The Illinois GOP’s last chance to head-off its next embarrassing election disaster

“Progress never comes from those satisfied with the failures of a broken system. It comes from those who want to fix the broken system. . . . Change is never easy. And the closer you get to success, the more ferociously those with a vested interest in the past will resist you. . . . You have to break the system a little bit and follow your own instincts. But if your vision is right, nothing will hold you down. Nothing.” -- From President Trump’s Commencement Address to graduates of the University of Alabama, May 1, 2025

A principal reason Donald Trump has earned (and deserves) so much love and loyalty is because he’s given a voice to millions of Americans who never had a voice before.

President Trump not only gives previously forgotten Americans a voice and a seat at the table -- he also gives them respect. And the man has continued working his ass off for us night and day, even after a lunatic shot him in the face last year.

The Illinois Republican Party inexplicably decided some time ago to go a different way. And with predictably disastrous results.

It’s been over a decade now since a Republican won a statewide office in Illinois. We’re down to holding only 3 of the state’s 17 U.S. House seats, and the GOP in the state legislature has been largely irrelevant for years, with the Democrats holding a super-majority of seats in both chambers in Springfield.

For as long as most can remember, Illinois elections have meant the Illinois GOP does horribly and Republicans then sit around consoling themselves with “well, there’s no place to go but up, we’ve hit rock bottom.”

And then just 2 years later in the next election the Illinois GOP finds a way to lose still more ground and seats to the Illinois Democrats.

We’re still on that identical track for the election next year. A blind man can see it.

The problem is the Illinois Republican Party is still clinging to a broken system – exactly the kind of broken system Donald Trump told those Alabama graduates to be on the lookout for as the President launched them off into the world last month.

Back in 1986, state GOP party bosses arrogantly decided to consolidate their power by disenfranchising their own voters. Rank-and-file Republican voters before that time directly elected the members of the Illinois Republican Party’s governing board – just like every shareholder gets to directly elect the members of a corporation’s board of directors.

Back in the 1980s, Illinois was a Red State and the party bosses probably figured it wouldn’t matter if Republican voters had their seat at the state party table taken away. The bosses just wanted to make it easier for themselves to control the money and the candidates for the public offices they cared about.

But direct elections would sometimes result in independent minded Republicans from the grassroots making it onto the state party’s governing board where they would often resist the idea of being just a rubber-stamp for the bosses.

So the party bosses eventually said screw that noise and force-fed a new cockamamie system on us that took our vote and our voice away in our own state GOP.

You can read more about that self-inflicted catastrophe HERE.

Anyone who says this isn’t a big deal simply doesn’t know what they are talking about.

The way the senior officials who manage an organization are selected is extremely important. It’s all about accountability. The boss system we have now is a disaster. It’s why no corporation in its right mind would try to disenfranchise its own shareholders. For one thing the corporation would immediately go out of business. And beyond that the officials who tried would face enormous civil penalties and would likely go to prison.

But here in the political world of Illinois, selfish, lazy, and grossly incompetent Boss Hogg wannabes are still getting away with it – and they don’t seem to care how many elections the Democrats win as long as they get to have a title and feel important.

The Republican Party in Illinois, like in every state, is full of truly decent, successful, and intelligent people in every occupation and profession. In a business context in the private sector we would never tolerate self-dealing insiders who attempted to remove accountability for themselves, certainly not if it were at a company in which we owned stock. We’re supposedly all capitalists after all.

That’s why it’s so embarrassing for each and every Republican in Illinois when they realize that it is OUR state party which idiotically adopted, and which some misfits still viciously defend for purely selfish reasons, a system that can only be compared to the Politburo of the Soviet Union of old.

Meanwhile, it’s the Illinois Democrats (they’ve kept direct elections for their state party’s senior governing board) who have the system which exactly parallels how EVERY American corporation functions.

Again, we had that same system too, but GOP bosses purged the right of Republican voters to vote in their state party when they found listening to their constituents too bothersome.

Yes, I know, the Illinois Democrats are beyond horrible and they are destroying the state, blah, blah, blah. That’s not news. We all know that and have heard the whining a million times. But guess what, their state party leadership listens to their voters and they are advancing their voters’ agenda every single day, and on every front.

The reality is the Illinois Democrats continue to run circles around the Illinois Republican Party which remains hobbled by a few senior titleholders whose biggest concern seems to be keeping Republican voters from voting in the Republican Party.

I will go as far as to say the Illinois GOP is never going to win a statewide election again until we restore the vote and accountability to the Illinois Republican Party.

In other words, the Illinois Republican Party is going to keep sucking at this whole democracy thing until we deliver democracy to the Illinois Republican Party.

It’s long past time we gave the Illinois Republican Party back to Republican voters. The obsolete Boss Hogg a/k/a Soviet Politburo system has been a complete and utter disaster, and yet we still have a few people sitting around pretending the GOP has political capital left to piss away in Illinois.

News flash, we don’t.

I’ll give some specific examples in a future piece of the lies and betrayals I’ve personally witnessed from Boss Hogg wannabes who have had to go to great lengths to keep an atrociously failed system in place – all at the expense of their credibility and OUR party.

We’re talking mostly about people of no particular accomplishment in life who fear they would never get one of the big state party titles if Republican voters had any meaningful say about it.

And on that point at least, they are no doubt correct.

But that’s what happens with a system where accountability is eliminated. Selfish actors are able to put their own interests ahead of yours, the stakeholder, who would actually like to beat the Democrats in this state once in awhile.

The good news is we can restore the vote and go back to direct elections via majority vote of the delegates at a state convention.

I’ve been urging State Party Chair Kathy Salvi to call a special state convention this summer so we can finally get it done. I urge you to do the same. Kathy is publicly on record as being FOR restoring direct elections. Let’s see if she has the leadership skills to make history and put the organization she chairs on track. At least half-a-dozen of her immediate predecessors over just the past 2 decades have been miserable failures, so it would be nice to see Kathy Salvi succeed.

We made a big push to restore direct elections at the regular state convention held last year over Memorial Day Weekend (the law requires the Illinois GOP to hold a state convention only once every four years and the Boss Hoggs prefer to do only the absolute legally required minimum for obvious reasons).

A resolution that would have restored our vote was all ready to go. If approved by a majority of the delegates at last year’s state convention our state party would be back on track today instead of just racing towards the next trainwreck.

But the delegates never got the opportunity to vote on the resolution. Before it could get to the convention floor for a vote by all the delegates it first had to pass out of a subcommittee on the first day of the convention. So the Boss Hoggs who controlled the subcommittee picks simply packed that subcommittee with their lickspittles who obeyed their marching orders and smothered democracy in the crib. The subcommittee refused to even send the resolution to the floor for consideration by the delegates.

The clear message sent was that the Illinois Republican Party is so hostile to democracy and accountability that it wouldn’t even allow state convention delegates to vote on whether Republican voters should have a vote again.

This is clearly not a state party that’s serious about winning, and that’s not going to change until accountability is restored.

I mean God help these misfits next year when Donald Trump isn’t on the ballot. Trump brought a lot of new voters over to the GOP and they’ll keep supporting him. But those new Trump voters certainly aren’t sticking around for local yokels who disrespect their own party’s voters and who are even willing to go to the extreme of rigging a state convention just to protect a failed system that shields useless players from accountability.

You can see who thus far SUPPORTS and who OPPOSES restoring our vote HERE.

If you’re an Illinois Republican, I invite you to also sign on. Just send an email with your name and Support or Oppose preference to restoredirectelections@mail.com. Or you can text me at 312.648.0061.