Trump Republicans must take the reins of the Illinois GOP

“By no act or complicity of mine shall the Republican party become a mere sucked egg, all shell and no principle in it.”

– President-elect Abraham Lincoln in January 1861

That quote from Abraham Lincoln came from shortly after his election as America’s first Republican president. Lincoln would not be inaugurated until March 4 of 1861, but states were already seceding from the Union in the wake of his election in November 1860.

As President-elect, and even after his inauguration, Lincoln faced enormous pressure from many fellow members of the fledgling Republican Party who urged compromise with horribly racist Southern Democrats who not only wanted to preserve slavery — they also wanted to extend it to the Pacific Ocean, and even south into Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central & South America.

Many Republicans were telling Lincoln such a compromise was the only way to satisfy the South and avoid Civil War.

But Lincoln would have none of it. Although in 1861 he was not yet publicly onboard with the total abolition of slavery in the states where it already existed, he reminded wavering Republicans that he had just won the election on the proposition that slavery should not be expanded to new territories.

Lincoln basically let everyone know there was no way in hell the Republican Party should be negotiating against itself by making immoral concessions to the racist losers.

Ten of the eleven states that would soon constitute the Confederacy didn’t even print Lincoln’s name on their general election ballots in 1860! How’s that for Democrat election interference?

Lincoln’s resolve and steady hand stiffened the spines of the Republican milquetoasts, and the rest as they say, is history.

Today in Illinois we wrap ourselves in Lincoln in a variety of ways, and we tell ourselves we have something in common with the man. LAND OF LINCOLN of course adorns every vehicle license plate, Lincoln’s Birthday is its own state holiday, and most county Republican organizations host an annual Lincoln Day Dinner. That’s all of course well and good.

But what would Abraham Lincoln think about the Illinois Republican Party of today, that organization he dearly loved and helped found?

Well, we know Lincoln was an intelligent man, as well as a very honest man. So my strong hunch is he would give it to us straight. He would sadly observe the obvious: the Illinois Republican Party has become that “mere sucked egg, all shell and no principle in it” that he cautioned against 162 years ago.

The Illinois Republican Party must innovate, in a major way, and quickly, or I can tell you exactly what’s going to happen next year.

First the good news from my perspective. Donald Trump is going to be our presidential nominee. Any serious person has to acknowledge that’s pretty much certain at this point. And if the Democrats’ election rigging in the battleground states can be contained this time, he’ll also be POTUS again.

But that big piece of good news will only come thanks to Trump voters in other states.

Absent serious innovation and a real change in the organizational culture of the Illinois Republican Party, next year is going to be yet another repeat of so many other Illinois election cycles over the past couple of decades—i.e., we’ll witness an excellent year for the GOP nationally while Republicans lose still more ground in Illinois (to the extent there’s even any ground left for the Illinois GOP to lose).

And to add insult to injury, the party officials in Illinois responsible for yet another disaster will blame Donald Trump for it all.

That’s hardly speculation, it’s already being set up that way. Don’t forget, so-called GOP leaders in Illinois blamed last year’s miserable election in the state on Trump, and the man wasn’t even on the ballot. And at Republican Day at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield in August, the name of the former president and presumptive 2024 nominee wasn’t even mentioned by any of the speakers on-stage.

But what’s truly unforgiveable, there was also no mention of the Democrats’ disgraceful abuse of our justice system for the sole corrupt purpose of “getting” Trump.

That gutlessness sends a clear and unmistakable message to every voter in Illinois: A party that won’t even stand up for its own former president, the best president in generations, certainly isn’t going to stand up for me.

I could list dozens of other examples where our State GOP refuses to fight the battles that actually matter and the battles that most people care about. But the average Republican voter in Illinois today has essentially no recourse.

People used to talk about a GOP divide, conservatives vs. moderates. But that stale paradigm is long dead. In the age of Trump, the new GOP divide is doers vs. do-nothings. It’s all about striving to make America and the lives of working people in this country better. It’s about actually getting positive things done instead of just sitting around on titles and feeling important.

The question then becomes how do we innovate an Illinois Republican Party that’s out of touch and always losing? How do we change the organizational culture so that officials are motivated to serve Republican voters instead of themselves? How do we cultivate a culture where voters feel welcome instead of disrespected?

I’ll tell you how we do all of those things. We start by giving Republicans back their vote in the Illinois Republican Party.

You’ll hear people repeating the mantra that the 17-member state central committee of the Illinois Republican Party (one member from each U.S. congressional district) is like a corporation’s board of directors. But that’s actually not true. It’s supposed to be true, but it’s definitely untrue where the Illinois Republican Party is concerned.

Every corporation gives every shareholder, large or small, a direct vote for members of their board.

The Illinois Republican Party used to do the same thing. Every Republican used to have a direct vote for their state party leadership. But in 1985 new legislation was rammed through the state legislature by some selfish GOP bosses for the sole purpose of consolidating their personal power in the Illinois Republican Party. Illinois was a dark Red State back then and the instigators just arrogantly assumed that disenfranchising 99.99% of Illinois Republicans in their own party wouldn’t be a big deal.

Boy were they wrong. Illinois Democrats kept direct elections for their state central committee, and they’ve been running circles around the hapless Illinois Republican Party ever since.

You can read more about the history of the Illinois Republican Party and how our vote was outrageously taken away HERE.

The insular, easily rigged, cockamamie system our state GOP now uses to choose its state central committee is rife with negative incentives and provides zero accountability. For now, I’ll just highlight one example.

Consider that last year during the GOP primary, around a quarter of the state central committee’s 17 members publicly endorsed an ethically challenged, career leftwing Democrat for governor—on the Republican ballot line. You’ll recall that candidate was Richard Irvin.

Plus, from the evidence I’ve seen, it also appears that state party resources were misused for the benefit of that career Democrat’s campaign, at the expense of the true Republicans in that same race.

But despite all of that special and inappropriate help, plus a record amount of spending ($50 million from Ken Griffin), Irvin was trounced in the primary, actually finishing a very distant third.

So the career Democrat was eventually resoundingly rejected by Republican voters—once they actually had a vote and a voice. That’s great. But the whole scheme was horribly embarrassing and divisive. The whole thing never should have gotten that far in the first place.

I absolutely do believe that if we still had a directly elected state central committee, Ken Griffin’s arrogant and tone-deaf scheme (directly aided by multiple top state party officials) to force feed Republicans a career Democrat for the top state job, never would have gotten off the ground. (Ken Griffin was of course the wealthiest person in Illinois, by far, until Republican voters said no to his Richard Irvin scheme last year, then he took all his marbles and moved to Florida.)

A directly elected state central committee, one that was actually connected to and listening to Republican voters, would have nipped that embarrassing fiasco in the bud.

But the reality is we don’t have a state central committee that is connected to and listening to Republican voters. That’s why when a couple of hundred rank-and-file Republicans showed up to the state central committee’s quarterly meeting in December last year calling for resignations in the wake of yet another disastrous election the month before, those Republicans were mostly treated with disrespect by the powers-that-be. Illinois Review provided some excellent coverage of that meeting.

And that’s the way it’s going to stay in Illinois until we give Republicans back their vote. The Illinois GOP is just going to keep spinning its wheels in the same fashion they’ve been spinning for years.  

If an organization doesn’t provide a meaningful voice to its constituents, OF COURSE it’s going to become arrogant and out of touch. That’s exactly the situation we have now, and as I said earlier, it was all self-inflicted by a handful of selfish GOP bosses decades ago.

Nearly all of those old bosses are gone now, but their legacy remains alive in replacement bosses who looked at our easily rigged system and decided they like it, despite the fact it’s been a disaster for our party.

I will actually go as far as to say NO Republican is ever going to win a statewide election again in Illinois until we give Republicans back their vote in the Illinois Republican Party. If any of the statewide candidates had asked me last year, I would have told them they were just wasting their time. Of course they all eventually found out on their own as they all lost miserably.

That’s truly how destructive disenfranchising Republican voters has been to our party. It shouldn’t come as some major surprise.

The reactionaries who still oppose giving Republicans a vote again in the Illinois Republican Party need to explain how they expect those suburbanites they always talk about to leave the Democratic Party once they find out our state party gives them inferior voting rights.

It’s the same with recruiting volunteers. Come and volunteer for us so our officials can take credit and look good, but oh, by the way, we don’t respect you enough to give you a vote like the Democrats do.

That’s simply not how a party that’s serious about winning operates.

And honestly, if someone is really that hostile to the idea of Republicans voting in their own Republican Party, then what are they even doing dicking around in Republican politics in the first place?

The good news is we can do something about it. We don’t have to just sit around waiting to see what new embarrassing disaster the party pooh-bahs who gave us the Richard Irvin disaster have cooked up for us this time around.

We can get our vote back. We can restore democracy to the Illinois Republican Party. That would be historic.

For more details on this past due reform and the mechanics of getting it done, please go HERE.

I’ll have more on this subject in the near future, but for now I invite you to add your name to our list of direct election supporters which we’ll be making public soon. (We’re also going to publicize the list of opponents.) If you have a political or grassroots organization title you would like to include with your name, please feel free to provide that too. But we highly encourage any and all Republicans to sign-on. Just email me at Doug.Ibendahl@mail.com.

Trust me, you’ll be in great company, because let’s face it, except for a few who might see the current failed system as an easier way to get a title or to have a little fiefdom to lord over, what true Republican wouldn’t want their right to vote restored? What true Republican is okay with being denied the same right to vote every Illinois Democrat already enjoys in their party?

I also have this crazy idea that if we’re going to keep calling ourselves the Party of Lincoln and have all of these Lincoln Day Dinners, we should probably ask ourselves what would Lincoln do on a party matter like this?

It’s definitely safe to say Lincoln was a big fan of direct elections. In fact, Lincoln would have beaten the obscenely racist Democrat Stephen Douglas in their famous U.S. Senate race if there had been direct elections for U.S. Senators at the time. Lincoln easily won the popular vote. But at that time U.S. Senators were still chosen by state legislatures, per the U.S. Constitution as originally drafted. Douglas won that race only because Democrats had the majority in the Illinois state legislature. As an aside, the 17th Amendment (ratified, 1913) which gave us direct elections for U.S. Senators grew out of corruption and abuse scandals involving the state legislatures and their U.S. Senate picks (sound familiar?).

Therefore, in the spirit of Illinoisans wrapping themselves in all things Lincoln, you’re damn right I’m putting Abraham Lincoln on the side of giving Republicans back their vote and restoring meaningful democracy to the Illinois Republican Party.

Illinois looks forward to hearing where YOU stand.