By Thomas DeVore, Opinion Contributor
Every cycle, the establishment wing of the Illinois Republican Party delivers the same lecture to conservatives: tone it down, move to the middle, nominate a moderate, because a Trump Republican can’t win here.
They say it with great confidence. The math says they’re wrong.
Look at what a moderate actually buys you. In Cook and the collar counties, the moderate Bruce Rauner outdrew the conservative Darren Bailey by about 149,000 votes. That’s the whole prize the establishment is selling: at best a little under 150,000 suburban votes. But downstate, the conservative outdrew the moderate by roughly 122,000.
So statewide, after all the agonizing over electability, the two finished within about 27,000 votes of each other. And both lost to J.B. Pritzker by more than half a million.
Now look at the pattern across the midterms themselves. In 2018, the moderate Rauner drew about 1.77 million votes. In 2022, the conservative Bailey drew about 1.74 million. Two different men, opposite wings of the party, nearly the identical statewide total.
Meanwhile Donald Trump pulled more than 2.4 million votes in Illinois in 2020 and again in 2024. The midterm ceiling sat right around 1.7 million no matter who the nominee was. The candidate’s ideology is not what’s capping the Republican vote.
And that ceiling loses. Pritzker won in 2022 by 514,653 votes. You do not erase a half-million-vote deficit by shaving a few suburbs and watering down the message. The country-club strategy has been tested in Illinois, and it loses by hundreds of thousands every time.
So where are the votes? They’re already Republican, and they’re already voting, just not in the midterms. The gap between Trump’s 2.4 million and the 1.7 million a Republican draws for governor is 709,984 voters who showed up for Trump and stayed home for governor. They are spread across every county in the state, not just the suburbs.
These are not moderate country-club Republicans. They are Trump Republicans. And a Republican needed only about 532,442 of them to win statewide, far fewer than the 709,984 sitting on the table.
Here is where I part ways with the people who say the answer is simply a candidate who can turn these voters out. No candidate does that. No nominee, however charismatic, personally drags 700,000 sporadic voters to the polls across 102 counties in a midterm.
That is not a candidate’s job, and it never has been. It is the job of infrastructure: year-round voter contact, data, registration drives, ballot-chasing, early and absentee-vote programs, and real county organizations. It is the unglamorous machinery that finds these Trump Republicans and gets them to vote when there’s no presidential race to do it for you.
Which is exactly why the endless moderate-versus-conservative war is a waste of time. Both sides are fighting over the wrong variable. A moderate with no turnout operation loses. A conservative with no turnout operation loses.
The thing that actually wins is the infrastructure, and it wins regardless of the candidate’s political leanings. Build the machine, and the nominee’s ideology becomes a footnote. Skip it, and no Republican of any stripe will ever close a half-million-vote gap.
Success doesn’t lie in the candidate. It lies in the infrastructure.
Thomas DeVore is a trial attorney based in downstate Illinois who gained statewide recognition during the COVID-19 pandemic for filing a series of lawsuits challenging Governor JB Pritzker’s executive orders and restrictions. In 2022, DeVore won the Republican nomination for Illinois Attorney General and went on to receive more than 1.7 million votes in the General Election – surpassing the vote total earned by the incumbent Republican governor in 2018. He remains an influential voice in Illinois conservative legal and political circles.
