In the Orange County Register Carl Cannon comments on the Illinois 3rd District primary race:
…Lipinski has close to a zero chance of losing in November. The reason? Well, that brings us to the other side of the electoral bracket, where the Republicans in Illinois’ 3rd District let a 70-year-old admirer of Adolf Hitler garner their nomination.
It’s true. Lipinski’s general election opponent is avowed racist named Arthur Joseph Jones. Yes, liberals and campus crazies hurl similar epithets at anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders these days, but Art Jones is the real article — someone who’s been a Holocaust denier all of his adult life. Jones read “Mein Kampf†in his foxhole while serving in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, joined the American Nazi Party, ran for mayor of Milwaukee as the candidate of the National Socialist White People’s Party, and now runs something called the America First Committee.
And he has some predictably awful ideas of what it means to put America first. Although he supported Donald Trump’s 2016 candidacy, he did so with convoluted logic. “He’s his own man,†Jones said at the time. “I like the fact that he doesn’t have to go hat-in-hand to Jewish billionaires to get money.†Later, he had second thoughts, and now calls the president “a Jew-loving fool†who “surrounds himself with hordes of Jews, including a Jew in his own family, that punk named Jared Kushner.â€
To be fair, Illinois Republicans denounced Jones even before he ran, and have been doing so for a long time. Yet, in this age of thoroughly gerrymandered districts, they could recruit no one to run against Lipinski, leaving the field to this buffoon.
Let’s pause there. The Illinois Republican Party has been practically supine for the last 15 years. That’s been the case since 2004 when Jack Ryan withdrew his candidacy for one of Illinois’s senate seats under assault from his actress ex-wife, Jeri Ryan. That left the field open for his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, then an obscure legislator, and the rest, as they say, is history.
What about Bruce Rauner (I hear somebody ask)? He became governor despite the Illinois Republican Party rather than because of it. He had never been active in party activities and financed his own campaign.
Tribune columnist John Kass believes that Illinois Republicans and Democrats have divvied the state up agreeably and don’t compete against each other.
Mr. Cannon continues:
No Labels leaders say they plan to get involved in dozens of races this year. They acknowledge that the bulk of this work must be done soon because by the time the general election rolls around it’s too late. “In nine out of 10 races,†noted Clancy, “the only elections that matter are the primaries.â€
Consider the implications of that. It means that the 10-20% most highly motivated, generally also the most radical, voters decide the political fate of the country.
It may be even fewer than that. Mike Madigan has been Speaker of the Illinois House for most of the last 35 years and in the 2016 primary election fewer than 18,000 people voted for him. In other words about .3% of Illinois voters decided the fate of the state.
It’s no accident that “independent/no affiliation” is the fastest-growing political party.
