Tomorrow are the Illinois primary elections and, for the first time in a long time, what happens in Illinois could actually matter. I have been deluged with robocalls, mostly for local races, TV is filled with political advertising, and about a third of the lawns in my neighborhood are decorated, if that’s the right word for it, with signs hawking one candidate or another.
In my neighborhood I’ve seen a few Sanders signs. I haven’t seen a single Clinton sign, poster, or billboard. Maybe the Clinton campaign doesn’t care about us. Maybe it thinks this overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhood is not favorable to it. Maybe they don’t think these old-fashioned strategies for campaigning and drumming up interest are effective any more. Maybe they don’t know what the heck they’re doing.
I don’t honestly know what’s going to happen in the primary elections in Chicago, in Illinois. I just have no feel for them. What I hope and what I expect are two different things.
On the presidential side, I hope that the Republican vote goes to Kasich and the Democratic vote to Sanders. Although poll after poll leading up to the primary have shown Hillary Clinton with a comfortable lead in Illinois the most recent CBS poll has shown that Bernie Sanders has a two point lead, presumably within the margin of error.
As in other states I think that polls have lost their effectiveness in Illinois. They oversample land lines, they oversample certain demographics, poll-weary and poll-savvy people don’t tell the truth to pollsters, any number of reasons.
On the downticket races I hope that a lot of incumbents go down in flames.
What I expect is moderate turnout for a primary and victories on the part of the usual suspects. Maybe I’ll be surprised.
Now that I think of it, I’m not sure I’ve seen any Presidential signs this cycle. The signs I’ve seen are for judges and state legislators.
Hillary will be here this afternoon for a townhall meeting with Chris Matthews, but the tickets were distributed to party loyalists pretty much at the time the event was announced.
Cruz will be here at 10:30 p.m. at a non-denominational TV church that I’m not sure is in city limits. Tickets required and available on-line. (When Trump came, the on-line distribution system broke down and admission was open at the door, and FWIW, I think admission to the Hillary event is by far the more normal approach.)
Trump just fired his Illinois campaign manager if that’s a predictor.
I think Trump wins with thirty-some percent of the votes. If Rubio had dropped out I think Kasich might have won, though early voting makes that less likely. Not sure about Sanders, but also wonder if his comments on Rahm had been made earlier, if that would have swung the state to him.
I’d love to see Sanders win in Illinois and Ohio, but I’m not holding out hope. Hillary Clinton is hitting up the Illuminati in their Bohemian Grove HQ; whatever shreds of her soul remain are being committed. She wants this primary to end Tuesday.
@Dave, I reject the premise that Trump’s campaign has ever been managed, at least in Illinois.
There’s word here in Chicago that a vote for Clinton is a vote for Emanuel. Lest there’s any confusion, that’s not a good thing.
If Kent Gray managed Trump’s rally in Chicago as is claimed in the firing (or sidelining), I reject all premises that what happened was purposeful on the campaign’s part.
Gray is the lawyer that handles ballot access issues, for which he was awarded a seat on the community college board. He’s run and is running in Republican primaries unsuccessfully against the party selected candidate showing little political acumen in the process. One could perceive him as an outsider, but ballot access lawyering is the most inside of party functions, and he comes across as the insider tired of waiting for his turn. Anyway, I cannot imagine anybody in Springfield knowing how to organize an event in Chicago.
Illinois doesn’t seem to be getting as much press as the states of Ohio and Florida. However, some of the latest polls there show a seesaw relationship between Sanders and Clinton, exchanging the leads — albeit Clinton recently had a double digit lead there. IOW, she seems to be dropping.
Trump and Cruz continue to be somewhat competitive with the former leading by single digits.
Florida is voting too, but it’s a closed primary state so I can’t participate since I’m unaffiliated. One advantage of that is that I’ve yet to receive any robocalls. I was tempted, very briefly after several glasses of wine, to change my affiliation to Democrat to vote for Sanders, but, no. I’ve seen a few signs around here – not many – mainly for Trump. I haven’t seen anything for Democrats, but my district is mostly Republican.
@Jan, there are a lot of hot local elections this year in Illinois, where the most important races are not Presidential. Its going to be hard to use past elections to model what will happen.
My state legislative district has become a proxy battle btw/ the Republican governor and the Democratic Majority Leader. There will be a lot of Democrats that pickup the Republican ballot tomorrow to vote in that race, and I have no idea who their Presidential candidate might be. Since unions are the galvanizing issue, I would not be surprised if the trade unions tend to vote for Trump because they identify with some of his policies and the government unions for Trump because they think he is the worse candidate in the election.
Just to name a few, even though Tammy Duckworth is not the party candidate to run as Democrat for the U. S. Senate, she’s still in the lead. The incumbent Cook County States Attorney isn’t the party’s choice and IMO both she and the party’s choice are shnooks. There’s also a significant number of hotly contended races for the state legislature including one in which the president of the United States has intervened.
It always interests me to hear the back story in local elections that PD and Dave discussed. It generates more of a soap opera curiosity when you throw in the influence of non official candidates such as Duckworth (I like her), union and POTUS involvements, and of course having the discord of a R governor with a D governance is akin to watching the drama of a wrestling match! Oh yeah, then you toss in the backdrop of Trump. As viewers on the side tend to say…..”Pass the popcorn!”
Ugh, this is ugly. From last night’s Trump rally in Bloomington, IL:
“People going to the Donald Trump rally on Sunday drove over graves and headstones and tore up turf when parking in East Lawn Memorial Gardens, according to residents with loved ones buried there.”
* * *
“Headstones were broken out there,†Twyford said. “Throughout the day, we kept seeing and hearing reports from the cemetery, and it just kept getting worse and worse and worse. It just shows that some people had a total disrespect for the graves and they need to be prosecuted.â€
http://www.pantagraph.com/news/local/vehicles-damage-cemetery-during-trump-rally/article_e41d25f0-2814-546a-a8a8-da0cbe498568.html