Asked to assess Vice President George Bush`s prospects for carrying Illinois, a statewide Republican leader shrugged, and said, `Ah, he should do okay. We`ll win the state.`
When it was suggested the response lacked confidence and enthusiasm about the GOP presidential candidate`s chances against Democrat Michael Dukakis, he rephrased the answer and came at the question from the opposite direction.
`Ah, Bush is okay because Dukakis will lose Illinois,` he said.
Just okay?
It appears that either candidate is going to have to accept a lukewarm victory to put a pivotal Midwestern state and its 24 electoral votes in his column.
With two weeks remaining before the Nov. 8 election, Illinois, a national microcosm that has voted for all but two presidential winners in the 20th Century, refuses to swing definitively to one candidate or the other.
Having recently overtaken Dukakis for a narrow lead in statewide polls, Bush`s momentum rests with undecided voters ”who are starting to come home to the GOP,” said Dennis Hastert, a Republican congressman from Kane County. A mistake could send them in the other direction.
And with states in the South and most of the West virtually sewn up by the vice president, a loss in Illinois would put Dukakis in a tough spot if he expects to string together enough victories in the Midwest to help him garner the 270 electoral votes needed to take the White House.
”Illinois is not an easy state to put away,” acknowledged Gov. James Thompson, a national cochairman of the Bush campaign. ”Illinois will make up its mind essentially at the last moment.”
In the meantime, Republicans are ”guardedly optimistic”, while a
”still hopeful” comment describes the most optimistic Democrats.
Elaborate get-out-the-vote efforts in all 102 counties are planned in the belief by both sides that the best grass-roots mechanics on Election Day will likely prevail in a year when many experts are predicting a below-average turnout for a presidential contest.
”Both parties are going to have to work very hard,” said Sam Skinner, Bush`s Illinois campaign manager. ”The better organized campaign will make the difference, assuming there is no vote fraud.”
The task will not be easy, observed Schaumburg Township GOP committeeman Donald Totten. ”The candidates are not engendering a lot of enthusiasm.”
Bush has been making frequent visits to Illinois to rally the kind of voter fervor he needs to build huge pluralities in Cook County suburbs, the collar counties and southern Illinois.
The Republican nominee would carry Illinois for the sixth consecutive presidential election if Bush amasses those pluralities while holding his own in farm regions and avoiding a drubbing in Chicago.
For Dukakis to do ”okay,” the Massachusetts governor has to find a way to meld together the state`s disparate Democratic Party forces, while marshaling a big vote in Chicago, a minefield of political distractions and freelancing committeemen.
An echo of their counterparts in other parts of the country, Illinois Democrats said that Dukakis can help by attacking Bush more aggressively, and trying to appear less aloof from the voters during campaign stops.
Chicago`s once monolithic, and heavily Democratic, vote has been shrinking to the point where it accounts for just about a quarter of the statewide total while the largely Republican vote in suburban Cook and collar counties has increased.
Yet Illinois remains a Democratic state. A majority of the state`s nearly 6 million registered voters are Democrats. Both U.S. senators, a majority of the congressional delegation and half of the state`s constitutional officers are Democrats. The party controls both chambers of the General Assembly.
Thompson maintains that despite this political handicap, Republicans win presidential elections in Illinois because the voters are essentially
”moderate to conservative.”
”Go across the whole range of hot issues in a campaign or in a presidency,” Thompson said, ”and most people would concur with Governor Dukakis that he is, by his own admission, a liberal.
”If you ask members of the public to define their own philosophy in politics and government, only a few will say they are liberal. Many more will say they are moderate or conservative.”
The Bush strategy of portraying Dukakis as outside the mainstream of American ideology ”has been very effective” in parts of Chicago and the suburbs, Totten said.
”A lot of Democrats who voted for Ronald Reagan will vote for Bush,” he said, ”because they see Dukakis in the same mold as Walter Mondale,” the Democratic landslide loser in 1984.
Paul Green, director of the Institute for Public Policy at Governors State University said that 80 percent of the statewide vote is divided evenly along partisan lines and that the current presidential campaigns have plodded along ”with no energy for either candidate,” among the 20 percent swing vote.
”People looking for a reason not to vote for Bush haven`t found it in a Dukakis campaign that has been on the defensive and lacked focus,” he said.
But Dukakis has vowed to pick up the campaign pace in Illinois, and Bush is still far from home free.
His support in key Republican strongholds, such as Du Page County has been ”soft.”
It is also weak among voters in traditionally Republican central and western Illinois, where the farm economy has been depressed during much of the Reagan-Bush administration, and where manufacturing centers have been slower to recover from the recession that occurred in Reagan`s first term.
What Bush has had going for him in Illinois, apart from the obvious benefits of a successful national media strategy, has been a veteran, in-state campaign team. Both campaigns are well financed with each candidate spending about $2 million in Illinois, but Thompson and Skinner bring the experience of four successful statewide gubernatorial races and two Reagan campaigns.
As the current longest-enduring major political figure in Illinois, Thompson has been able in his 12 years in office to establish a jobs and contracts force that includes Democrats in the pursuit of patronage outside the volatile milieu of Chicago`s City Hall.
That volatility in city politics and the Democrats` inability to put together as cohesive a statewide campaign organization have hindered Dukakis in Illinois. ”It has been a (expletive) campaign,” declared Patrick O`Connor, alderman and Democratic committeeman of the 40th Ward.
Intrigue about who will be running in a 1989 special mayoral election has taken center stage in Chicago to the point that a Dukakis campaign stop on the South Side was overshadowed by the attempts at one-upsmanship by rival black political camps.
Some leading Cook County Democrats, including party chairman George Dunne, have been miffed because the campaign has been worked through the state party organization headed by State Sen. Vincent Demuzio (D., Carlinville). Dunne planned a torchlight parade down Michigan Avenue four days before the election, despite belated approval by the Dukakis campaign, and warnings by some locals that the event could backfire politically with a poor turnout.
Black Democrats, a base of the party organization in Chicago, have not been inspired by Dukakis, according to 28th Ward alderman and Democratic committeeman Ed Smith, in part because Jesse Jackson has had a low public profile.
”Sure he`s campaigning for Dukakis,” Smith said of Jackson. ”But it`s not the same as if he`d been on the ticket. I hear it all over. The enthusiasm just isn`t here, it`s not happening.”
