Former DuPage County Auditor Bob Grogan was elected Monday as the new chair of Illinois’ Republican Party, taking over what has become a moribund political organization that new election data shows has hemorrhaged voters from what was once its key suburban base and a March primary turnout that is the lowest non-presidential-year balloting in four decades.
Grogan, of Downers Grove, was elected by the state GOP’s 17 state central committee members in a closed meeting held virtually on Monday. He defeated incumbent state Chair Kathy Salvi of Mundelein, who was elected to the post in July 2024 following the resignation of Don Tracy of Springfield, the GOP’s current U.S. Senate nominee.
Grogan had held the DuPage County auditor’s post for three terms before losing by 75 votes to Democrat Bill White in 2020 and by fewer than 5,000 votes in a rematch in 2024. Grogan also made an unsuccessful 2014 GOP primary bid for the party’s nomination for state treasurer.
Though four candidates ran for the post, including former Kendall County Board Chair Scott Gryder and Lawrence Stowe of Moline, only Grogan and Salvi received votes, with Grogan gaining the majority of the weighted vote of the 17 state central committee members on a single ballot, according to a person familiar with the voting process who was not authorized to speak.
In a statement, Grogan said he was “honored and humbled” to assume the post and thanked Salvi for her work. Grogan called the state GOP “united” and said he was “excited to get to work electing Republicans up and down the ballot in November.”
Grogan takes over a Republican state party that has been plagued by factional infighting with few successes over Democrats who hold all statewide offices, a majority of state Supreme Court justices and supermajorities in both the Illinois House and Senate.
The GOP’s dire standing in Illinois was reflected in Republican voter turnout in the March 17 primary, according to an analysis of primary voting data by the Tribune.
Despite competitive Republican races for the party’s nomination for governor and U.S. Senate, Democrats, with their own battle for the U.S. Senate, swamped the GOP in ballots cast. Nearly 1.3 million Democratic votes were cast compared to 591,913 GOP ballots — a 68% to 31% turnout advantage for Democrats — based on official primary results recently certified by the Illinois State Board of Elections.
There were more than 220,000 fewer Republican votes cast in the 2026 primary compared to four years earlier, when downstate farmer Darren Bailey, the current GOP nominee for governor, won a costly, contested ballot battle to seek the state’s highest office, only to lose the 2022 general election to Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker by nearly 13 percentage points.
The poor Republican turnout in March was the party’s lowest since the 1986 primary, when then-Gov. James R. Thompson, a Republican, was en route to a record fourth term as Illinois’ chief executive, and two little-known Republicans challenged each other for the right to take on a then-undefeatable Democratic U.S. Sen. Alan Dixon. In that primary, 570,661 Republicans cast ballots.
Worse strategically for Republicans has been the gradual erosion of GOP votes in suburban Cook County and the collar counties surrounding Democrat-heavy Chicago in the last dozen years, the state elections board figures show.
Once the base of Republicanism in Illinois, DuPage, Kane, Lake, Will and McHenry counties have become increasingly Democratic in recent years as the GOP has turned further rightward. The state GOP’s base is now firmly outside the Chicago area, where fewer voters live.
In 2014, when Bruce Rauner won a heavily contested GOP primary en route to his single term as governor and served as the last Republican elected to statewide office, suburban Cook and the collar counties accounted for 424,483 Republican ballots or 51% of the statewide GOP total.
But four years later, suburban Cook and the collars fell to 47% of the statewide GOP primary vote, and in 2022, the region dropped to 43% of the statewide Republican turnout. In March, the suburban vote, a key region for any candidate to win a statewide race, had fallen to only 39% of Illinois’ GOP primary total.
“You can draw a direct line, in my opinion, from Donald Trump into the demise of the Illinois Republican Party because Donald Trump’s message never has and never will sell in the suburbs,” said Pat Brady, a former state GOP chairman from 2009-2013.
“I think they’ve abandoned my notion of traditional conservatism for Trumpism, which is populism, and they’ve bought all in, and so whatever Trump says or does, they agree with, and they’re not going to change their minds, no matter what he does, and that has decimated the Illinois Republican Party,” he said.
Brady said he was “optimistic” that the GOP nationally would move in a different direction, toward traditional conservatism and away from Trump’s “Make America Great Again” posture, after the president’s term ends in 2029.
“But if the party is looking for another Donald Trump, we’re going to be in the same boat in Illinois going forward as we have been for the last dozen years,” he said.
