Furtive GOP votes, blue-state security blanket: What were suburbanites thinking this election?

Suburbanites secretly voting Republican coupled with blue-state laissez faire contributed to election surprises in the region, experts say.

More than 5.3 million Illinoisans cast ballots this year in the showdown between President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, compared to more than 6 million in 2020.

“The story here is turnout,” College of DuPage Political Science Professor Melissa Mouritsen said.

Although she lost the election, Democrat Harris won Illinois with over 2.85 million votes to Republican Trump’s nearly 2.4 million, according to unofficial results.

In suburban Cook and DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry and Will counties, Harris garnered about 1.38 million votes, a drop from President Joe Biden’s 1.66 million four years ago, Friday tallies showed.

“There just wasn’t enough time to build up the message of who Kamala Harris was. She ran for 100 days,” Lisle Democratic organizer Patrick Watson said.

Republican Trump’s numbers also declined, but less sharply, with 1,007,190 suburban votes in 2024, contrasted with 1,028,391 in 2020.

“We thought that he was going to lose between 800,000 to a million votes,” Illinois Republican Party Co-Chair Aaron Del Mar of Palatine said. “He over-performed by 50%.”

That “would be consistent with what we’re seeing across the country,” North Central College political scientist Stephen Maynard Caliendo noted.

Trump “won bigger in the places he won. And in fact, he lost by a smaller margin in the states he lost,” said Caliendo, NCC’s dean of the College of Arts and Science.

Vote totals will shift in the coming days as ballots are still being counted.

‘Hold our noses and vote’

Trump backers were buoyed by the former president securing 40.7% of the suburban vote, surpassing his 37.2% in 2020.

In Cook, 366,183 voters cast ballots for Trump this year compared to 377,035 in 2020. But the president-elect saw his share of the vote grow to 36% from 31.7% in the last election, current totals indicate.

Cook Republicans focused on encouraging residents to vote early or by mail and it paid off, Del Mar said. On Election Day, “when it monsooned, we already had the votes in.”

In Will County, Trump captured 48% of the vote compared to 44.6% in 2020.

Why?

“We went out and worked our butts off for the president and all the down-ballot people and I think that made a big difference,” RNC delegate Steve Balich of Homer Glen said.

The economy, crime, immigration and the Democratic push for electric vehicles, were key for voters, Balich added.

“At first people were afraid to say they supported Trump, but in the end they know they support him. They just don’t tell anybody,” the Will County Board Republican leader noted.

Del Mar characterized some voters he met as disliking Trump’s rhetoric and talk of mass deportations but not being clear on what Harris stood for.

“They’re thinking: ‘We’re hurting — gas is high and we can’t fill up our tank, groceries are high, we know we can’t buy a new house because interest rates are high,’” he explained.

“’We don’t like (Trump), but we’re going to hold our noses and vote for him because we’re going to do what’s best for our household.’”

Did your vote count?

Unlike other states, there was no governor or U.S. Senate race, or an abortion referendum on Illinois’ ballot, said Caliendo.

And unless there was a hot local race, in blue-state Illinois people “knew their vote wasn’t going to count, so I don’t know how many people who identified as progressives or as Democrats felt moved to go to the polls,” he added.

Compared to swing states, “there wasn’t much campaigning” or TV ads, Caliendo said. “For Illinois, it was a low-interest election.”

That’s not to say local Democrats weren’t knocking on doors with many heading to Wisconsin and Michigan to canvass. So what happened?

Watson, a member of Indivisible Illinois, noted the presidential margins in the state “were closer than I would have expected, so clearly some of the parts of inflation and the economy must have resonated.

“When people’s pocketbooks are hurting, they tend to blame the party that is currently in power.”

Despite the top-of-the-ticket results, Illinois’ top Democrat Gov. JB Pritzker noted at a Thursday briefing that Republicans “were projecting they would win five seats in the General Assembly — and they didn’t.

“There were a lot of competitive races all across the state and Democrats fared very well,” Pritzker said.