Naperville's Kevin Coyne takes over as DuPage County GOP chair
A former Naperville city council member is taking the reins of the local Republican Party in DuPage County, a formerly deep-red bastion that has seen Democrats flex their political muscle in recent years.
Kevin Coyne will lead the DuPage County GOP as chairman. He officially starts New Year’s Day.
“The DuPage GOP was tremendously successful for a very long period of time,” Coyne said Tuesday. “And for a lot of different reasons, things have changed in recent election cycles. And I think right now, we have an opportunity to modernize, to take a fresh look at things and to move forward with more aggressive, smarter-run campaigns.”
Coyne also is the founder and president of Safe Suburbs USA, a political action committee. He succeeds Jim Zay at the helm of the county GOP.
“It's just time for somebody to come in with some new ideas and new skills and take a swing at it, and I think Kevin's the person to do that,” said Zay, a DuPage County Board member since 1999.
“I'm not going anywhere. I'm just giving up the chairmanship of the party,” he added.
Zay hasn’t decided if he’s going to run for reelection, run for a countywide office or run for another office, and said that he’s keeping his options open.
“It's very difficult to do that if you're the chair of the party also,” Zay said.
It wasn’t until 2018 when Democratic women in particular made waves at the county level. Democrat Deb Conroy became county board chair four years later. In November’s election, Democrats flipped a board seat, adding to their majority, and won a countywide office.
“We're being horribly outspent all the time. We don't have a billionaire governor who is putting lots of money into campaigns and into the state party,” said Zay, referring to Gov. JB Pritzker. “We just have to get candidates out there.”
Coyne currently sits on Naperville’s public library board. He also was a member of the Illinois leadership team for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign.
“We've had a lot of local success in local races in the April cycles,” said Coyne, pointing to “a lot of Republican mayors all over the county.
“I just think we need to really grab a hold of this national momentum that we've seen for the Republican Party, which now controls the White House, the Senate, the Congress … and bring some of that back home.”
Coyne acknowledged that there's a “narrative out there that the political guard has changed,” but that he doesn’t believe it to be true.
“Even with these huge challenges that we faced as a party, the bulk of our losses, certainly on a county level, have largely been single digit,” he said. “There's a real opportunity to turn this around and to bring the Republican (Party) back here in DuPage County.”