‘Suburban cocktail party language’: Illinois GOP chair says better messaging needed to win back voters

Bob Grogan was only a 6-year-old kindergartner at the height of the 1974 Watergate midterm elections. But it’s the closest comparison the self-described student of history could find for the electoral defeat Republicans had up and down the ballot last week.

By 1980, Ronald Reagan — a native son of Illinois — would ascend to the White House, and it was a new era for Republican politics.

So Grogan — chairman of the Illinois Republican Party — remains hopeful of his party’s future.

But he couldn’t help but use another comparison, of a metaphorical sort, in a state with a rich farming and agricultural heritage.

“Sometimes you have to have a controlled burn — this was less controlled — to put nutrients back into the soil, so that we can grow again,” said the Downers Grove resident, a local CPA and one-time elected DuPage County auditor.

Grogan was performing his first electoral post mortem six months into his tenure at the helm of a state party that has dealt with internal squabbling across geographies and ideologies amid continued losses at the ballot box.

Democrats, who still hold every statewide elected office, expanded their supermajorities in both chambers of the General Assembly — even picking up seats in suburban and some downstate districts thought to be reliably Republican.

After election results are certified and new people sworn in, few elected Republicans will remain on the county-level throughout what was once the ruby red suburbs: only three GOP board members in Kane County, two in Lake County and one in DuPage County.

Republicans also lost their only remaining seat on the Cook County Board.

“The suburbs are a challenge, but I’m born and bred in the suburbs, and we have to be competitive here, and I think that we can be competitive again,” Grogan said.

How so?

Grogan sees silver linings in many local referendum results, like in Lake County, where voters rejected a proposed 1% sales tax to fund schools 57% to 43%. It’s the same county where GOP gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey lost to Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, 30% to 66%, respectively.

Grogan thinks Republican policies about lower taxes, the size of government and safer streets can be winning issues for the GOP in the suburbs, but acknowledged the message and messengers haven’t been.

“Our policies are actually majority policies, and right now the voters punished our brand for some other reasons,” he said. “The voters sent a message that they were not happy with Republicans in general. It didn’t matter whether it was (DuPage County Board member) Brian Krajewski or (DuPage Treasurer) Gwen Henry. I think that maybe it was a rejection of our governing style, and that’s on a national level.”

“If we were going to be successful, we had to localize that election, and the Democrats obviously tried to nationalize it,” he added.

DuPage County GOP Chair Kevin Coyne called the blue wave a political “earthquake” in which lack of support for the war in Iran and other national issues made it hard for local Republicans up and down the ballot.

He said President Donald Trump “became the race.”

“It’s sad that our county treasurer and sheriff’s races are being determined by international and foreign issues, but clearly they are,” Coyne said.

He called for Republicans to “shake off” the losses and stay engaged, noting the next election cycle is just months away. He said he doesn’t think the country’s values have changed, but believes the “political pendulum seemingly swings faster and faster every cycle.”

“(DuPage) went from red to blue on a dime here and it can go the other way too,” Coyne said.

Kane County GOP Chair Michelle Bettag said “one bad Election Day” wouldn’t deter local Republican organizers, who worked hard knocking on doors to get out the vote this election cycle.

“Unfortunately, the hatred for someone goes a long way,” she said about local voters’ feelings about Trump. “(Democrats) were able to sway the independents better than we were.”

Collin Corbett, the one-time Republican strategist and pollster from Palatine whose independent bid for governor garnered a little over 3% of the vote, called on both parties to “come back to reasonable and mainstream and be big tent parties.”

Corbett — a fiscal conservative who supports abortion rights and IVF — now labels himself an independent who is “politically homeless.”

“What does the Republican Party do?” Corbett said. “Do they only want a party full of people who think and look and talk like them, or do they want a party that’s going to have different ideas and perspectives that’s going to be able to represent a larger swath of the electorate and actually be competitive in elections again?”

Grogan seemed to agree with the concept of a big tent Illinois GOP, and a coalition of conservatives and moderates that prioritizes gaining back power, “as opposed to just virtue signaling with just the base,” he said.

But he doesn’t see the party’s problems as much about ideological fractures as it is the ability to communicate.

A downstate conservative is perfectly able to win statewide office, Grogan believes, so long as the candidate can talk to suburban voters who may disagree about some issues.

“What we need to be competitive on a statewide level is someone who can actually speak suburban cocktail party language,” Grogan said. “We have to communicate in the method in which people understand and get past our own talking points.”

Daily Herald staff writer Susan Sarkauskas and freelance writer Alicia Fabbre contributed to this report.

cplacek@dailyherald.com