Illinois Republicans head to Milwaukee for the party’s national convention on Monday amid the political upheaval of electing a new state chairman whose chief task will be be trying to quell growing ideological and geographic divisions fueled by the hard-line partisanship of presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Kathy Salvi of Mundelein, who has made unsuccessful runs for the U.S. House and Senate, was selected Friday at a virtual meeting of the 17-member Illinois Republican State Central Committee. Salvi on July 19 will replace Don Tracy of Springfield, who in his resignation letter last month bemoaned spending “far too much time dealing with intraparty power struggles, and local intraparty animosities” involving “Republicans who would rather fight other Republicans than engage in the harder work of defeating incumbent Democrats.”
The closed-door vote culminated a calamitous period following May’s state GOP convention, which revealed internal splits that led to the ouster of the state party’s vice chairman, Mark Shaw of Lake Forest. Shaw was accused of improperly displaying a delegate badge to participate in floor votes and trying to leverage his status as a Trump organizer to become the state’s Republican national committeeman.
The state central committee’s decision to dump Shaw as vice chairman and remove him from the party’s fundraising committee portended Tracy’s demise, and he submitted his resignation two days later.
Salvi won the chairmanship with about 60% of the weighted vote against state Rep. John Cabello of Machesney Park, a Rockford suburb, in an initial round of voting after Aaron Del Mar, the Palatine Republican Township committeeman, withdrew from the contest. In a final tally, 16 of the 17 members voted for Salvi, with one abstention, said GOP sources who were not authorized to speak publicly about the committee’s deliberations.
Cabello’s candidacy to be “interim” chairman until after the Nov. 5 election was backed by forces aligned with the controversial Shaw, who still sits on the state central committee despite losing his party title and looked to exert some power within the party, the GOP sources said.
Cabello said he wanted to serve as a caretaker to “keep the train on the tracks while they do their due diligence to find someone else” to serve as chairman.
Salvi now faces the task of trying to unify disparate groups of Illinois Republicans as the national party on Monday focuses on a united convention celebration behind Trump to defeat Democratic President Joe Biden, whose political fate was thrown into question after a stumbling debate showing against the former president.
In the short term, rallying delegates behind the former president at the national convention is an easy job. All 64 of them are pledged to Trump’s nomination.
But after that, the task for the new party chair is much harder — trying to sell Trump in populous suburban areas where moderate women, a powerful election voting demographic, have shunned him. Trump has suffered back-to-back 17 percentage point defeats in Illinois in 2016 and 2020, pushing the state GOP into further irrelevancy down ballot as Democrats increased their dominance.
Salvi needs to find a message that can unify Republicans geographically as the party core has shifted from suburban moderates to hard-line conservatives in largely rural downstate counties.
Dominated for decades by wealthy donors, the party’s once winning statewide platform of moderation on social issues and fiscal conservatism has gradually been scuttled by a growing embrace of social conservatism, including opposition to abortion and gay rights. Increasingly, the party has put ideological purity over electability in selecting candidates.
The state GOP’s rightward tilt was accelerated by the ascension of Trump, playing to feelings of victimization among voters and encouraging disruption of government institutions.
A prime example is the 2022 GOP nomination of far-right downstate evangelical Darren Bailey for governor, aided in part through backdoor help from the man who ultimately defeated him, Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker. Bailey lost badly in the general election and his candidacy cost Republicans across the ballot.
Former Republican Gov. Jim Edgar, who served from 1991-1999, was blunt in his assessment of the state party’s future if Trump regains the presidency in November.
“I don’t see any hope in Illinois, because he’ll still have firm control of the Republican Party,” Edgar said.
“The suburbs have been the key for several years,” Edgar said, noting the collar county region was staunchly Republican during his tenure but has since become Democratic. “We haven’t done well there. And I think more recently, it’s been the Trump factor. It’s just that style of politics, I don’t think, plays well with the average suburban voter.”
Edgar said he believes it could be “a long time before the Republican Party can come around in Illinois” if Trump wins.
“It’s a cult more than a movement, an ideology,” he said. “It’s obvious that everybody has drunk the Kool-Aid, and that’s where the party is.”
Edgar did note that the current disarray among Democrats over Biden’s fate on the ticket could help the GOP in Illinois.
In an interview ahead of the chairman vote, Salvi said she has been “very active with the party, supporting candidates up and down the state of Illinois, attending events where invited and making my case to the people willing to listen how Illinois is really no different than the states that surround us.”
Acknowledging Trump’s previous losses in Illinois and concerns by some Republicans that his presence on the ballot has dragged down Republicans in down ballot contests, Salvi said she believes the 2024 election will be different because of voters’ dissatisfaction with Biden and his policies.
Biden “basically pulled a bait and switch,” she said. “People are hurting. Families are hurting. And they look at their lives under the four years of President Trump and they look at their lives of the last 3 1/2 years and people are hurting.”
“We’re going to have an angry vote out there. Not just Republicans. People who have never voted before. They’re coming out in droves to support something different because they feel as though the promises made were not kept,” Salvi said. “The policies of the Biden administration have hurt families, have hurt Illinois families and voters. And people are recognizing that, which is why I think that the middle, center-left is coming on board.”
Tracy will retain the chairmanship through the end of the national convention in Milwaukee, while Salvi, as incoming chair, is expected to join U.S. Rep. Mary Miller, the chair of the Illinois delegation, at convention-related party organizational events. Miller is a member of the far right House Freedom Caucus, an ally of U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and actively sought and won Trump’s endorsement for her reelection efforts.
The Republican National Convention runs Monday through Thursday with nightly programming occurring mainly between 6 and 10 p.m. from the Fiserv Forum, the home of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks. The Illinois delegation will gather for morning breakfast organizing sessions at its hotel. It is among 56 state and territory delegations with a total of nearly 2,500 delegates who will formally nominate Trump and learn of his selection of a running mate.
The RNC plans to have a theme for each convention night, with Tuesday’s being “Make America Safe Once Again.” It’s likely that Chicago’s crime issues will be a target for attacks as one of the cities Trump’s campaign say have become “hollowed out, dystopian nightmares” due to ‘‘ ‘woke’ soft-on-crime and open border policies.”
Speaking July 8 on Fox News to Sean Hannity, Trump said he expected Biden to be the nominee at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and that post-July Fourth weekend shootings make the city “like a war zone.”
Democrats are “obviously very proud of Chicago. And I love Chicago. I have investments in Chicago,” Trump said, “But when you look at the crime in Chicago, when you look at what’s gone wrong with Chicago, it’s not a very good thing to be displaying right now.”
Republican convention delegates in Milwaukee will be asked to approve a slimmed down national party platform that in some respects is less conservative than the Illinois Republican platform.
The national party platform proclaims that it was “because of us” that the U.S. Supreme Court’ overturned Roe v. Wade, returning the issue of legality of abortion to the states, in recognition of the conservative justices appointed by Trump. But it does not call for a national abortion ban, as many abortion opponents had sought.
The Illinois GOP’s state platform approved in May continued its long-standing expression of support for “a human life amendment to the federal and Illinois constitutions affirming the right to life of unborn children.” The state GOP also approved a resolution attacking Illinois Democrats for their “extremist pro-abortion agenda.”
Democrats successfully used the high court’s decision to overturn Roe as a rallying cry in the 2022 midterm elections and are heavily promoting reproductive rights in the 2024 campaign.
The Illinois GOP state platform also continues to oppose same-sex marriage, stating that “the ideal environment for children is within a two-parent family based on the principle of marriage between one man and one woman” and backing a constitutional amendment to that effect.
In Milwaukee, Democrats will be conducting counterprogramming operations, including daily events featuring elected officials from across the nation, including Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
In addition, the Democratic National Committee has paid to wrap 57 Milwaukee County buses with signs supporting President Joe Biden and has purchased space on 10 billboards in Milwaukee featuring Trump and some of his incendiary statements, including his reference to Milwaukee as a “horrible city” in a June meeting with House Republicans.
Eight additional billboards are going up focusing on preserving democracy and restoring abortion rights. Those billboards will feature Biden and slogans including “Democracy is on the ballot, folks,” and “Joe Biden will: restore Roe, fight for freedoms, defend democracy.” The billboards are located along Interstates 94, 41 and 43 that cut through the heart of the Wisconsin city.
Salvi, the new Illinois GOP chair, is an attorney who mounted an unsuccessful challenge to Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Hoffman Estates in the 2022 general election, losing by more than 15 percentage points. Her platform on the campaign trail was typical of many Republicans today: She opposed abortion rights, though when asked about the prospect of a federal abortion ban that would outlaw the procedure in all states, she said she thinks laws regulating abortion are “best made by individual states” — in line with Trump’s latest position. She also expressed support for constructing a wall along the southern border with Mexico to halt illegal immigration, one of Trump’s central goals during his single presidential term.
During a Daily Herald candidate forum for the 2022 GOP primary, Salvi also resisted saying whether the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump. “Joe Biden is our president,” Salvi said. “I wish we had a different president to meet this moment, but we don’t.”
Salvi also ran for the U.S. House in 2006 but lost in the Republican primary.
Her husband, Al, was elected as a state representative in 1992 and served two terms before making unsuccessful bids for U.S. Senate in 1996 and for secretary of state in 1998.
Cabello was an at-large Trump delegate in 2016 and co-chaired the Illinois delegation to the national GOP convention in Cleveland that year. Cabello is in his second stint as an Illinois House GOP member, serving in his current northern Illinois seat since last year after initially serving in the chamber from 2012 to 2021.
Del Mar, an unsuccessful 2022 GOP lieutenant governor candidate, said he withdrew from the chairmanship race when it became clear he could not get the votes needed to win.
“My whole thing was about trying to give a voice to the grassroots community, the Illinois Republican grassroots community, that often has had a deaf ear turned to them,” he said.
