Donald Trump’s Nov. 5 loss in Illinois was a foregone conclusion, allowing leading Illinois Democrats to focus on the nearby swing states of Wisconsin and Michigan in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to advance Kamala Harris’ bid for the presidency.
But a closer look at the presidential election results in Illinois shows that a significant number of the state’s Democratic voters also had their focus elsewhere — though not on Trump.
While Trump closed the gap in Illinois on a percentage basis compared with his last two runs for president, it wasn’t because he won over large numbers of Democratic voters. His ostensibly improved showing came about in in large part because Harris received nearly 410,000 fewer votes in Illinois than Joe Biden got in defeating Trump four years earlier, according to election results that were certified earlier this month
Illinois Republicans, who have repeatedly been touting the November results as a sign of growing momentum for their beleaguered party, have been promoting largely illusory gains. Trump’s vote total increased by a mere 2,188 votes from 2020, with a notable decline for the president-elect in downstate counties that have become the GOP’s geographic base.
The results also continued a troubling tale for the state’s Republican minority in failing to take advantage of Democratic disillusionment at the top of the ticket in downballot races.
To be sure, after losing Illinois by 17 percentage points in both 2016 and 2020, Trump’s loss to Harris by 11 percentage points was a marked improvement — on a percentage basis. But with a smaller universe of presidential voters, it was largely the result of Democratic drop-off and not due to large numbers of voters switching parties to vote for the Republican and his agenda.
Still, the numbers do carry a warning for Illinois’ dominant Democratic party heading into the 2026 midterm elections. Every statewide office Democrats now hold will be up for election. So will the U.S. Senate seat occupied by five-term incumbent Dick Durbin, who has yet to decide whether he’ll seek reelection, and congressional and state legislative seats, the vast majority of which are held by Democrats.
Overall, Democrats said Harris was unable to counter voters’ economic and inflationary concerns and that she was yoked to the unpopularity of “Bidenomics,” the policy agenda of the man she hoped to succeed. She also was unable to counter Trump’s promise to fight illegal immigration and enact tougher border security. The combination resulted in gains for the Republican candidate among Black and Latino voters, while Harris underperformed with younger voters compared with Biden.
The Associated Press Vote Cast survey of Illinois voters found the economy ranked as voters’ top concern at 36%, followed by immigration at 22%. Issues associated more with Harris’ priorities trailed, including abortion at 11%, and the climate and health care each at 7%.
Added to the mix was a unique election year in which Illinois had no statewide offices up for election and few seriously contested congressional and legislative races.
There was “definitely a performance gap and an enthusiasm gap” among Democrats, said veteran Democratic strategist Pete Giangreco, who, like other Illinois Democratic activists, campaigned for Harris in Michigan, secure in the knowledge Harris would win Illinois.
“Yeah, we definitely have work to do,” Giangreco said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do to just do basic blocking and tackling and cleaning up the voter file, registering and reregistering people. It’s really easy to register to vote in Illinois and we just don’t spend a lot of money doing it.”
Giangreco said that “there tends to be a lag among Democrats when their turf is not in play.” Traditionally, the party can expect a drop-off in voters of at least 5 percentage points in areas without competitive congressional races, he said.
Harris underperformed Biden by nearly 170,000 votes in Chicago, nearly 110,000 votes in suburban Cook County, more than 83,000 votes in the five collar counties and more than 47,000 votes in the state’s other 96 counties
While she won the same 14 Illinois counties Biden did four years earlier, Harris outperformed Biden in only two of those counties — McLean, the home of Illinois State University, and Jackson, where Southern Illinois University at Carbondale is located.
Durbin said he thought one lesson learned by Democrats involved the immigration issue and Latino voters who had traditionally been allied with the party.
“Initially, that Latino vote probably thought about immigration and citizenship more than anything else. But over time, as they establish themselves and they no longer fear deportation or maybe they’re in a (safe) legal status, they start thinking about the issues that every American thinks about,” the state’s senior senator said. “So we are naive to believe that a group sticks with one issue for a long period of time. It changes, and we’ve got to make sure our message fits that change.”
House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, blamed the top of Democratic ticket for the failure to add to his caucus’s supermajority of 78 seats.
“Had we had a national ticket that brought people out, I would have picked up more seats,” Welch said.
Welch said that along with the issues surrounding Harris’ campaign, racism and sexism played a role in a drop in support for the first Black and Asian American woman to receive a major party nomination for president.
“I’m a Black man in America. I’m a Black man in America in a leadership position. You can’t ignore racism and sexism. You have to acknowledge that as a fact,” Welch said. “Clearly, we missed some things on the economic message on a national level. But let’s not ignore the elephant in the room, right? We have to acknowledge racism and sexism still exists in this country.”
There’s another potential factor for the drop-off in votes for Harris in Chicago — the unsettled political situation in the city under the progressivism of Mayor Brandon Johnson.
“There’s no question that had something to do with that, that it was a bit of a turnoff,” Giangreco said. “There’s not just a federal reaction to whether the country is headed in the wrong direction. It’s also a reaction to how the city is working.”
Giangreco said many city Black residents are not as progressive as Johnson “and are very tax sensitive, they want police protection, they want to be able to work in their neighborhood.”
He pointed to the results in the 21st Ward on the South Side, with a 98% Black population, where Harris got 92% of the vote and Trump got 7%. Though the ward has been redrawn since the 2020 election, its population characteristics remained the same as they were when Biden defeated Trump 96% to 3%.
Compared with 2020, Trump did better in Chicago by nearly 22,600 votes and in suburban Cook County by another 3,000 votes. In the collar counties, once the heart of Illinois Republicanism but now an increasingly Democratic region, Trump bested his 2020 results by only 1,154 votes.
But those gains were offset by 24,549 fewer votes in the rest of Illinois.
“That is surprising, that kind of fall-off downstate,” said Roger Claar, the former Bolingbrook mayor who hosted Trump in the 2020 campaign and is a former member of the Illinois Republican State Central Committee. “I thought the early voting was up and, of course, being biased, I thought it was the enthusiasm from getting out the vote for Trump. But that is an interesting stat, and I’m not sure how to find an answer to that.”
John Shaw, director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at SIU Carbondale, was equally perplexed by the softening of Trump’s downstate numbers.
“The signs I saw on the ground suggested strong support for Trump,” Shaw said.
Another potential factor both Republicans and Democrats cited for Harris’ decline in Chicago and for Trump downstate was the state’s population decline in the four years since Biden’s election.
The actual Republican vote count for Trump raises questions about post-election statements made by Illinois GOP Chair Kathy Salvi, which included an assertion that “our state has made considerable progress in attracting new voters.”
Salvi also contended that “in a significant shift, a majority of our counties shifted toward the Republican Party.” In reality, Harris won 14 counties, as did Biden in 2020 — two more than Hillary Clinton won in 2016.
Trump outperformed his 2020 results in 27 counties. But that means he underperformed in the other 75 counties. Republicans have traditionally won more counties, particularly downstate, but the combined population of those counties is dwarfed by those in the Chicago area and larger downstate cities.
Salvi also declared, “For the first time in two generations, the margin between the two parties in the House is narrow.”
But Republicans failed to win any legislative seats and cut into a record 78-40 Democratic-led split in the Illinois House and a 40-19 division in the state Senate.
Democrats have held at least 64 seats in the 118-member House since 2008. The party has ruled the chamber since 1983, largely due to its gerrymandering skills, except for two years between 1995 and 1997.
Despite such dominance, Kent Redfield, political professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Springfield, said Democrats should not become complacent.
“I think it would be a real mistake for the Democrats to look at this and say, ‘You know, we’re pretty comfortable and we can lose a little bit, that this is just people not being interested … and we can turn it back on,’” Redfield said.
Welch, the House speaker, said Democrats need to carefully review the voting data and ask, “What are we missing? What do we need to do to inspire these voters to get to the polls?”
But he said he foresees a different dynamic at play in 2026 and for the next presidential in 2028 — the actions of the incoming Trump administration.
“If the new administration goes in and they’re too extreme, they’ll quickly become a common enemy to a whole lot of advocacy groups,” he said. “And for ’26 for Democrats, I see an extreme agenda in Washington driving Democrats back to the polls, and again in ’28 as well.”
