Does downstate Illinois really love Quinn now? Or just afraid of unknown?

The Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University came out with its own poll recently for the upcoming primary elections, and there’s little surprising about its conclusion that Gov. Bruce Rauner and Democratic challenger J.B. Pritzker are the favorites for victory come March 20.

Has downstate forgiven Pat Quinn?

But I did find one aspect amusing – the portion that relates to the Illinois attorney general’s office.

ON THE SURFACE, it would indicate that Kwame Raoul, a state senator from the Hyde Park neighborhood, and Erika Harold, of Champaign, would be the favorites – although not by much. In a sense, a University of Chicago vs. University of Illinois election.

On the Republican side, it seems that nearly two-thirds of would-be GOP voters don’t have a clue who either Harold or challenger Gary Grasso are.

For the Democrats, there are eight candidates, but only two of them have any sizable following. As in Raoul and none other than Pat Quinn, our state’s former governor, who’s hoping to use the attorney general post as a way of achieving a political comeback.

According to the poll, Raoul has 22 percent support, compared to 18 percent for Quinn – with none of the others above 10 percent, and some 39 percent undecided.

BUT WHAT INTRIGUES me is the part that tried showing the regional breakdowns – where Raoul has 25 percent support in Chicago and 24 percent support in the suburbs. But Quinn is the leader in downstate Illinois.

Will it wind up being a Raoul vs. ...

The Mighty Quinn has some 25 percent support of downstate voters who will cast ballots in the Democratic primary, compared to 10 percent for Raoul.

“So what!,” you may ask. It might seem obvious that a lowly state legislator with little-to-no name recognition outside of his specific Senate district on the South Side would lag behind a guy who has been a part of the political scene for nearly as long as Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, himself.

Which is true, since Quinn served on the staff of then-Gov. Dan Walker back in the early 1970s, before going on to other roles – including the “cut back” action that reduced the Illinois House by one-third in the early 1980s.

... Harold brawl following the March 20 primary?

BUT IF ONE remembers back to 2014, the reason that Quinn lost to Rauner is supposedly because he was weak in downstate Illinois.

Actually, despised is more the word that was used to describe why rural voters were willing to back a rich guy from the North Shore suburbs over Quinn. The only county out of Illinois’ 102 that Quinn won was Cook. The rest of the state map from November 2014 was a solid shade of red.

Even in the primary election held in March of that year, there was evidence that Quinn was not the preferred candidate outside of Chicago.

Quinn actually managed to lose the vote in a few counties of Southern Illinois, where the distaste for Quinn was such that they voted for opponent Tio Hardiman – even though I suspect they knew nothing about him, and when they eventually learned of his views on gun control (he’s heavily concerned about urban violence – head of the CeaseFire Illinois group), they wished they could vote for nobody.

HARDIMAN IS ACTUALLY trying again to run for governor this time, and the Simon Institute poll shows him running last out of the six candidates with zero percent in downstate Illinois. Even perpetual fringe candidate Robert Marshall manages with 1 percent support.

How many of Tio's '14 backers still support him for gov?

So what does it say that many of the people eager to dump Quinn back in ’14 now seem to be supporting him? Should we regard that election cycle as a fluke? Or is the fluke the election cycle occurring now?

Is Quinn being forgiven for the misdeeds people constantly accused him of four years ago. Or perhaps it is the sight of what we replaced Quinn with for the past few years that makes some people think perhaps he ought to be given another chance.

Regardless, it will be interesting to see how this eight-way electoral fight manages to turn out, since it will be possible for someone with only about 25 percent support to win the Democratic nomination. Which could wind up being Raoul – although I’ll admit the thought of a Quinn/Harold debate come October is one I’d find amusing.

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Is Rauner losing the rest of Illinois’ support? Or nothing but Dem fantasy?

Gov. Bruce Rauner’s efforts to keep real political power (and not just bear the title) is dependent largely on the idea of keeping the rest of Illinois united and thinking the problems our state faces are due to excess influence by Chicago.

So what should we think of the new poll by Southern Illinois University’s political institute named for former Sen. Paul Simon? It’s the one that says the southernmost region of the state doesn’t think very highly of Rauner, nor the performance of Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill.

I’M SURE THERE are Democratic partisans who are going to put the overly-simplistic vision out there that says the people are rejecting Rauner, and that he may be causing harm to his GOP allies.

That’s just a little too easy to be accepted. Although I would think Rauner ought to have his concerns about how well-liked he truly is in the parts of Illinois outside of metro Chicago – particularly those southernmost counties where the nearest city of any size isn’t Chicago or St. Louis; but Memphis, Tenn.

For the record, the Paul Simon Institute did a poll of people in 18 counties; finding that 50.7 percent disapprove of the governor’s performance. Only 37.4 percent think the governor has done an acceptable job.

It also seems that only 15 percent of people think Illinois as a whole is doing the right thing in the way it operates these days.

AS FOR KIRK, only 30.4 percent approve of his stint in Washington, while 46.6 percent have no opinion of the man – even though he has been in the Senate for five years now.

Not exactly solid numbers for a political party that wants to believe its hard line stance in refusing to put together a state constitutionally-mandated budget is somehow an act of financial responsibility – and not reckless disregard for the people of Illinois.

Although historically, Southern Illinois was a region that leaned toward the Democratic Party. There were all those coal miners in the region known as “Egypt” who were inclined to think of the labor unions as their allies – and the others who just thought of Republicans as the party of country club-types.

 

There truly is a part of Illinois apart from Chicago, and it's known as Egypt

Then again, the southern states used to be hard-core Democrat because they were still bitter about the Republicans being the “Party of Lincoln.” Those states are now the basis of the modern-day GOP, and are the ones who think there’s nothing ridiculous about the stalemate that prevents Congress from naming a new speaker of the House of Representatives.

BUT SOUTHERN ILLINOIS has changed to Republican-leaning as well. The past couple of decades saw many of the old Democratic Party legislators in Springfield get dumped for Republicans. I can remember a political observer who said the change was because “Southern Illinoisans realized the Democrats don’t care about them anymore.”

There also is the fact that places like Cairo, Metropolis and Eldorado are very inclined to think that Chicago is an alien land (Jackson, Miss., is closer to those municipalities than is the Second City). Making them susceptible to the Rauner message.

So it wasn’t a shock that all those Southern Illinois counties threw their support to Rauner in last year’s election cycle. That they were more than willing to think of former Gov. Pat Quinn as just a Chicago guy – even though Rauner himself is a Cook County guy who also has a place to live in downtown Chicago.

But should it be a shock that Rauner hasn’t exactly kept the support of Southern Illinois? Which is necessary because Chicago and the inner suburbs of Cook County are nearly half of Illinois’ population.

FOR RAUNER TO achieve the strength necessary to get away with defying a Democrat-dominated Legislature, he needs to have all of Illinois united against the city (which, by itself, is about 22 percent of the state’s people).

If Southern Illinois were to throw its lot in with Chicago metro (which when you include all the suburbs accounts for about two-thirds of the people), it could make for a miserable mess for the remainder of the Rauner term – and could mean people anxiously awaiting 2018 as their chance to “Dump Bruce!”

Where Illinois becomes one with Missouri and Kentucky

Then again, this poll could mean merely that people are disgusted enough to vote “No!!!” without really knowing what “Yes” is for. As the institute’s director says, “Voters here have been in a bad mood, and they continue to be.”

Which is probably the best for our society as a whole – we don’t really want to be a state that silences anyone who has the gall to speak out against the status quo. Particularly when our status quo is one that can’t fulfill basic obligations like a state budget.

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A DAY IN THE LIFE (of Chicago): Putting limits on ‘term limit’ talk?

Part of the reason I don’t think it’s such a big deal that Gov. Pat Quinn has that “26 percent” approval rating that some people like to toss out over-and-over is that the reality is that most people don’t think much of anybody in our state government.

MADIGAN: Truly the exception

The contempt isn’t solely for Quinn. There’s the recent Gallup Organization poll that showed, among other things, only 28 percent of people approve of the way Illinois’ state government works over all. Both Republican and Democrat.

AND I STILL recall that Chicago Tribune poll that had Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, with only a 13 percent approval rating.

So I wasn’t surprised to learn of the study released this week by the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute – 79.5 percent of those surveyed either strongly or somewhat favor term limits for legislators. And 82.7 percent would support the idea of limiting how long someone could serve as a legislative leader.

It’s just the usual contempt some people feel for government when they don’t comprehend its actions. Although much of what I see and hear anecdotally indicates that what most people feel is that they want their officials to remain – and everybody else’s to go away – so that their views will prevail!

I also sense that many are amazed at the concept of Michael Madigan being in charge for as long as he has (a member of the Illinois House from the Clearing neighborhood since 1971, who became House speaker in 1983 and has been in charge ever since – except for that two-year period when we experienced the concept of “Illinois House Speaker Lee Daniels, R-Elmhurst”). Their overwhelming support for the idea is a gut reaction to that.

DANIELS: Did 'speakership' really happen?

YET THAT IS the very reason why I’m skeptical of term limits. That, and the fact that Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bruce Rauner seems to want to use this concept to build traction for his own campaign against Quinn.

 

Madigan is the exception to the rule. Just about everyone else who has ever been a legislative leader in Illinois hasn’t come close to the amount of time served that would limit them out of the post. Should we really want to make long-term changes to our laws because of the exception that may never occur again?

In part, because Rauner thinks if he can’t beat his opponents in a head-to-head fight, he’ll just try to eliminate the opposition altogether. Which, to me, is as cynical a reason to do it as any in politics. As bad as those who use redistricting processes to limit the ability of people to challenge incumbent candidates.

What else is notable these days on the southwestern shores of the thawing-out Lake Michigan, where our residents fear that fully shaking off winter coping mechanisms will result in bad karma and us getting hit with one more winter snowstorm?

78 CENTS ON THE DOLLAR: Gov. Pat Quinn wants to make sure he takes the vote of the female segment of the electorate come Nov. 4.

Quinn trying to be Kennedy-esque?

Or maybe that’s just a cynical way to interpret the event he held Tuesday to show he supports the concept of equal pay for women. It turns out that it was Equal Pay Day across Illinois, even though I suspect most people didn’t have a clue.

“Here we are in 2014, 51 years after President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, and women on average still don’t earn as much as their male counterparts in the workplace,” Quinn said. “We won’t be satisfied until all workers are equally compensated for the same work, regardless of their gender.”

He also pointed out that during the past decade, the state’s Equal Pay law has resulted in 709 complaints about unequal pay for women, and the resulting investigations have resulted in $690,000 in back wages being paid.

3-4 & 2-4 – 25 MORE WEEKS TO GO:  Those are the won-loss records for Chicago’s two baseball clubs, following the first week of play. It’s early, but it seems neither the White Sox nor Cubs are going to be pennant contenders.



This season's highlight?

Thus far, the one-time Cuban beisbol sensation Jose Abreu has shown some ability. I still am impressed with that three-run triple he hit against the Minnesota Twins – except that the White Sox seemed determined to blow that ballgame.

How long Abreu can keep it up will be intriguing. He could be legitimate. Although that aforementioned game may wind up being typical of the season – losing despite themselves.

As for the Cubs, it’s going to be another lame year. Fans will turn out to play along with the whole “Century of Wrigley Field” celebration, where they will fondly reminisce about all the past losers they rooted for – while trying to ignore the current incarnation of the “lovable losers.”

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