Illinois Republicans go all in for Trump at state convention

COLLINSVILLE – Illinois Republicans used their state convention Saturday to go all in for former President Donald Trump’s election this fall, adopting a platform attacking Democrats for supporting abortion rights, eliminating cash bail and promoting transgender identity.

“Joe Biden’s vision for the country and J.B. Pritzker’s vision for the state is, it’s a disaster, and may I say, even that it’s evil,” U.S. Rep. Mary Miller of Hindsboro, a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, said of the president and the Illinois governor.

“I think that the left is counting on us to be uninformed, passive, afraid and divided,” said Miller, one of the three downstate Republicans in the state’s 17-member House delegation. “But we have to fight for opportunities and freedom for our children and grandchildren, and we need to fight for a way that honors those that have gone before us that have paid the ultimate sacrifice to secure and maintain our freedom.”

The southwestern Illinois setting for the 2024 Illinois GOP convention was apt for a political organization that has seen its statewide influence dwindle along geographic lines, leaving Republicans strongest in rural, less populated areas downstate while Democrats have grown beyond their traditional strongholds in Chicago to include the once GOP-rich collar counties.

Madison County, once a downstate hotbed of Democratic politics, began a gradual shift three decades ago to become overwhelmingly Republican, and is now a growing suburban area of St. Louis. The GOP-led county board has placed a non-binding referendum on the November ballot calling for Illinois counties outside the Chicago area to secede and form a new state.

There was no talk of secession on the floor of the GOP state convention, though a vendor booth stationed outside the hall at the Gateway Convention Center promoted the cause. But some Republicans acknowledged that for the GOP to make advances in a  state where Democrats hold all statewide offices and legislative supermajorities, the party will have to make efforts to appeal to suburban voters who have demonstrated a deep dislike of Trump.

“You know, Trump has not done well in the past in Illinois. That’s for sure. If the election were held today, though, I think he would do better than he has in the past,” said State GOP Chair Don Tracy of Trump’s 17 percentage point general election losses in Illinois in both 2016 and 2020.

“How much better? I just don’t know,” he said.

But Tracy contended that Republican enthusiasm had increased for Trump while “the enthusiasm for Joe Biden on the other side seems to be dwindling and there seems to be cracks in the Democrat coalition that are appearing.”

As for the suburban Trump factor, U.S. Rep. Mike Bost of Murphysboro said it was important for Republican candidates to “make sure that they’re selling themselves and their ideas and not let somebody else paint who they are by affiliation with somebody they don’t like.”

Bost acknowledged that has been a difficult line for suburban GOP candidates to toe as political campaigns have become more nationalized. The veteran GOP congressman said the suburban shift to Democrats has accelerated because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which returned questions of abortion legality to the states.

Abortion, and the role of Illinois Democrats led by Pritzker to enshrine a fundamental right to the procedure in state statute, was the topic of one plank of the party platform adopted at the convention which said that Illinois “has rapidly become perhaps the most radically pro-abortion state in the union.”

“The restoration of the culture of life in Illinois will not occur until the Democratic Party and the radical organizations that support them are removed from power,” the platform plank read.

The state GOP party platform has long opposed same-sex marriage, though its been almost a decade since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down bans against those unions. On Saturday, the party added a plank “confirming the immutable biological sex of humans and the protection of women” and opposing gender treatments as well as “all efforts to validate transgender identity,”

The platform adopted by more than 500 delegates at the convention also attacked the Democratic Party for eliminating cash bail, contending it “opposes law and order and law enforcement.”

Despite Trump’s unsuccessful attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which included dozens of lawsuits that were rejected by courts, the Illinois GOP called for “restoring integrity to our elections.” But the plank also erroneously claimed that Democrats were promoting “voting by non-citizens” through support of illegal immigration. Non-citizens cannot legally cast a vote under federal law.

The state GOP also sounded familiar criticisms of Biden, attacking the president for failing to control the nation’s southern borders and for offering student loan debt relief.

The tenor of the convention was established at the outset when Myles Holmes, the pastor of the Pentecostal Revive church in Collinsville, said he knew he “was in the right place” when he saw “Trump hats and MAGA tee shirts,” a reference to the Republican presidential contender’s Make America Great Again mantra.

Holmes said he preaches in support of Trump from his pulpit because he considered the provision of the federal tax code that prevents non-profit organizations like churches from endorsing or opposing political candidates “Illegal, unconstitutional and I don’t have to pay attention to this.”

“We ask for your blessing on Donald Trump today,” Holmes said in his opening prayer “We live in a world where there’s so much confusion and deception. We live in a world where people do not know what is right and wrong, what is good and evil what is up or down. They do not even know anymore what a boy or a girl or a man or a woman is.”

The only contentious note in the festivities occurred when former Lake County GOP chairman Mark Shaw was twice overwhelmingly rejected in votes from the convention floor in his bid to become the state’s new Republican National Committeeman, replacing Richard Porter, who is term limited.

Shaw, a Trump delegate and a “senior adviser” to the presidential candidate, has a controversial party history. Once viewed as a grassroots supporter, his attempts to maneuver into the RNC job were rejected by delegates who viewed him as too establishment.

Dean White of St. Charles, a construction company owner and a member of the Republican State Central Committee, was ultimately named national committeeman after Shaw dropped out. Hardin County GOP Chair Rhonda Belford, who chairs the Republican County Chairs’ Association, was voted as national committeewoman, replacing Demetra DeMonte.