Handicapping House Races an Impossible Task
Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Taylorville) celebrates re-election on election night 2018.
2018 was terrible for Illinois Republicans. Their incumbent Governor was creamed, they were once again held out of statewide office, they lost legislative seats, and turned over two suburban congressional seats to the Democrats. A third, Rodney Davis, came dangerously close to losing. One Republican texted me early on election night in 2018 with two simple words: “blood bath.”
Conventional thinking says 2020 will be no better. Illinois is a blue state already counted in Joe Biden’s category, Senator Dick Durbin is likely to sail to re-election, and President Trump’s approval among suburbanites is melting like an ice cube on a hot summer day. But when you dig into the numbers, it is nearly impossible to tell what may happen on election night this year.
In 2016, then-Congressman Peter Roskam, a Republican, won re-election to his seat in Congress in the northwest suburban 6th District cruised by around 19 points. Democrat Hillary Clinton won that district by nearly 7 points. Roskam won by 65,000 votes in a district Trump lost by 25,000. That’s roughly 90,000 voters who filled in the bubbles for Clinton and Roskam.
In 2018, the opposite happened. Incumbent Republican Governor Bruce Rauner beat JB Pritzker in the 6th District by roughly 17,000 votes, but Roskam lost his seat to Democrat Sean Casten by around 22,500 votes. That’s about 40,000 voters who went Rauner/Casten.
In the 13th District, stretching from Edwardsville to Springfield and Bloomington-Normal to Champaign-Urbana, Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Taylorville), came within an inch of his political life in 2018, holding off Betsy Dirksen Londrigan by around 2,000 votes. CNN even called the race for Londrigan at one point in the night. (Disclosure: I was Communications Director on Davis’ first race in 2012, a race he won by 1,000 votes and I panic-sweated through multiple shirts on election night.) Davis was nearly dragged down to the depths by Rauner, who lost a downstate district he had no business losing by some 10,000 votes. Downstate Republicans abandoned Rauner and nearly took Davis with him. In 2016, Trump won Davis’ district by 5.5 points.
In the 14th District, a combination rural and exurb district reaches from the Wisconsin border north of McHenry south to the outer edges of Joliet. It was considered safely Republican when Trump underperformed in the district in 2016, defeating Hillary Clinton by an unexpectedly close 3.75 points. In 2018, Rauner outperformed Trump, beating JB Pritzker by around 8 points, yet Republican Congressman Randy Hultgren fell to Democrat Lauren Underwood by around 5 points. Ticket splitting abounds.
So, conventional wisdom tells you Davis is safer than in 2018, Casten is safe, and Underwood is in big trouble, right?
Not so fast.
Let’s start with Underwood. Republicans started the year optimistic about taking out an inexperienced, wave-riding member who wouldn’t usually be representing cornfields outside of Somonauk, Marengo, and Hebron. They felt good about Sen. Sue Rezin (R-Morris) and even conservative Latina Catalina Lauf, who found herself beloved by the grassroots. Then uber-conservative State Senator Jim Oberweis (R-Sugar Grove) dumped a ton of personal money into the primary and pitted an unnerving 74-year-old white man against an unassuming 33-year-old Black woman. It is an invitation to scare off female voters. And Oberweis is delivering, occasionally looking like a bully in some of their joint appearances.
There’s obviously still a long way to go, but Underwood is up on TV, Oberweis is a political brand with some negative connotations, and Underwood appears to be in better shape than many thought she would be if you asked them a year ago.
If anyone has a potential chance to breathe a little sigh of relief with six weeks to go before Election Day, it may be Rep. Sean Casten (D-Downers Grove). He’s not moderate, he’s not soft spoken, he would usually be a target in a race like this. Instead, he drew firebrand former State Representative Jeanne Ives of Wheaton, who challenged Governor Rauner in the 2018 gubernatorial primary, and surprised many with her performance.
Ives has a network (and probably listens to some of the wrong people), and she’s smart running ads like this instead of like this, but it’s going to be hard to turn a district trending so hard to the left so quickly.
Then there’s the curious case of Davis. His district follows multiple trends. He has both the University of Illinois and Illinois State University campuses. He has the cities of Champaign, Urbana, Decatur, parts of Springfield, Bloomington, Normal, Edwardsville, and Collinsville. Trump underperformed in all those communities in 2016. The southern half of Davis’ 13th District may as well be as red state as you can find. Trump voters were fired up in the southern half of the district in 2016 and were completely tuned out in 2018. Davis’ chances weigh on what Trump’s enthusiasm is in the southern half of his district by November 3.
If one thing is for certain, nothing is for certain this year.
