Gore holds lead in race for Illinois

By Curtis Wilkie, Globe Correspondent, 10/22/2000

CHICAGO - For nearly 30 years, Illinois was considered a reliably Republican state in presidential elections. But during the last decade, the GOP began to lose numbers in the predominantly white counties surrounding Chicago.

In heavily populated DuPage County, which Ronald Reagan won by 113,000 votes on his way to victory in 1980, the GOP margin was cut to 34,000 by President Clinton in 1996. Clinton, who broke the Republican hegemony in Illinois in 1992, carried the state again four years ago. One result stunned Republican officials: Clinton actually won suburban Lake County, which Reagan had taken by 50,000 votes. "For a Republican to win, you gotta run gangbusters in the suburbs," said former governor Jim Edgar, a Republican. "In the last elections, our candidates ran into real problems with suburban women. They couldn't connect with suburban women on issues like abortion and gun control."

Rich Williamson, the state Republican chairman, said suburban voters also turned away from the GOP in 1996 because of the harsh conservatism of Newt Gingrich, then the House speaker. This year, he said, Governor George W. Bush of Texas is emphasizing two goals - putting an end to partisan bickering and implementing an education program with the motto "leave no child behind" - that should win favor in the Chicago suburbs.

With a little more than two weeks to go before the election, both sides agree that Vice President Al Gore holds a single-digit lead in the state. But that lead may be narrowing.

"Gore's been doing well in Illinois from the beginning," said William Daley, the national chairman of the Gore campaign and brother of the powerful Chicago mayor, Richard M. Daley. "The Chicago Tribune had us up 8 to 10 points," Daley said, referring to a survey conducted early this month. "Actually, it's more like 6 to 8. Gore's doing OK downstate and cutting into the Republican vote in the suburbs."

Two weeks ago, the Bush campaign stopped buying television time in Chicago, tacitly acknowledging its disadvantage here. The decision to divert resources to other states was made by strategists at the national headquarters in Austin.

"They currently see Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin as more winnable than Illinois," said Williamson. "The Democrats want to say it's over, but I think they're ahead by no more than 3 or 4 points."

That view was buttressed by a Chicago Sun Times/WFLD poll, conducted Oct. 16-17, that showed Gore leading Bush, 45 percent to 43 percent, well within the 4-point margin of error.

Bush has picked up ground in Illinois ever since his appearance on the Oprah Winfrey television show here a few weeks ago, said Rich Juliano, who is managing the statewide Bush effort.

Though the Bush advertising campaign currently is inactive here, the Texas governor is not writing off the state, Juliano said. The GOP nominee is scheduled to come to Illinois twice in the final two weeks. And if the poll numbers remain close, Bush could buy back into the expensive Chicago market, he said.

The key to Democratic victories in the state has always been the enormous vote that comes out of Chicago, a force best dramatized in 1960 when the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, father of the present mayor, produced such a flood of Democratic support that it carried the state for John F. Kennedy and provided Kennedy with his margin of victory in the electoral college.

This year, Gore can be expected to roll out of Chicago with an advantage of as much as 300,000 votes. A strong GOP showing in the rural areas downstate and in the suburbs is thus essential.

David Axelrod, a Chicago political consultant and an adviser to the Gore campaign, said he would feel more comfortable if the candidate called on President Clinton, a highly popular figure among minority constituencies, to help mobilize the black vote in the city in the last days of the campaign.

Though Chicago is vital, Axelrod said, "part of the reason the Democrats won" Illinois in 1992 and 1996 is that "they neutralized the traditional Republican advantage in the suburbs." Clinton's centrist themes and economic proposals appealed to the suburban voters, he said, at the same time they were "rejecting the Gingrich Republicanism" that helped sink Bob Dole in 1996.

The Democrats continue to make inroads, Axelrod said, because the suburbs are no longer as conservative as they once were. "The people are more independent. Some of them are old Democrats who moved out from the city. Some are new people moving in. The setting there is not rock-ribbed Republican anymore."

Republican officials are painfully aware that the Chicago suburbs have shifted from secure GOP bases to battlegrounds. "In 1996, quite honestly, the Dole campaign was not very appealing," said Bob Kjellander, the Midwest chairman for the Bush campaign. "We got clobbered in the suburbs and all over the country. But this year we see better margins out there.

"Governor Bush's emphasis on education is having an impact in the collar counties" surrounding Chicago, Kjellander said. "That's reflected in our polling data. Gore's lead is totally based on the Democrats' domination in the city of Chicago."

Edgar, who left the governor's office two years ago, put it this way: "George W. is doing a lot better with suburban women than his dad did or Bob Dole. But right now Gore's ahead. Bush could win, but there would have to be a significant Republican turnout in the suburbs."