It's My Mind: Not a Comment on the Opposition #twill

I was asked by a relative to try to predict the midterms. In 2024 it was easier to say Vice President Kam-A-la Harris would get her clock cleaned by President Donald Trump. Even then it was not fully assured. This time is harder.

Both sides have put up candidates I would not send.

In Texas the Senate race is James Talarico aka "Talafreako" against Ken Paxton. Texas is not a purple state that wandered. It is a red state, and Paxton is still not clear of Talarico. September polls had the Democrat ahead or tied. A New York Times/Siena survey in June had them even at 47. That is the tell. Paxton carries the baggage. Talarico is a strange fit for the state he is asking to send him.

He is a Presbyterian seminarian who told the Texas House, in 2021, that God is non-binary, and that trans children are made in God's image. He has said other traditions circle the same truth. I am not grading his theology. I am saying a candidate who talks that way is asking Texas to ignore what it has been. Democrats may still vote for him. A lot of them cannot bring themselves to vote for a Republican, especially one aligned with Donald Trump.

The same pattern shows up with Democratic Socialists of America candidates who have won House seats. I would not call them strong candidates. They have a leg up anyway. Democrats who are not socialists will often take the socialist over the Republican.

Allow me to bring this conversation home to Illinois.

My read on the Illinois races I have looked at in September is that Democrats keep the governor's mansion and the Senate seat Dick Durbin is leaving. Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton against former state party chair Don Tracy. Gov. J.B. Pritzker, running for a third term, against Darren Bailey again.

If there was a seat people could call winnable, it was Durbin's. I am saying winnable. I am not saying Republicans win it. A Public Policy Polling survey taken September 30 and October 1 had Stratton at 49 and Tracy at 36. The same poll had Pritzker at 54 and Bailey at 34, with independent Collin Corbett at 6. The Senate gap is the smaller one. Smaller is not small.

Then came Monday. Via CapitolFax.

Former Illinois House Republican Leader Jim Durkin endorsed Pritzker over Bailey, in a video the governor's campaign released. Durkin led the House minority from 2013 to 2023. He still calls himself a Republican. He said he served with Bailey, that Bailey's politics are subtraction, and that he is not cut out for the job. He cited infrastructure, the state's credit, and gun laws. Then the line that matters: he is not going to waste his vote.

I am not surprised. Durkin has been uneasy with Trump and with MAGA Republicans for years. He is not the first Illinois Republican to cross. In August 2024 the late Jim Edgar, governor from 1991 to 1999, said he would vote for Harris. He told a Springfield radio host he had never voted for Trump and would not start. Ray LaHood, Adam Kinzinger, and Joe Walsh were on the same list. Edgar's was a federal race. Durkin's is the state he used to help lead.

Durkin is also no longer only a former leader. Since he left the House in 2023 he has been in government affairs, affiliated with Point of Difference Strategies. That firm is led by Lisa Duarte, who was Pritzker's deputy governor for budget and economy. Bailey says the endorsement is about a job. I cannot prove that. The reader can hold both facts.

What it tells me is simpler. The Illinois GOP has to be the solid opposition. Not a comment on the opposition. Not a former leader lending his name to the man already in the office. A party that loses and still stands on the other side of the vote.

I would have little trouble with that party lining up with the MAGA faction. That is a position. Endorsing the incumbent is not a position. It is a vacancy.

In the 2000s, conservative writers I used to cite called the Springfield arrangement the bipartisan combine. John Kass at the Tribune had been using the Combine for years. In a March 2008 column he put the phrase out for other writers to take, and he quoted former U.S. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald calling it the bipartisan Illinois political combine. Legislative leaders, a governor, a mayor, cutting deals with very little daylight between them. Fitzgerald's point was that their allegiance was not to a party. It was to the pocketbook.

People now call the Washington version a uniparty. Same observation. A Republican who lines up with Democrats, and a party label that does not survive the deal. The word itself is older than that use. Ralph Nader's campaign was already saying corporate uniparty in 2000. The use readers know, the one aimed at so-called RINOs, came later, once the right picked it up. In the sources I was reading, the Combine was the Illinois word for it first. A Republican vote for the Democratic governor is how that arrangement stays intact.

Illinois is a blue state. That is not an argument for a softer Republican Party. It is the argument for a harder one. Republicans last held the state Senate after the 2000 election and lost it in 2002. The Democratic majority was seated in January 2003. That is the chamber Barack Obama entered in 1997, while Republicans still ran it. They have not had it since. The House has been Democratic even longer, aside from one term in the mid-1990s. The last Republican statewide win was Bruce Rauner in 2014.

A party in that shape does not get to endorse the other side and call it realism. To make the Illinois GOP the opposition again, what would it take?