Illinois GOP chair on midterm results, the party’s path forward

Welcome back 819 the day after election day here on this Wednesday. We really appreciate you being here. We're grateful for that. You know, as the final votes Are tallied in the midterm elections, the national landscape and the political map right here in Illinois faces a moment of reorganization. Indeed, indeed. And joining us now to share the Republican perspective, just heard from Senator Duckworth on last night's results in the path forward for the GOP here in Illinois, is the chair of the Illinois Republican Party, Mr. Bob Grogan. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you. We really appreciate it. Okay, let's just dive in and get your reaction to what happened last night, and let's talk about what you attribute the results to. So, the voters sent a message that they were not happy. I think angry is probably a good term for a lot of the voters. And I think we're gonna be having to look through what exactly that they said. Just because you lose doesn't mean you actually know why you lost, right? It's interesting that... While, I'll give you an example, like in Lake County, Darren Bailey lost by 33 points, but a referendum to increase taxes for schools won by 14. So our policies maybe aren't as unpopular as the actual messengers. And so we have to determine whether it's our policies or maybe the way we were governing. Maybe it's the way we're doing, we're providing leadership. I do think at the end of the day, we are electing people to go do a job and make our lives better, Republican or Democrats. So how do we do that? How do we work together and make that happen? Yeah, I mean, I think that I've come from a wing of the Republican Party where it's about governing. It's not about pontificating, it's not about another tweet. I think that we need to find ways of governing and when the other side is right, we should partner with them. And when they're wrong, we should be the noble opposition. Let's see. To my recollection, the last Illinois governor was Bruce Rauner. Correct. Okay. Governor Pritzker just won the third term, what will be his third term, in the neighborhood of a million votes more than Darren Bailey. Yeah. Unpack for me what the strategy could be for the state GOP to improve that breakdown. Well, I mean, one of the things that obviously happened here was for us to be successful, we would have to localize the election. Because I mean, Illinois suffers from different problems, I mean, the Bears don't talk about moving to Indiana because of something Donald Trump is doing, right? So, you know, our goal was to localize the election, but I think that the people spoke that they were really looking at national issues and sent that back. I think that, you know, we have to, you know, you go back, but once upon a time, we used to own the governor's mansion. I mean, Governor Edgar, in my lifetime, won 101 counties, and that included Cook. He lost one southern Illinois county by three votes. So I think we have to get back there. The fact that we have to compete in Cook County. It's a disgrace that we actually had no county-wide candidates in Cook County, the Republican Party. We didn't have a single judge running, and we have to get back to actually, you can't beat somebody with nobody. Okay, let's also talk a little bit about, I mean, as we said, this was a referendum. So in your perspective, from what you're seeing, what do you think voters want? And what do you think the Illinois party needs to deliver? Yeah, I saw some statistics that People are unhappy with the affordability issue, right, inflation and such, and those numbers are the same as they were two years ago. So they're still upset about the thing, and I don't think that they got the impression that we have solved that issue. So what the national Republicans did, because in Illinois, we don't pass legislation, right? So whatever's going on in Illinois, if it's an Illinois issue, the Democrats pretty much own it. They can only blame- Bruce Rauner so much longer. But President Trump and the Republican Congress, they cut taxes on overtime, they cut taxes on tips, things like that. People don't see that every day at the grocery store. And so some of those things that they were trying to offer in relief for affordability, It didn't come across, and I think we have to do that. And obviously, I think that there's a lot of reaction to the Iran war, and that's something that I think actually President Trump came in on being against forever wars. And so I think that that's a major issue supposed to be dealt with. You mentioned Jim Edgar, and he was popular here in Cook County. I was a kid when he was governor, but I do remember him being. On the moderate side, okay, I'm wondering if you were going to advise your candidates going into 2028 to separate themselves from MAGA and from President Trump. No, I mean, I think that where, you know, I think like Don Tracy, who, you know, also lost last night, said he's, you know, where President Trump is right, you know, I'm going to agree with him and where he's wrong, I'm going to disagree with him. I think that the advice going forward is, as I said, I started off earlier saying that I think that on policies. I think that still a lot of Republican policies are very popular. You just had a referendum, a constitutional amendment in Wisconsin that won handily. It was an anti-DEI referendum. It out-polled the governor candidate there by 10 points, right? So I think that what we have to do, the difference is... I think we're right on the policies, but we have to be able to speak that suburban cocktail party language. We have to be able to describe it and communicate to people who don't agree with you just ideologically and you have to explain it to them in more of that common sense way as opposed to just checking boxes. So let's think ahead to 2028. What does that look like in your eyes ideally? 2028, obviously, we are coming off a new low, unfortunately, so it's rebuilding. I think that a lot of it, we have to heal as a Republican Party, we're gonna have to do an autopsy, maybe several, we gotta go around and listen. One of the problems Republican Party has is I think we're so far out of power that it's almost like we suffer from a Stockholm Syndrome. We can't identify what it's like to have power, so we just squabble amongst ourselves. So we have to unify, we have to be that noble opposition, and then on those issues, we have to challenge the Democrats, we have to field good, strong candidates, and we have to actually go back to talking to neighbors instead of lecturing them. Thank you for being in, Bob. Appreciate your time. Thank you.