As you’ve probably heard by now, Illinois Republican Party Chair
Don Tracy announced his resignation last week, apparently effective the day
after the Republican National Convention concludes on July 18.
The announcement came after far-right activists forced out the
state party’s vice chair, Mark Shaw, and the resignation of the party’s finance
chair, Vince Kolber. Both Shaw and Kolber had made unsuccessful bids for the
Republican National Committeeman post days earlier, but were rejected by state
convention attendees.
After he first won the chairmanship job in 2021, Tracy said,
“Regardless of our differences… Republicans are the only hope for turning
Illinois around.”
By last week, Tracy was finally forced to admit the obvious.
“When I took on this full-time volunteer job in February, 2021, I
thought I would be spending most of my time fighting Democrats,” he wrote in
his resignation letter. Now, however, “we have Republicans who would rather
fight other Republicans than engage in the harder work of defeating incumbent
Democrats by convincing swing voters to vote Republican.”
It has always been thus. This is what I wrote almost six years
ago, in late 2018: “The far right has been obsessed with gaining control of the
Illinois Republican Party for as long as I can remember. They’ve only really
held the party’s reins once, in 2002 when Gary MacDougal was handed the
chairmanship after then-House Republican Leader Lee Daniels was forced to step
down during a federal investigation into campaign work on state time that
eventually nailed his chief of staff.”
But MacDougal didn’t last long: “Before the year was out he was
replaced by then-Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka, the only Republican to win
statewide during that year’s sweeping Democratic victories. Topinka spent the
next few years in almost constant battle with her right flank. But she
prevailed and the far right has been shut out ever since.”
When I wrote that story in 2018, Jeanne Ives and the far-right
were attempting to oust then-party chair Tim Schneider six months after helping
broker a deal that made their guy, Lake County Republican Chair Mark Shaw, a
state party co-chair with Schneider. Fast-forward to this month, when that very
same Mark Shaw was deemed as aloof from the “grassroots” and had to go and Ives
is a member of the state central committee.
Party elders have done whatever they could to keep the party out
of the hands of the insurgents. The fear was the insurgents would alienate the
“donor class,” the wealthy Republicans who only wanted to deal with people who
looked and talked like them.
Also, people who spend their lives yelling “No!” and trying to
tear things down rarely, if ever, learn to say “Yes” and build things up. It’s
no accident that the state party has had 10 different chairpersons in the past
23 years. When you look around the country, though, it’s kind of amazing that
the Republican powers-that-be have held on this long.
Most members of that once-powerful donor class have passed away,
retired and/or left Illinois. Kolber, the resigned party finance chair, has
contributed more than $1.3 million to campaigns in the past 10 years. The state
Republican Party’s latest quarterly report showed that Chairman Tracy, his
family’s company and his family members accounted for 76% of all the ILGOP’s
individual contributions - $109,600 out of $144,013.
One of the lesser-known, but highly important aspects of state
parties is their access to a federal postage discount. By paying for their
direct mail through the state parties, candidates can save a lot of money.
But that requires a level of trust that the parties will spend the money
as intended, which is another reason the people who run things want one of
their own in there.
But now, it looks like those perpetually aggrieved outsiders could
soon take over the party apparatus.
Palatine Township Republican Chairman and state central
committeeman Aaron Del Mar wants to be Tracy’s replacement. Del Mar ran as Gary
Rabine’s running mate in the 2022 Republican primary. Rabine finished fifth
with less than 7% of the vote.
Del Mar appeared earlier this month on Ramblin’ Ray Stevens’ WLS
Radio show where he cracked two jokes about Gov. JB Pritzker’s weight. Still,
that put him in sync with former President Donald Trump, who also recently
mocked Pritzker’s weight.
Needless to say, Trump lost Illinois by 17 points in both 2020 and
2016. But, hey, welcome to what looks to be the new Illinois Republican Party.