Illinois Republicans urged to look beyond traditional base as national party courts unions

MILWAUKEE – A former Republican congressman from New York told Illinois Republicans Tuesday that to win more elections in their deeply blue state, they need to reach beyond the traditional conservative voting base.

“We need to challenge ourselves to get out and talk to the people who vote the least, talk to the people who have voted Republican the least,” former Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin told Illinois delegates to the GOP convention in Milwaukee.

That includes finding new, persuadable voters within groups often considered Democratic strongholds, he said.

“And don’t just pander to them by saying, ‘I love Black people, vote for me. I love Hispanic people, vote for me. I love Asian people, vote for me.’ That doesn’t work and it shouldn’t work,” he said. “It’s about us being proud, principled conservatives, going to those voters who are longtime disenfranchised Democratic voters and telling them it doesn’t have to be this way anymore.”

Zeldin, who served from 2015 to 2023 in the U.S. House from New York, was the keynote speaker at the Illinois delegation’s breakfast meeting Tuesday as they prepared for Day 2 of the national convention. Former President Donald Trump received the presidential nomination on Monday, along with his 2024 running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance.

Unlike at many past Republican conventions, Illinois’ GOP delegation is made up of mostly non-elected officials. And those elected officials who did make the trip to Milwaukee are among the state’s most conservative – including far-right U.S. Rep. Mary Miller of Oakland.

Miller, who is married to state Rep. Chris Miller, told the crowd she was “proud of my husband and the work that the Illinois Freedom Caucus is doing to fight back against the Democrats in Springfield.”

“I think I’ve heard my husband call [the General Assembly] the Bad Idea Factory,” she said, later calling President Joe Biden’s border policies “treasonous.”

In a rare availability with reporters afterward, Miller blamed the media for Republicans’ losses in deep blue Illinois. When asked why she thought more moderate Republicans weren’t at the RNC, Miller offered no answer.

“Well, I don’t know why those people aren’t here,” she said. “But President Trump is our leader, and we’re here to support President Trump.”

State Rep. Charlie Meier, R-Okawville, said while he wasn’t a member of the Freedom Caucus, the fact that he gathered signatures for Trump shows the ILGOP is a “big tent” party.

When asked if the party has room for “anti-Trumpers,” Meier said, “I believe so.”

“Because look at it: The man stands for opportunity for everybody,” Meier said. “I talked to a lot of people saying, ‘I don’t like the man, but I love his policies and I’m going to vote for him.’ We need those people to vote for this platform.”

He said the “infighting” among the state’s GOP – which holds no statewide offices and is relegated to a superminority in both chambers of the General Assembly – “cost us seats and that is a problem that we are working to correct.”

On the convention floor Monday night, Republicans demonstrated that they intend to target a major traditionally Democratic support group: organized labor. Sean O’Brien, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, gave a primetime address that took aim at big business, “corporate welfare” and called for bipartisan labor law reforms. Unlike most other major union groups, which have endorsed Biden, the Teamsters have not yet endorsed a presidential candidate.

After the breakfast Tuesday, state Sen. Terri Bryant, R-Murphysboro, said O’Brien’s appearance at the convention marked a long overdue change in the GOP’s own messaging.

“I think for a long time we have needed to get our message out better that we know that we are pro-labor,” she said.

Bryant – a retired employee of the Illinois Department of Corrections, former member of AFSCME Council 31 and retiree member of Laborers Local 773 – said her southern Illinois region is home to a high percentage of state workers.

“To have [O’Brien] stand up there and say some of the things that I think Republicans need to hear was really refreshing last night,” she said. “Some things made me a little uncomfortable, though, because maybe I haven’t been doing the best job that I could even as a union member.”

Republicans’ relationship with organized labor in Illinois deteriorated during the administration of one-term GOP Gov. Bruce Rauner, whose focus on weakening public employee unions – chiefly AFSCME – contributed to a two-year budget impasse that decimated state services.

Inside the convention hall, the theme of the day for Tuesday was “Make America Safe Once Again,” a reference to crime rates in major American cities like Chicago, which Republicans blame squarely on the Biden administration.

“And there’s a lot that is in common between cities like Chicago and New York and Atlanta and Baltimore and Philadelphia and elsewhere,” Zeldin said. “There are these longtime Democratic voters disenfranchised by Democratic policies, ready to vote for conservative solutions. But we can’t just expect them to show up on their own and start voting for us.”

Chicago is often held up as the Republican exemplar of a big city run by Democrats with a major crime problem – South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott name-dropped the city in a Monday night speech.

While murders in Chicago were higher in 2021 than at any point since a nationwide crime wave in the mid-1990s, they’ve since fallen.

Zeldin said there are voters in major cities across the United States, often assumed to be Democratic strongholds, that may be receptive to Republican policies on issues like crime, school choice and immigration.

“And our message to Democratic voters in Illinois, Democratic voters in New York, and independent minded voters who want to try something different in 2024: ‘Don’t let anybody take your vote for granted,’” he said. “We as conservatives want to earn your vote, and we want to earn keeping your vote.”

Zeldin also said Republicans should change some of their own election strategies, including taking advantage of early voting and mail-in ballot programs, which Democrats have utilized and many Republicans have viewed with skepticism.

He said Republicans who “boycotted” in Nevada in reaction to a ramp-up in early voting caused the narrow reelection of U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto in 2022, when Democrats barely kept control of the chamber with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote.

“If we as a party decide that we want to boycott universal mail-in balloting because we disagree with it, we will wake up – guaranteed – on November 5 having already lost the state of Pennsylvania,” Zeldin said.

Outgoing ILGOP chair Don Tracy has pushed for mail-in ballot programs and early voting. Kathy Salvi, who is slated to replace Tracy when he officially steps down on Friday, is scheduled to address the Illinois delegation on Wednesday.

Back in Illinois, Democrats on Tuesday resumed criticisms of Trump, his vice president pick and his platform. Gov. JB Pritzker was slated to speak in Milwaukee on Monday as part of Democrats’ RNC counterprogramming, but those events were canceled following the Saturday assassination attempt on the former president.

At an unrelated news conference in Chicago Tuesday, Pritzker said political violence shouldn’t happen and he has never and would never call for it.

But he resumed his condemnations of Trump’s candidacy.

“It’s still true: Donald Trump is a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, has been a congenital liar and is unfit for the office of President of the United States,” Pritzker said. “Having said that, I am very pleased that he remains relatively unharmed … and, of course, saddened and I find it extremely tragic that someone with, apparently, an assault weapon, killed people at that rally.”

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, the Senate’s Judiciary Committee chair, noted Vance – Trump’s vice president pick – blocked an appointment of a U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Illinois to oversee federal prosecutions in Chicago, leaving the post vacant.

“Three times or more, I went to the floor and asked him, confronted him with this decision, saying, ‘How can you be for law and order and talk about stopping the scourge of fentanyl and other terrible things, human trafficking ...’” Durbin said. “He said and repeated himself over and over: his goal was to grind the Department of Justice to a halt.”

Vance has said the move was retaliation for what he believes is the Justice Department’s unfair prosecutions of Trump in several federal court cases, including the case a judge threw out Monday over Trump illegally keeping classified documents after leaving office.

Republicans, meanwhile, were supportive of Trump’s choice of Vance.

“He’s got a great story, he came from nothing. You know, he’s self-made. The man worked his tail off,” state Rep. John Cabello, a police officer from Machesney Park, told Capitol News Illinois. “Yeah, I think that’s a good fit for the story. It’s the same thing that Trump did, you know, work your tail off, build yourself and you know he’s very knowledgeable. I think it’s a great pick.”

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service covering state government. It is distributed to hundreds of newspapers, radio and TV stations statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, along with major contributions from the Illinois Broadcasters Foundation and Southern Illinois Editorial Association.