Texas GOP chairman calls Illinois a winnable ‘purple state’

SPRINGFIELD – The chairman of the Texas Republican Party said Thursday that he thinks Illinois is winnable for the GOP in 2026, despite the party’s lack of success in recent elections.

Speaking to a joint meeting of the Illinois party’s state central committee and county chairs, Abraham George pointed to the fact that Donald Trump won 43.5% of the vote in Illinois in the 2024 presidential election. That was three points more than he received in 2020, when he lost his first reelection bid to Democrat Joe Biden, and nearly five points more than he received in his first presidential run in 2016. The closer margins, however, were mostly due to fewer votes for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, as Trump improved his vote total by just over 2,000 from 2020 to 2024.

“That’s not a blue state anymore. That’s a purple state,” George said. “This state can flip to a Republican pretty fast.”

The meeting of party officials Thursday morning was a precursor to the annual Republican Day festivities at the Illinois State Fair, an event where the party showcases its major candidates for the next round of elections and tries to generate enthusiasm among its core base of voters.

Gerrymandering battle

George was invited to speak to the group largely because of the ongoing controversy in his home state over congressional redistricting, a controversy that has spilled over into Illinois politics.

The Texas Legislature is currently meeting in a special session to consider several issues, including relief for victims of deadly floods that struck the state in July.

In addition, at Trump’s request, the Republican-controlled Legislature is also considering a mid-decade congressional redistricting plan that is designed to give the GOP at least five additional seats. That would raise their total to at least 30 out of the state’s 38-seat delegation.

To prevent the Texas House from voting on that plan, dozens of Democratic lawmakers fled the state on Aug. 3, with many of them lodging in Illinois. That has prevented the Texas House from mustering the two-thirds quorum required for it to do business.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, has openly welcomed the Texas lawmakers to stay here. He has also suggested that if Texas Republicans follow through with their redistricting plans, Democratic-led states like Illinois and California could retaliate by redrawing their own maps in favor of Democrats.

But George criticized the outrage that Pritzker has shown over the efforts in Texas, given how heavily gerrymandered the Illinois maps already are. He noted that while Trump won 43% of the vote in 2024, Republicans hold only three, or 18%, of the state’s 17 congressional seats.

“You know, Democrats, they don’t hate gerrymandering. They hate losing,” George told the Illinois Republicans. “Because if you haven’t looked at your map, they love gerrymandering. I was looking at the map of Illinois and the congressional seats. I’m like, I don’t think this is possible in a computer system.”

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Recruiting candidates

Despite the optimism expressed Thursday, Republicans have been slow to announce runs for some of the higher-level offices that will be up for election in 2026. Those include races for governor and all other state constitutional offices, all 17 congressional seats and a U.S. Senate seat being vacated this year by the state’s senior senator, Dick Durbin.

One Republican who has decided to run is former state party chairman Don Tracy, a Springfield attorney, who has announced he intends to run for Durbin’s U.S. Senate seat.

Speaking to reporters Thursday, he conceded it is a “daunting task” for a Republican to run for any statewide office in Illinois, given the Democrats’ significant fundraising advantage.

“They usually outspend us three-to-one, five-to-one, 10-to-one,” he said. “I think I can beat them if it’s only five-to-one. If it’s 10-to-one or 20-to-one, it will be a bigger challenge.”

But fundraising isn’t the only challenge facing Republicans in a statewide race. They also face the reality that in recent statewide races, Democrats have consistently outpolled Republicans in Illinois by roughly a 55% to 45% margin. That means to be considered viable, any given Republican needs to attract about 6 percentage points more than GOP candidates have typically gotten in recent elections. Based on the last race for a U.S. Senate seat in 2022, that would amount to about 246,000 votes.

Asked how he intends to attract those votes, Tracy said, “by running a good campaign, by having a big team, by taking advantage of the Democrat Party’s drift toward leftist socialism and crazy social things like boys and girls sports. They are opening the door for us. But I’m going to need help. I can’t do this on my own.”

Illinois Democrats, meanwhile, have made it clear that a big part of their message will be to focus on the Republican Party’s drift toward the right under the Trump administration, which has pushed through a package of steep cuts in social spending and large tax breaks for upper-income taxpayers, as well as the deployment of military personnel on the streets of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

Fox News analyst Gianno Caldwell drew cheers from the crowd during his keynote State Fair speech when he told the crowd it “took guts” for Trump to activate the National Guard and federalize policing in the nation’s capital.

Tracy also rejected the suggestion that Trump’s political agenda has been extremist.

“The Trump agenda is peace, prosperity and law and order,” he said. “I think most Americans, including most Illinoisans, support that agenda.”

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

Peter Hancock

Peter was one of the founding reporters with Capitol News Illinois. He came to Springfield after many years working in Topeka, Kansas, where he covered the Kansas statehouse and other beats. He began his reporting career in 1989 at a small county weekly newspaper and has worked in a variety of settings including both daily and nondaily newspapers, online media and public radio. A native of the Kansas City area, he has degrees in political science and education from the University of Kansas.