The Illinois Republican Party has successfully avoided being dragged into the hard-right camp at the state level for decades. Those days may be over.

When I reached out for advice from longtime Illinois political pundit and reporter Rich Miller, he posted my e-mail to his well-traveled blog CapitolFax.com with the title “A little help?” I had asked Rich if he had any ideas, comments, or specific questions he thought we should include in an Illinois state senate and house candidate questionnaire. Within hours, there were dozens of questions from various perspectives posted. All of them are published below and the original blog post is found at CapitolFax.com/2022/05/17/a-little-help-3/.

It's primary election season in Scott County (June 7) and Rock Island County (June 28), and there are nearly as many county and state races unopposed as contested within each of the fictionally competing Democratic and Republican primary contests. For this primary election, questions were developed for Iowa and Illinois Democrat and Republican Primary candidates in four separate races: Iowa's Scott County Board of Supervisors (SCBS); Illinois' Rock Island County Sheriff; and both the Illinois State Senate and State House of Representatives. For the Illinois State Senate and House races, we partnered with our prolific and plugged-in columnist Rich Miller, who queried his Capitol Fax blog subscribers for candidate questions. We requested each candidate choose their own destiny via answering five questions of their choosing from the 40 posted.

Illinois peaked at 27 U.S. House seats after the 1910 Census and subsequent reapportionment. That lasted until the 1940 Census, when Illinois dropped to 26 seats in Congress. We’ve been steadily losing ground ever since. It’s not that we lost population, it’s that other states in the West and the South grew much faster. California had just eleven congressional districts as a result of the 1910 Census. It now has 53.