Throwaway Post

Sometimes we like to get a little "inside baseball" when talking politics. This is one of those articles that we enjoy and like to share:

• Yes, many Chicago voters shifted right this election, but even more of them didn’t show up to vote blue.

  A WBEZ analysis finds that a large part of Trump’s doubling support in Chicago was due to a staggering dropoff in Democratic voter turnout rather than an increase in Trump voters.

Trump actually won the 45th Ward, once a bastion of Right thinking city workers and for years, though that has faded over the years. 

• Citywide, former President Donald Trump saw a roughly 16,000 vote bump compared to 2020, but Vice President Kamala Harris’ vote total was more than 205,000 votes behind President Joe Biden’s in 2020.

  “The real story is you have fewer people voting and that Trump got the same number of votes in 2024 than he got in 2020,” said Delmarie Cobb, a Democratic political and media consultant.

  The city’s overall voter turnout — 65.02% as of Friday — was the second-lowest it’s been in a presidential general election since 1944. In that span, only once has citywide turnout fell below that mark — 63.17% in 1996.

  A steep decline in voter turnout, especially in the areas of the city that most reliably vote blue, show that a vast number of Democrats who stayed home this election played a significant role in Chicago’s rightward shift this year.

Though Trump lost Illinois by half-a-million votes, it was his best showing in three cycles and the best for a GOP candidate since Bush Sr in 1988. Illinois was almost in play, and if there had been an appearance or two here, probably would have been much closer.