Big election turnout amplified deep divisions

Fair Tax failure puts state on course to repeat worst of Rauner budget impasse, warns SIU Prof. Jackson

A screen shot from Professor John Jackson’s webinar on “The 2020 Presidential and Congressional Elections: Rural America’s Impact and Stake.” (Zoom)

By Ted Cox

A deeply divided electorate produced deeply divided election results, according to a prominent professor of political science at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

“In short, the divided Congress represents a divided nation,” said Professor John Jackson of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at SIU in a Tuesday webinar on the election titled “The 2020 Presidential and Congressional Elections: Rural America’s Impact and Stake.”

According to Jackson, both Republicans and Democrats were successful in turning out voters in their political bases, but those bases are deeply divided between rural and urban areas, with suburbs increasingly the battleground in between.

“Where you live has a lot to do with how you see the world and how you see politics and how you behave politically,” he said. “And what we get, of course, is that red-state-blue-state phenomenon we’ve all become so accustomed to that we don’t realize it’s only been with us a couple of decades.” He drew parallels between the rural versus urban split nationally and in Illinois, saying, “Those divisions grew in this campaign and this election.”

Rural areas went “overwhelmingly for President Trump,” Jackson said, adding, “What was a surprise was how heavily rural areas turned out to vote.” Trump “mobilized and energized voters in those rural areas,” and he succeeded in holding the farm vote, in spite of the economic turmoil brought on by his trade war with China, through $61 billion in subsidies going directly to farmers over the last two years, $46 billion in this year alone. “Trump just mopped up having done that,” Jackson said. Like University of Illinois at Chicago Professor Dick Simpson in another election post mortem last week, Jackson also credited the traditional door-to-door electioneering Republicans were more willing to engage in despite the pandemic.

Democrats, however, also got their base out in urban areas. Although they “depended on social media” to get their message out, Jackson said, “it also worked for them.” The election was also in large part a battle of issues between the economy and the pandemic, with ultimately more voters concerned about battling COVID-19 as a first step to reopening the economy.

As a result, more Americans voted than in any previous election, and the 65 percent turnout nationally was the highest since 1900. Both Biden and Trump topped the previous record for votes for a presidential candidate, although Biden prevailed by more than 4 million. When Biden also prevailed in the Electoral College to become president-elect — a result Trump continues to contest — Jackson said, “I think we dodged a bullet,” in that if Trump had pulled out a victory by the state count it would have been the third time in six elections since 2000 that the winner of the popular vote did not win the election. He called that “a particularly unfortunate outcome that was looming at the time.”

In Illinois, Jackson granted that rural areas voted against their own self-interests in overwhelmingly rejecting the Fair Tax Amendment. Although the graduated income tax to be established by its passage would have only taxed those making more than $250,000 at higher rates — a demographic concentrated in Chicago and the suburbs — Chicago actually was the only area to endorse it by the required 60 percent supermajority to change the state constitution, while the rest of the state rejected it.

“The governor put his prestige on the line, and he went down to defeat … a surprisingly large defeat,” Jackson said. Republicans “nationalized the races,” he added, succeeding in making two nonpartisan issues — the Fair Tax Amendment and the retention vote on state Supreme Court Justice Thomas Kilbride — appear partisan, especially for rural Republicans. They also successfully used the ComEd bribery scandal that has embroiled state House Speaker Michael Madigan to argue against the tax on issues of corruption and “trust” in government.

“Republicans very effectively carried that message against Justice Kilbride and the Fair Tax Amendment,” he said. “The Republicans got their message out more effectively.”

While granting that “supermajorities are tough to achieve, and this was always going to be a tough slog for the governor’s forces to get that 60 percent,” Jackson called the defeat of the progressive income tax “seismic in terms of the budget problem we already had in Illinois,” making it “much more difficult” for Gov. Pritzker in the second two years of his term before facing reelection in 2022. The graduated income tax was “the only plan on the table” to address the state’s fiscal problems, he said, and the impact of the loss would be felt “rather immediately.”

Jackson added, “The people who were critics were rarely asked, in my estimation, by the media, what would they do and what was their plan? And when asked, their answer was, ‘Get rid of waste and fraud.’” That pat answer, he said, veiled how the two-year budget impasse under Gov. Rauner in 2015-16 had made it clear that “our budget’s really pretty bare bones already.”

The professor said one source of relief could be an additional COVID-19 federal relief package in Congress, one that grants aid to states and local governments. He pointed to how the Illinois Municipal League “has advocated for that,” even with its heavy representation “in very Republican areas.” He said he is “cautiously optimistic” Republicans in Congress are “going to hear from those people back home” that they need that additional aid, especially in the areas of infrastructure, a clear Biden priority, and rural broadband.

According to Jackson, in prevailing political theory, “the American people, and certainly I think the people of Illinois, are what are called symbolic conservatives and operational liberals. That is, they want low taxes. They don’t want any new taxes or new revenue increases whatsoever, and yet they also don’t want any cuts.”

“The American people, and certainly I think the people of Illinois, are what are called symbolic conservatives and operational liberals,” says Professor John Jackson. “That is, they want low taxes. They don’t want any new taxes or new revenue increases whatsoever, and yet they also don’t want any cuts.” (Zoom)

Jackson said he expected the now all but mandatory state cuts to come — as they did during the Rauner budget impasse — in “hollowing out” state agencies in personnel, as well as cutting funding to ancillary local organizations serving the “most vulnerable,” while cuts would also be “visited on the universities.”

The professor pointed to where the political divide is shifting, such as suburban areas like DuPage County, the former “powerhouse” of the state Republican Party, which has become increasingly Democratic, especially in the last two national elections among “suburban women.” Jackson also cited the rising involvement of millennial voters as “good news,” saying, “Young people did get excited, they mobilized, and they turned out. The parties have got to start moving to address that generation.”

Jackson credited Biden with uniting diverse factions in his own Democratic Party to claim victory — following the same basic game plan as Presidents Clinton and Obama — and that could bode well for his need to do the same with a divided Congress as he takes office. A Biden presidency would appear to “help get people calmed down” and back to some level of “normalcy,” Jackson said. “We desperately need leaders who stress what unites us,” he added, pointing to “some of that same problem with Illinois leaders.”

Jackson said, “We need leaders who say that what unites us should transcend party, ultimately, should transcend region and race and should be part of what we learn about what it means to be a citizen of the United States. Because after all most people benefit from stability and progress, and they can only come together when we understand that the larger community is what’s at stake here.” He quoted political philosopher Thomas Hobbes as stating that “life in the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short,” adding, “We’ve been all too close to nasty, brutish, and short at times.” Jackson cited Kyle Rittenhouse killing two protesters in Kenosha, Wis., and on the opposite side to the way Black Lives Matter protests sometimes dissolved into looting.

“We’ve lost that ability to compromise,” Jackson said, and regaining it is the key to a more stable political system, on the national level and in the state of Illinois.