GOP: "Illinois Is Next"

The GOP is aiming high after Massachusetts. They’re going for Illinois and probably think their on their way to “getting their country back”. My guess is, it won’t happen, because we’ll be ready this time.

This time, it won’t be an easy race. This time, we’ll be prepared. So, slow down boys, you’re not even close. We’re still  ahead of this race.

“Illinois is next,” Pat Brady, chairman of the state Republican Party, declared. “The political environment is worse here for Democrats than it was in Massachusetts.”

Representative Mark Steven Kirk, the front-runner in the Republican primary for the Senate seat once held by President Obama, has even taken to talking like Mr. Brown.

“No one should make the mistake by calling this the Obama seat,” he said in an interview. “This is the seat of the people of Illinois.”

Democratic leaders here discount direct comparisons to Massachusetts — for starters, the election there was a special election, not a primary — and cite distinctions from this state’s candidates, voting blocs and alliances. And perhaps most of all, they mention their sense that Illinois voters still carry a special allegiance to Mr. Obama.

Still, the message from Massachusetts is resounding among Democrats, too (in interviews, several candidates quickly proclaimed themselves “outsiders”), as the party tries to hold onto the Senate seat, the governor’s mansion and a few House seats that Republicans say they are especially confident about winning.

A televised forum among the three leading Democrats for the Senate last week seemed to transform into a scuffle over which one would be least likely, come November, to repeat what happened in Massachusetts. (Along the way, they struck notes that sounded not so unlike Mr. Brown.)

One candidate, Cheryle Jackson, who led the Chicago Urban League, said the Massachusetts vote had reflected the lack of jobs and the suffering of people — “precisely,” she added, “the reason I have decided to run.”

And another candidate, David Hoffman, a former inspector general for the city of Chicago, offered this pitch for himself as a way to dodge a Massachusetts outcome: “We need to make sure that we have a nominee who is as independent as possible.”

Some argue that Mr. Kirk, as a five-term congressman and a moderate Republican with centrist-leaning views that have irked conservatives, may not benefit from voter unrest. (Democrats also have their eyes on his district in Chicago’s northern suburbs.)

“In a key way, Illinois is Massachusetts in reverse,” said Kathleen Strand, a senior adviser to Illinois for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “Here, the Republican candidate is the Washington insider that voters are angry at, not the Democrat.”