Chicago has been a stalwart of the DNC for the last 99 years. With the rise of the Unions, Planned Parenthood and the BLM movement, it looks as though Chicago would never go to a republican candidate. As the more recent elections have shown starting in 2020 a shift is building. We are going to discuss political shifts that are going to have an impact in the coming elections if the GOP candidates take advantage of specific shifts in messaging and deliverance of said messaging in the future
Ill-2
Theresa Raborn ran as the 2020 GOP House of Representative nominee for Illinois Second Congressional District. She ran on an America First Platform based on common-sense solutions to all these problems and more, putting the solutions and actual bills out for the public to see. Historically speaking, the GOP has only accounted for 5%-7% percent of the Chicago voting base since before the 2020 election. The shift toward the GOP has been trending up slowly over the last twenty years according to the election results for Ill-2, officially reported by the Chicago Board of Elections. Theresa Raborn had a 1.35% upward shift to 7.05% in the 2020 election, and in the 2022 election Thomas Lynch received 10.24% for a total of 3.19% shift upward without a social media presents or policy prescriptions for inner-city constituents.
These shifts in political ideology have more to do with the outreach of the particular candidates running. Campaigns for Ill-2 have been very cheap with actual cost less than five thousand dollars spent by GOP nominees, while democrats spent 835k to over a million plus. Various nominees across the GOP ticket have seen very little GOP main support causing outreach into these areas to become sparse. Several items that can be tackled at the grassroots level are for instance church outreach, increase in policing, helping at food banks/pantries etc.
In the predominantly black communities, attending church services on a Sunday is a vital way of life for the black registered voters. The vast majority of black voters tend to be deeply religious; whereas those who are not religious tend to not be concerned with politics and rarely vote. This presents a real place for Christian conservative candidates to reach out to, and connect with, like-minded people in these communities. The same can be said about food banks and other outreach areas. One of the biggest attack ad campaigns are focused by the democrats toward republican candidates about the lack of empathy towards the poor black communities. If republicans were to focus on the status of HBCU’s nationwide and the opportunity zone funding, which would help bring economic stability to the inner cities, they would statistically speaking see an almost 20% jump in the black vote ensuring the return of sanity into the lesser served areas.
When you look at the cost per vote the democrats are outspending the republicans almost close to 3:1 ratio in prior years as show below.
As you can see in the last three elections republicans are using less than $5000 coming to a grand total of $0.08 per vote in the election while the percentage of the overall captured vote is on the rise.
So in conclusion if the GOP wants to win in the inner cities we have to focus on the mainstays of the community at large and for a candidate speaking/helping in the community outreach areas we could have a seismic shift in the vote of our inner-city communities the likes of which has never been accomplished by the GOP.