Il-6: Trending Democratic

Having an interesting discussion on the Swing State Project blog about Il-6 and how its trending more and more Democratic. Here is why I think we can knock off Roskam even though DuPage has historically been solidly Republican. First off, while most of IL-6 is in DuPage County, there is a significant chunk (about 20%) of the vote in Cook County. Duckworth won Cook County last year (results below), and a solid Democrat could presumably do likewise in '08.

2006 Cook County Results
Duckworth (D) - 18,544 - 52.8%
Roskam (R) - 16,576 - 47.2%

That leaves us with DuPage County, which has historically been a Republican bastion. Here there are a couple of factors at work. First, the Demographics are changing to become more urban and diverse - tendencies that generally trend Democratic.

DuPage population (2005 estimated)
1990 - 2000 - 2005
Total - 781,666 - 904,161 - 929,133
Black - 15,462 - 27,600 - 38,094
% Black - 2.0% - 3.1% - 4.1%
Hispanic - 34,567 - 81,366 - 104,992
% Hispanic - 4.4% - 9.0% - 11.3%

These changes have helped fuel the area's increasingly Democratic voting trends. Below are the Congressional results for DuPage the past few years - clearly a trend going the right way.

2002 - 2004 - 2006
Republican - 92,403 - 114,790 - 74,806
65.7% - 55.0% - 51.7%
Democrat - 48,005 - 87,769 - 68,028
34.2% - 42.1% - 47.0%

Unfortunately, because of the Republican history of the county (which includes several very Republican leaning townships not in the IL-6 congressional district) DuPage County has no local Democrat officials and only a few elected Democratic state officials with only miniscule portions of their districts in DuPage County. A Democrat came very close (49.3%) to winning state house seat 46 in 2006, but came up a little short. We need to continue to build the emerging Democratic infrastructure in DuPage over the next 2 years, if we do so we can definitely knock out the very conservative Roskam.