Kane County Board - Kane County Il: Fill & Download for Free

I’m tired of talking about Trump so let’s talk about behavior.Here in IL, there are guidelines about social distancing and self-solation. I live in Cook County (the city of Chicago is part of it). When i go to a park in the more rural neighboring Kane County, i see young people in groups of 4 up to 8, partying, drinking beer, smoking in the woods. COVID-19 be damned…

Yes, very much so.This is something people dont realise. The people that the media calls Reagan Democrats, are mostly actually (W) Bush Democrats. Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan (and Dewey for that matter) brought suburban areas, mostly in the South (where they had been voting Democratic because they were, well, in the South), into the GOP coalition. Dewey brought in Montgomery MD (briefly), Baltimore County MD, Arlington VA, Fairfax VA, Orange FL, Broward FL, and Palm Beach FL. Eisenhower brought in Dallas, Harris, Tarrant, and Denton TX, Seminole FL, and Oklahoma County OK. With Nixon came Wake NC, Prince William VA, Collin TX, Rockwall TX, and Montgomery TX. And with Reagan came Williamson TX, Kaufman TX, Ellis TX, Bell TX, Coryell TX, McLennan TX, and Forsyth GA. Hence these suburban counties in Dixie were aligned with their longstanding GOP counterparts in the North, such as DuPage and Kane IL, Westchester, Suffolk and Nassau NY, Chester, Bucks, Montgomery and Delaware PA, etc.In 1980, Reagan carried almost every Southern state; but he struggled in most of them. He carried Virginia, Florida, and Texas easily. These were distinguished from the other Southern states by their growing populations and suburbanisation. Ford had carried Virginia in 1976; his entire margin in the state could be made up in Henrico. He nearly carried Mississippi, largely by winning Hinds by over 20%. Both Henrico and Hinds are now blue counties, as are several mentioned in the previous paragraph.Now, the GOP also had a lot of rural support, especially in Yankee-settled areas (the Yankee Kingdom states of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine; upstate New York; the “T" of Pennsylvania; most of outstate Michigan; most of outstate northern Illinois…). They also picked up a fair amount of rural support in the West and South over the Cold War period. But both parties had a lot of rural support. Democrats had a lot of rural support in the South, which shrank over the second half of the Cold War but was still in evidence as late as 2000; they also had a fair amount of rural support in the West, echoes of Bryanism, which also shrank over this period and was essentially gone by 2000. Egghead Adlai Stevenson carried Chouteau MT, Judith Basin MT, Mineral NV, Plumas CA, Lassen CA, and Tooele UT; and bloodless technocrat Dukakis carried Carbon UT, Lincoln MT, Shoshone ID, and Clearwater ID.Meanwhile, as these shrank, new rural bases of support for the Democracy kept coming in as late as Dukakis and Clinton--it was really only beginning in 2000 that Democrats consistently failed to win over any new rural areas (on any sort of long-term basis). From 1964 on, Democrats began making inroads in the rural areas of the Yankee-settled Upper Midwest. Rice MN and Lake MI especially starkly flipped from red to blue in 1964, but there are many other counties in the same general region where you can see a definite trend following that election. This continued through the following decades. There are a number of previously GOP-leaning counties in Iowa, in Illinois' rural Forgottonia region, and in Wisconsin, that, after having had a fairly solidly Republican voting record, voted Democratic from 1988 to 2012. In 1988, Bush Sr. became the first Republican to win without Iowa, and the first to win despite ceding Wisconsin to the Democrat, ever, both being largely to almost entirely rural states. (And Reagan had underperformed in Iowa in 84 big-league.)So before 2000, both major parties had rural areas of the country where they had support. The distinction lay in that the GOP owned the suburbs, and the Democracy, the urban cores (Suffolk MA, Philadelphia PA, Wayne MI, Cook IL, Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx NY, etc.).From 2000 on, the Democrats have almost consistently cratered in rural America across the board (as well as in the blue-collar collar counties that are most archetypically seen as the “Reagan Democrats,” but most of which either did not support Reagan or did so lukewarmly and were not convinced by Reagan to a long-term loyalty to the GOP--Westmoreland PA, Kenosha WI, Trumbull OH, etc.). Even 2008 was only a partial and temporary reversal of this, as rural gains Obama made (mostly in the Midwest) were all wiped out in 2016, and meanwhile McCain carried a number of counties in the South that had last voted Republican in 1972 or in some cases before. Democrats haven't carried a county in Oklahoma since 2000 or in West Virginia since 2008. The way they've won states is largely the way Republicans had won them during the Cold War--by winning the suburbs (except in conjunction with the large cities). In 2008, Obama's strength in the Philly collar counties was cited as the key to his victory in the state, even as he lost a majority of the counties in the state that Mondale had carried (some of which Kerry had carried just four years prior). And of course, the Southern states Reagan won easily are now either blue, competitive, or trending competitive, whereas the Southern states where he eked it out are now amongst the reddest in the country (Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, South Carolina, Arkansas…).