With abortion rights moving to the fore, suburban women voters in Illinois are key in race for governor

Two weeks ago, Gov. J.B. Pritzker gathered at a colorful event space in the West Loop where a few Democratic lawmakers and Illinois’ top abortion-rights activists backed his bid for a second term.

The event stood in stark contrast to one just a few days earlier when Republican state Sen. Darren Bailey, one of the men trying to replace Pritzker as governor, stood at Trump Tower in Chicago and said Pritzker was trying to have Illinois “compete with California or New York on who can be the most pro-abortion state in the nation,” as Bailey was endorsed by Illinois’ major anti-abortion groups.

At the time, both events were little more than routine campaign stops for two candidates receiving expected endorsements.

But in the days since, their positions on abortion, as well as the positions of other candidates for governor, gained new significance due to the leaking last week of the U.S. Supreme Court conservative majority’s draft decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade and the right of women to obtain an abortion with minimal government interference.

It also shined a spotlight on a critical voting bloc — suburban women voters.

Even before a Republican challenger is picked in the June 28 primary to face Pritzker in the Nov. 8 general election, it is the support of suburban women — many fiscally conservative and socially moderate, and growing in diversity — that is crucial for the governor’s chances to win a second term.

“When you talk about the suburbs, remember that women’s rights are an enormously important issue,” Pritzker said at the abortion-rights event at Catalyst Ranch.

“When I ran in 2018, I worked hard, as I do now, to talk to people all across the suburbs, and that’s why we won most of the collar counties and Cook County, and it’s why as you move to the outer exurbs, we’re also winning voters over because they understand the radical right isn’t what Illinois is about,” he said, “and it isn’t representing the women of the suburbs.”

The draft decision, authenticated by Chief Justice John Roberts, upended many of the expected storylines of an already hectic campaign season, providing renewed energy to Democrats facing national and local headwinds as well as conservative Republicans using the anticipated ruling to rally their base.

In his 54% to 39% victory in 2018 over first-term Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, Pritzker won Chicago, Cook County and all of the collar counties except McHenry County. His results among suburban women voters mirrored the statewide percentages, with Pritzker receiving an almost identical 54% support from suburban women compared with 38% for Rauner, according to an AP VoteCast survey of voters conducted with NORC at the University of Chicago.

In recent statewide elections, suburban voters have constituted the largest geographic demographic of people casting a ballot. In 2018, 53% of the state’s ballots were cast in the suburbs throughout Illinois, with urban voters making up 26% and rural voters 21%, according to the VoteCast survey. And suburban women make up about 28% of the overall statewide vote in the past two general elections, the largest gender-based geographical voting bloc in the state, the survey showed.

The suburbs in general have grown more Democratic in Illinois and nationally in recent years — a trend that accelerated under the presidency of Donald Trump. A 2010 survey by NBC and the Wall Street Journal showed suburban women favored Democrats by only 3%. By 2019, the survey showed Democrats were favored by 13%.

Add into the mix the increasing diversity of the suburbs, where an estimated 30% of women nationally are people of color, and the old concept of rock-ribbed suburban Republicanism has significantly faded.

Those figures help explain the complex dynamic Pritzker’s Republican challengers have in front of them as the GOP tries to regain an edge in the suburbs by November. Most of the work so far has focused on issues such as safety and outbreaks of violent crime, pocketbook issues such as inflation or topics involving race and gender in schools.

But for suburban women, the biggest divide between Pritzker and his Republican opponents may rest on abortion.

Anne Wick, who co-founded a group of progressive women in suburban Downers Grove, said the prospective court opinion is a motivator for suburban women regardless of partisanship.

“It’s not just Democrats and independents. I think when you take away an individual right, it’s a wake-up call for women — particularly Republican women who didn’t necessarily realize what this (conservative movement) entailed,” she said.

“The wolves are certainly barking at the door,” said Laura Welch of Naperville and president of the Illinois National Organization for Women. “We have a strong coalition out there in Naperville. We’re going to push back. It’s not going to happen on our watch. We must continue our vigilance here in Illinois.”

Citing attempts by conservative groups in the suburbs to place people on library and school boards and special events committees to control how public dollars are spent, Welch noted that the issue of abortion rights doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

She said other issues are key to suburban women voters. Environmental justice, health care access, equal pay and education “are just the top of the iceberg” of what women are seeking to maintain and enhance, she said.

Still, Pritzker’s predecessor, Rauner, lost GOP conservative support and almost his renomination when he signed into law legislation that authorized the use of taxpayer funding for abortions for poor women.

All five of the major Republican candidates for governor declare themselves as opponents of abortion. Bailey of Xenia opposes abortion, with no exceptions for rape or incest, while Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin said he supports exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. The other contenders — cryptocurrency venture capitalist Jesse Sullivan of Petersburg, Bull Valley business owner Gary Rabine and former state Sen. Paul Schimpf of Waterloo — have been less specific.

Irvin notably had no comment on the potential Supreme Court ruling when the leak became public. Instead, an Irvin aide said the campaign expected to make a comment in the next two months and potentially after the June 28 GOP primary. On Saturday at a meet and greet campaign stop in suburban La Grange, an audience member asked Irvin about his views on abortion. “Pro-life,” Irvin responded, later telling the Tribune he believed in exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother.

Schimpf has voted against abortion-rights legislation. In his current campaign, he has adopted a platform similar to that used by former President George W. Bush in his successful 2000 presidential campaign, saying the “culture” must change before more stringent restrictions can be enacted.

After Bailey’s event at Trump Tower, he went further in discussing women on a recent right-wing podcast where products of Trump-supporting election-fraud conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell are advertised. He spoke in biblical terms of the decline of the family unit and called transgender rights “the moral rot that is destroying society.”

“God, in His creation, He intended, you know, the family unit to be headed by the dad. The dad is supposed to be out, you know, teaching his children hard work, ethics, honesty and integrity,” Bailey said in the April 4 interview on “Outside the Beltway.”

“You remove that,” he said, “and then you begin to deplete everything, morality, everything of integrity, and our children wander around lost, waiting for a Democrat Party to give them everything and teach them their ways.”

Recognizing the potential for blowback among suburban women, the state’s top Republicans were notably silent when asked for reaction to the potential court ruling — including state GOP Chair Don Tracy, House Republican leader Jim Durkin of Western Springs and Senate GOP leader Dan McConchie of Hawthorne Woods — even though the state Republican platform explicitly calls for overturning Roe v. Wade and the election and appointment of judges who endorse overturning the 1973 decision.

In addition to overturning Roe, the GOP platform also calls for a constitutional recognition of marriage as between one man and one woman. Democrats have contended that an adverse Supreme Court ruling on abortion could also result in a court reversal on same-sex marriage.

One Republican state lawmaker, Sen. Steve McClure of Springfield, an abortion opponent, went so far as to declare that a court ruling overturning Roe would not affect the availability of abortion services in Illinois and sought to dismiss Democrats as merely trying to use the issue to avoid having to discuss crime and inflation.

After Pritzker won in 2018, he and the Democratic supermajorities in the General Assembly then expanded abortion rights, making access to an abortion a “fundamental right” in Illinois regardless of what the Supreme Court may decide, and then repealed a 1995 law requiring a minor to notify a parent if they sought the procedure.

“Republicans are doing all they can to strip us of a choice that should only be ours to make,” Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton told abortion-rights supporters in the West Loop. “These actions by GOP-led legislatures across the country have struck fear and anxiety into the hearts of millions of women and girls, forcing us to envision a future without a constitutionally protected right to safe, legal abortion.”

Citing the draft opinion, Pritzker used a news conference to sound a rally cry for abortion rights and a stern warning to Republicans.

“Don’t angrily shout about freedom and then engineer it away from more than half of Americans. Stop pretending you’re patriots when you’re cheering the death of democracy. Don’t take us, the exhausted majority, for granted anymore,” he said. “We are done. And today we begin to show you how ready we are to fight back.”

Pritzker said his efforts to appeal to suburban women go beyond the abortion issue. He said Illinois is a “beacon for the nation,” by expanding health care coverage for new mothers, enhancing protections for survivors of domestic violence and enacting “equal pay for equal work.”

“Illinois Republicans want to take all of that away,” he said. “They want to bring their war on women and working families to our doorstep. And if they win in November here, that’s exactly what will happen.”

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