Editorial: Exit lllinois Republican leader Don Tracy, pushed from stage right

The MAGA knives came out for Don Tracy, the chair of the Illinois Republican Party for more than three difficult years, and they stabbed more fiercely than in May. We’re sorry to see this decent man go. We always found him to be thoughtful, reasonable and an independent thinker.

Tracy’s so-long-suckers letter, heavy with the vibes of resignation to the seemingly inevitable, hit familiar themes as the Illinois GOP goes all MAGA, all the time in advance of the pending Milwaukee convention and Donald Trump’s campaign for president of the United States.

“When I took on this full-time volunteer job in February, 2021,” Tracy wrote Wednesday, “I thought I would be spending most of my time fighting Democrats, helping elect Republicans, raising money to pay for more Party infrastructure, and advocating for Party (sic) unity. Unfortunately, however, I have had to spend far too much time dealing with intra party power struggles, and local intra party animosities that continued after primaries and County Chair elections.”

Advocating for party unity? The outrage. Building infrastructure? Boring. Spending time convincing swing voters to actually vote Republican? How picayune. And that party unity? There is only one kind of unity Tracy’s intraparty opponents understand. And that comes with Tracy on the other side of the door.

The Tribune’s Rick Pearson and Jeremy Gorner predicted Tracy’s demise when they wrote about how Mark Shaw, the former chairman of the GOP in Lake County, was nixed Monday as state party vice chair by the Illinois Republican State Central Committee and also removed Monday from the party’s fundraising committee: “The decision by top Illinois Republican officials to dethrone the party’s vice chair could portend even bigger changes for the moribund organization,” they wrote, as if speaking of a coming June GOP version of the Ides of March on the Prairie.

The reporters proved right. Maybe more quickly than they expected.

Tracy’s letter even contained its own Shakespearean flourish as he said that the brutal, extra-procedural (or so he claimed) manner of Shaw’s removal “portends a direction of the State Party (sic) I am not comfortable with.”

Tracy’s list of “et tus” remained unarticulated, but we suspect it was as long as his arm.

He also notes in the letter the current MAGA-land synonym for extremist power seekers: grass-roots leaders, which in this instance is not so much about growing anything as burning down what little still exists. Republicans are quick to accuse Democrats of employing big-lie terminology (the ‘Inflation Reduction Act” and so on) with Orwellian implications, but they hardly are above the same tactics. Grass sometimes needs someone willing to wield a mower lest it choke the rest of the garden.

Nobody can or should fault Tracy for following his conscience, and he noted in his letter his willingness to continue to support his party, at least as he once understood it to exist. But when moderate conservatives, or maybe Tracy is best described as a conservative who believes in actually serving the roughly 40% of Illinoisans who call themselves Republicans and would like an actual say in some Illinois matters of import, exit from the stage, the state is not the better for it.

It hardly needs stating that where goes the national Republican Party, so goes Illinois’ GOP. While Trump sits atop the GOP, it is hard to imagine many of Tracy’s aims coming to fruition or his party gaining either power or relevance in this state.

But we surely respect that the man tried.