If the state were to vote on the separation of Chicagoland, it would be a fascinating map. In this proposal, the counties of Lake, Cook, DuPage, McHenry, Kane, DeKalb, Kendall, and Will would become their own state. This is much more feasible than simply Cook becoming its own state. In this vote, you would have strong support in the southern part of the state and moderate support in Cook County. Strong opposition would come in the collar counties and liberal counties downstate and out west.
It would be quite interesting if the entire state of Illinois was allowed to vote on whether or not to essentially give Chicagoland the boot - haha!
If only the Chicagoland counties were allowed to vote on such a proposal, do you think the numbers in Cook County would be enough to overcome the high margins in the well-to-do suburbs?
It sure would be interesting. Typically you have downstate and Chicago being very opposed in elections with the suburbs being swingy. In this case downstate and Cook are more or less in agreement with the suburbs being very opposed.
Illinois is currently a blue state largely because the suburbs are able to tack on enough blue votes (on top of Chicago) to put the state out of play with downstate largely irrelevant. If we go back to the days of swing-state Illinois, we see it was a swing state because Chicago and the suburbs were very much opposed (the suburbs were staunch Republican pre-1990's). Downstate was, though, split at the time between GOP corn country (it still hasn't changed) and the blue dog southern third (that's changed a lot).
My guess is that Chicago + downstate would put the NO team out of play, but if it were strictly Chicagoland voting it would be more competitive.
