What I'm getting at is, would Illinois even be a blue state without the large black vote in Chicago? Would Michigan be a blue state without the black vote in Detroit? I don't think they would. Iowa does not have those demographics at all, but Democrats win there. It just seems like there is a different dynamic going on in Iowa.
I looked up the election results for 2000, the election in recent years with the most closely divided results. George W. Bush won the electoral college with 271-267, with Al Gore earning the electoral votes of Iowa and Illinois.
According to Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, in 2000, Gore carried the State of Illinois by 569,605 votes. Gore carried Cook County, which encompasses the City of Chicago and its innermost suburbs, by 746,005 votes, which was greater than his victory margin in the entire state. Thus, if Chicago and its innermost suburbs were removed from Illinois, Bush would have carried Illinois.
While Gore won Cook County, the other Illinois counties of the Chicago metropolitan area, including DuPage, Kane, Lake and Will, went for Bush. Outside of the Chicago area, it appears that most of the Illinois counties that Gore carried were near the Mississippi River. Some of these were in southern Illinois, close to St. Louis, MO, but the largest number of Democratic counties were in northwestern Illinois near Iowa.
Thus, it appears that western Illinois shares liberal its political proclivities with Chicago, and most of the remainder of the state is conservative.
We can conclude that without Chicago, Illinois would have went for Bush in both 2000 and 2004.
