And we could saw off Wyandotte County, parts of Johnson County, and that part of Douglas County where Lawrence is, send it out to you folks there in Obamastan, and they would immediately become the most conservative parts of your misbegotten, POS state.
You don’t even have Cook County but you did have Kathleen Gilligan Sebelius as governor for two terms of politically canoodling with the late unlamented baby-killer Killer Tiller.
I'll see your Sebelius and raise you a Pat Quinn, Rod Blagojevich, George Ryan, Dan Walker... Illinois must be the only state in the nation where a reunion of former governors is catered by the prison cafeteria. As for Tiller, how many abortionists are doing business in your state?
Elect Phill Kline as your governor when Sam Brownback retires and I will be impressed.
You need to keep up with the times; Phill doesn't live here anymore. Besides, we've got better people than him in the pipeline. Kris Kobach, if he doesn't run for Pat Roberts' seat in 2014. Jeff Colyer wouldn't be too bad of a choice. Derek Schmidt would be a solid conservative as well. You see, we have actual honest-to-God conservatives living in this state. What do you have? Someone? Anyone?
Start turning out the conservative vote that we do and that Oklahoma and Nebraska and North and South Dakota do and then you can flap your gums about things in other states. Until then, squat there in your liberal sh*thole and shut up.
If Derek Schmidt (who has received the support of the utterly misnamed "Kansas Traditional Republican Majority" a group of tiresome social issue leftist revolutionaries and baby-killers who want to spend more $$$ on "education") is your idea of a conservative, then Illinois has plenty of them. Our junior US Senator Mark Nancyboy Kirk would be one and he is rather pathetic.
If voting records matter, then certainly Illinoisans far better than Derek Schmidt would include Congressmen Bobby Schilling, Joe Walsh, John Shimkus, Aaron Schock, Adam Kinzinger (despicable for other reasons), Randy Hultgren, Don Manzullo, Peter Roskam and former US Senator Peter Fitzgerald and the late Congressman Henry Hyde.
If your Lt. Governor, Dr. Colyer, is sooooo conservative, why is he sooooo bashful about answering issue questionnaires like VoteSmart??? Kobach may be more conservative than Colyer and Schmidt but seems obsessed with alienating immigrants. Perhaps he has shown more pleasing qualities to the homefolks. He is apparently pro-gun and pro-life. He is still engaged in the practice of law despite being Secretary of State and has a practice stirring up anti-immigration litigation and legislation in Alabama and Arizona and other states. One wonders where he gets the time to perform his official duties. His margin of loss to former Democrat Congresscritter Dennis Moore was the widest victory of Moore's career. You forgot to include our former Illinois Demonrat Governor Otto Kerner as a guest at the prison cafeteria buffet although he has been available only in spirit since his death in 1976.
You can keep anything related to Lawrence, Kansas. Wasn't Lawrence honored by a nice visit from Quantrill, Anderson and the James Boys sometime back???
Outside of Cook County and a certain few of its northern suburbs (the land of Nancyboy), Illinois is rather conservative territory. Quinnochio is an airhead and gross incompetent, a faithless cafeteria Catholic who favors abortion and "gay" everything, never saw a spending program (particularly for state and local government "workers") that did not sexually excite him and has demonstrated an IQ level low enough to make it unclear whether he will remember to have his heart pump blood from moment to moment. Better that he should remember than to forget and leave the governorship to Sheila Simon. Quinnochio is a lifelong bachelor. The Chicago Demonrat Machine and its wholly owned subsidiary aka the Illinois State Republican Party are gearing up to nominate Dan Rutherford who is also apparently a lifelong bachelor and Myth Romney's state chairperson or whatever. The beat goes on.
The elections in our "misbegotten POS state" as you so delicately put it, are typically a result of almost every county in the state voting GOP by often substantial margins but they are small in population and two or three small counties joining Cook County (the Demonrat Death Star with massive population living and dead but all voting Demonrat). It is believed that, though dead, Abraham Lincoln, UpChuck Percy, John Vliet Lindsay, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and, according to rumor, even Ronald Reagan and many other lifetime or sometime Republicans still vote with great regularity now as Cook County Democrats. Only Lindsay formally converted to Demonrat in life. The Demonratic Machine will not tolerate discrimination against them or deprivation of their voting rights (and responsibilities) merely because they are dead so long as their votes are cast by ward heelers out of respect (of course) for their new found and permanent status.
In any event, the point is and was that the degree of difficulty in Illinois (because of Cook County) is considerably greater than the degree of difficulty in Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, North Dakota and South Dakota and a lot of other places.