(upbeat music) - Welcome to another episode of Capitol View, Your weekly look at the happenings inside and outside the Illinois State Capitol.

I'm Jennifer Fuller.

Our guests this week are Dave McKinney of WBEZ, Chicago Public Radio, and Peter Hancock of Capitol News, Illinois.

Gentlemen, thanks for joining us.

- Thanks for having us.

- Good to be here.

- We are now within a week of the November 8th general election, and if polling is correct, Democrats will carry most statewide offices.

But what are you watching here, Peter?

What are we watching for Tuesday?

- Well, you know, I think the one that's gonna be really interesting is this race for Secretary of State.

That's the one Constitutional office, statewide constitutional office that's an open seat this year.

We have Alexi Giannoulias, a former state treasurer and a current lawmaker from Bloomington, Dan Brady.

Giannoulias has been up on TV, at least here in central Illinois and I imagine everywhere else.

We haven't heard much from Dan Brady.

But he is a fairly well liked personality in the General Assembly.

I think he's respected on both sides, and it's just gonna, a lot of it's gonna depend on turnout, who turns out and what's on their mind.

If people are thinking that one party rule, which Illinois has had for quite some time, if it's time for a change, then you could see Dan Brady doing better than expected.

- Dave, what about you?

Are there races that you're keeping a close eye on?

- Well, I think the, everybody's attention nationally is drawn to the governor's race.

I mean, I would not be surprised if that race winds up being a little bit closer than people thought.

And, you know, all you have to do is look at the state of New Jersey back in last November, a guy who thought he was a popular incumbent and had won election four years ago, now five years ago, by 13 or 14 points, winds up in a nail biter against a Trump backed opponent.

And so, there are parallels obviously to be on the lookout for.

So any of these races that we think polls show a wide spread well, I think, it's good for everybody to be a little bit cautious about where those things wind up going.

I think outside of the governor's race, I'm naturally very interested in the Supreme Court races.

I think those two races up in the collar counties are probably the headline elections, honestly, because, if Republicans thread the needle and can win both of those races, then they will control the State Supreme Court for the first time in decades.

1969 was the last time the Republicans held control there.

So that's one I'm watching very closely.

- I know Republicans are keeping a close eye on that and Democrats as well.

That is definitely a couple of races that people are watching closely.

In addition, when it comes to national politics, Democrats and Republicans are paying very close attention to turnout and getting out the vote in congressional races in the Chicago suburbs.

Dave, I know that there are some heavy hitters heading to Illinois at the end of this week into the weekend.

What are those messages going to sound like, do you think?

- Well, they're basically the closing arguments that Democrats are hoping to make.

That they're hitting, they're trying to hit hard on abortion rights.

They're trying to hit hard on election integrity and you know, honestly, going at the extremism that we've seen on really on both sides of the political spectrum, but of late kind of on the, the far right.

I think those congressional races, Jennifer, in the collar counties are, they're actually turning into kind of an interesting thing because they too were ones that had kind of been assumed to be safely democratic.

And we're talking like Sean Casten and Lauren Underwood and Bill Foster.

And when Democrats redrew congressional boundaries, they did so kind of with the expectation that Democrats would win maybe 14 of the state's 17 congressional seats.

You know, in the last week I've heard scenarios, I'm not sure I believe them, but scenarios where some of these races, if it is an outright Republican tsunami nationally, well, you know, you could have a 10 to seven spread or an 11 to six spread like that, so I mean, anything could happen in those collar county races right now.

Casten, Foster, Underwood are ones to definitely be keeping an eye on as is the race in far northwestern Illinois.

That one in the 17th is always, it just seems like it's the classic purple district where Republicans, Democrats, they're just fighting tooth and nail to win it.

And I think I would not be surprised to see a Republican take over for Cheri Bustos in that district and then the new district along Interstate 55 with Daring and Budzinski.

So there's a lot on the map here to watch.

- Certainly a lot of safe districts, but as you say, a lot of districts that we're paying close attention to, not just for this year, but how they may shake out for years to come.

Dave mentions election integrity and lawmakers across the board are saying, Get out, vote, make your voice heard.

But Peter, we're also seeing that law enforcement is getting ready for any potential that may come from election day, whether it's problems at the polling place or whether there is some sort of unrest.

And in the wake of January 6th, 2021, is everything on the table?

What are you hearing in terms of the preparations from places like the FBI, the Attorney General's office, those sorts of agencies?

- Well, you know, we've seen some troubling signs around the country of people dressed in combat gear hanging out around drop boxes.

There has been voter intimidation in a lot of places.

I haven't heard too much of it in Illinois, but of course there have been some troubling things, someone making a threat against the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Darren Bailey.

So, I think America is just in a much different mood than we've ever seen before.

Some of it is very troubling, and so it's probably prudent of them to be on their toes and be on the lookout.

And certainly voters, if they experience anything, certainly should not hesitate to call law enforcement and report it.

- Peter mentions the threat against Republican gubernatorial nominee Darren Bailey and Dave, I know that this happened in and around Chicago.

What's the reaction been, not just from statewide candidates, but locally as well?

- Well, I think people sort of scratch their head and think what kind of bone head would do something like this?

There no sense in it.

And, utter stupidity.

And it doesn't matter if it's a Republican crazed assailant or a Democratic crazed assailant, it doesn't belong in in politics.

It doesn't belong in our culture.

And this is all coming on the heels of the attack on Paul Pelosi in San Francisco.

And so there's great sensitivity toward that.

And you know, Bailey is getting the attention out of this latest headline but I mean, Pritzker, the Governor has had similar things like this, so I'm not aware that there have been arrests, but it's not well publicized.

In the midst of the covid mitigations, he was fielding all sorts of threats.

The state police were having to deal with those.

So, I mean, it's out there, it's a really gross, gritty, ugly, ugly underbelly of our state and political world that people somehow think that this is a way to let their political feelings be known.

- I know the question is out there, is this who we are?

Is this who we have been or is this where we're going?

From each of you.

What's your sense on this, Dave, as you call it, this really ugly underbelly of American politics.

Is this going to continue or do you see an end to it?

Dave, I'll let you go first.

- Well, I do.

I mean, in my neighborhood, nobody acts like that.

And in my family, nobody acts like that.

I think it's, we're dealing with a very, very much a subgroup of our population that engages in this kind of behavior.

And, I think it's really important that we have strong law enforcement to be able to combat these people.

These people who do this kind of thing need to be held accountable.

They need to suffer the penalties, the criminal penalties that come along with this kind of behavior.

And that's the only kind of deterrent that works.

And whether it's this kind of behavior, shoplifting, carjacking, whatever it is, there need to be penalties associated with bad behavior, and that's what this is.

- Peter, what about you?

What's your take?

- You know, I keep thinking back to the late former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a conservative democrat from New York who coined the phrase defining deviancy downward.

And it just seems like every time one of these things happens within that certain subculture of America, then it starts to become more and more acceptable, and then it takes something even greater to shock people the next time.

And, I don't wanna put too much of this on Donald Trump, he didn't invent it, but he certainly fed off of it and in a way normalized it for a segment of the population.

And I think that's what we're dealing with, whether or not we can turn around and go back to a more civilized kind of discourse, you know, time will tell.

I certainly hope so, but that's just kind of where we are now, is outrageous behavior and uncontrolled anger and fury at politicians has just become the norm.

- Well, and Jennifer, we can't forget that, one of the things that I would say is primarily fueling a lot of this is the lack of regulation of social media and the fact that you can go on Twitter and adopt a pretend name that is unrecognizable, it's not your own name, and then say anything you want even up to and beyond the line of libel, and not face any consequences to that.

And we saw it with just this past week with the Pelosi attack where Elon Musk comes into the picture and is the new owner of Twitter.

And rather than expressing condolences to the Pelosi family as most human beings would do, you see Musk actually raising questions that there's some underlying story here that's not being told about a man being awakened in the middle of the night by some guy that broke into his house with a hammer.

I mean, that right there tells you where a lot of this is coming from.

It's coming from this kind of potshot speech that has been allowed on places like Twitter and Facebook and these other social media platforms that don't seem to have any consequences for inciteful speech.

- You know, we talk about these national issues.

It's long been said that all politics is local, but you know, when we're hearing that abortion is on the ballot or that people talking about inflation, pillars of the major parties platforms and things like that, how much do local issues play into some of these races that we've talked about, whether they're congressional races, statewide political candidates, or even our local general assembly candidates this year?

Dave, I'll start with you.

- Well, clearly you've seen, the local issues do matter.

I mean, you've seen on the Republican side, for example, the pack that is supporting Bailey's campaign, it's been all crime all the time, and they've focused on attacks that have occurred in Chicago.

The people being jumped as they're walking down the street On the flip side, on the Democrats, you see messaging up and down the board on abortion rights.

And so, these national issues are trying to be localized in some way.

Crime is happening everywhere, but it's also, there are aspects of crime that truly are up, but the worst kinds of crimes, homicides, are down and that that's being ignored in this kind of thing.

But, it's an interesting clash of messaging here where the abortion rights messaging of the Democrats is going up against the crime and economy messaging of the Republicans.

And, I do think that the economy is the part here that really is gonna be the tide that turns the election because people, everybody feels it.

- Peter, what say you?

Is inflation and driving up prices really going to be the big thing that people are voting on?

- Well, I think the polls certainly show that that is the number one issue on people's minds, the economy and inflation.

Abortion typically, it's a small segment of the voting population that votes solely on abortion.

And we're seeing that again this year.

So, to a large extent, I think we've seen congressional races get nationalized over a period of years.

The national parties send in consultants to run congressional campaigns.

They tend to have a cookie cutter approach to it.

They know what messages and what issues work for their party and which ones to stay away from.

And so, I think when people go to the polls in congressional races, partly, you know what's on their mind, Do you wanna give the speakers gavel to Nancy Pelosi again or to Kevin McCartney?

And in national elections, I think people focus on national issues and on the state and local elections, they focus on state and local issues.

- Certainly.

One specter that we've talked about a couple of times already on this show would be the specter of Michael Madigan and his indictment on federal charges.

He entered a plea earlier this week in federal court.

Peter, how big is this case when it comes to Illinois politics?

It certainly hasn't made the same kind of headlines that it would've made two, or even four years ago.

- Yeah, and you know, what's interesting to me is how the Republicans are still running on this anti-Madigan platform.

All incumbent Democrats have taken Madigan money if they took money from the Democratic Party of Illinois.

And yet Democrats still have super majorities in both chambers.

So I'm not sure from a political standpoint how much it's going to matter, but I certainly think historically it's significant.

I mean the man was speaker for most of everybody's lifetime, and he was the king maker.

He was the most powerful politician in Illinois.

And now we have two of the state's largest corporations, AT&T and Commonwealth Edison both admitting in federal court that they attempted to bribe him.

AT&T wasn't technically charged with bribery, but Madigan is charged with bribery in both cases.

The federal bribery statute is mentioned in a number of charges.

So, you know, politically, I'm not sure how many voters are still thinking about Michael Madigan.

He's been gone for two years.

He's no longer the chairman of the party.

You don't see his face on television.

He's not a force in the State House anymore.

So I'm just not sure how salient it is in terms of this year's elections.

- Dave, we talked in the past about corruption fatigue in Illinois.

How does the Madigan case stack up against other cases, whether it was George Ryan, Rob Blagojevich, or so many others who have gone up against corruption charges?

- Well, I mean, each one of those is unique unto itself and sort of sucks the oxygen out of our system in a way.

Cause you know, I don't think there will ever come a time when these kinds of cases stop.

I just think it's the nature of, the basic kind of human frailties that exist, greed, vanity on and on, and those never leave us.

And you know, I think that there is gonna be a great deal of focus whenever the Madigan case comes to trial where it will draw, gavel to gavel coverage by Chicago media for sure.

And you know, it is interesting in some of the campaigns up north here where, you know, and specifically the Supreme Court races, Madigan, the Republicans are trying to use Madigan again.

They've used him in every cycle I can think of all the way back to 2012 at least.

And they're doing it again with these court races where appellate justice, Mary Kay O'Brien, the Democrat, who was up against incumbent justice, Michael Burke, she served in the Illinois House and as a result, the very first vote that that happens each two year session at the beginning is who do you want to be speaker and all the house Democrats vote for or used to vote for Michael Madigan.

So she has that in her history.

And that if that then becomes the point at which Republicans are saying, Look, you've got a tool of Mike Madigan.

Well, no, not really.

You've got somebody that, like every other house Democrat voted for Michael Madigan because he was the only candidate in the democratic side to do that.

And then in the other race, same thing where they're trying to portray Elizabeth Rochford the Democrat as a crony of Madigan.

And that one is a little more tenuous because the two of them haven't really intersected that much, at least publicly that I'm aware of.

And so it'll be an interesting thing to see if there's any effect from that kind of advertising.

It's just like all the political advertising though.

You turn it on and you know, if you're watching Monday Night Football or the evening news or whatever, these ghoulish pictures of Michael Madigan take up the entire screen and the dark creepy voice saying all sorts of things.

But it's, Madigan will never, really never go away from us I don't think.

He's a historic figure.

- Let's shift gears a little bit away from politics and get to the state's report card for schools across Illinois which came out last week.

We talked a little bit about it with our guests last week, but the statistics had just been released.

So what we saw is not unexpected.

There is a bit of a gap, there was a bit of a dip because of covid where students weren't in the classroom face to face.

And so now they're playing catch up in many cases.

Peter, are you surprised by these numbers or was there any nugget of information in that report that kind of made you say, Oh look, this is interesting to me?

- No, I wasn't terribly surprised.

We've seen this nationwide.

In fact, the same week that those test scores came out, there was also the release of what's called the National Report Card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP Exams.

And they showed the same thing that if you compare the scores in 2022 with scores pre-COVID in 2019, there have been big drops across the board.

And one thing that is kind of surprising to me is that if you look at the Illinois report card, it shows a very small percentage of students who are at grade level in reading and math.

So, you know, 25, 30% in that range.

But at the same time, you also see pre-covid, three quarters of them enrolled in college within 12 months of graduating.

It drops a little bit here in 2020.

College enrollment nationwide is down since the pandemic, but still it is close to two thirds of 'em were enrolling in college.

So while the scores may show they're not at grade level, certainly it's not preventing them from going on to post-secondary education.

- Certainly we'll track that information and those trends for years to come.

Dave, I wanted to spend a little bit of time before we finish this week's episode, taking a look at something that's, well, frankly, pretty complicated.

And it comes to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Museum and so many artifacts that have been on display for several years now, but as of this week, that's changing.

You've done a lot of reporting on this.

What's going on?

- Oh my gosh, Jennifer, I was thinking the other day that like, I've been in journalism since the mid eighties, and it feels like I've spent the majority of my career dealing with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Museum from its opening in 2003 to where we're at now.

I mean, what we're talking about is this big collection of artifacts from a collector on the west coast.

It's called the Taper Collection.

And the state acquired that in 2007, and it was a $23 million acquisition by a foundation that had been aligned with the museum.

I mean, the purpose of this Foundation was to raise money for the museum, acquire artifacts, and then get these artifacts conveyed to the state of Illinois and on display permanently at the museum.

Well, over time we've had this complete breakdown and what we saw happen Monday was there were trailer trucks loaded up with things like Mary Todd Lincolns blood stained fan, the gloves that Lincoln had in his pocket the night of his assassination, his walking sticks, his presidential seal, things like that.

Things that are priceless, being loaded up onto a truck and taken away by a Chicago auction house.

And the foundation not really being clear at all about what its plans for that was.

There was an agreement, a loan agreement, between the state and the foundation that expired on Monday, and that's what the foundation used as its basis to want its stuff back.

But, you know, this collection of material, while there is just immense value historically in the documents and artifacts, it was kind of forever tainted by what had been the cornerstone of it, which was this stovepipe hat.

They had gotten this in 2007 and considered it a coup, one of only three hats traced to Lincoln, and it had been appraised at six and a half million dollars.

And basically the provenances, the authenticity of it, was worthless.

I mean, there was no evidence of it.

So anyway, long and short of it, more trouble at the Lincoln Presidential Museum.

The sad part of it is that these things that have all sorts of historic value won't be seen by the people going to the museum.

- And we should let people know that the museum and the library are still open.

There are still things to see, but as you've mentioned, just a large portion of what was once thought to be going to be a permanent exhibit, not available anymore.

That'll bring us to the end of this week's edition of Capitol View, Peter Hancock, Dave McKinney, thanks so much for your time.

- Thanks Jennifer.

- Thank you.

- And when we join you next week, we will be post-election, so we'll catch you then.

You can find all of Capitol Views episodes at our website, wsiu.org and on our YouTube channel.

We encourage you to subscribe there.

Until next time, I'm Jennifer Fuller.

Thanks for joining us.

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