(dramatic intense music) - Welcome to "Capitol View," where we discuss the latest in state government and politics.

I'm Hannah Meisel with NPR Illinois.

Joining us this week is Dave McKinney, reporter for Chicago public radio station, WBEZ.

Thanks for being here, Dave.

- Hey, Hannah.

- And also here is Jason Piscia, director of the Public Affairs Reporting Program at the University of Illinois Springfield.

Glad you're here, Jason.

- Great to be here, Hannah.

- A few developments this week in Illinois congressional races.

State Representative Delia Ramirez, a progressive Latina state representative from Chicago, announced not unexpected that she would be running in the newly created Latino influence district in the, you know, from the city to the suburbs.

A very new kind of district.

One that Latinos have been clamoring for years.

And they really, especially after trying to get the word out about the census in 2020, they really wanted this.

So Dave, as a very new district and we should also mention of course, she's not the only one in the race for Chicago.

Alderman Gil Villegas is also running.

But, you know, tell us a little bit about this matchup and, you know, the challenges that they might face in this totally new (static cuts off speaker).

- Well, I mean, these are two candidates who, you know, obviously come from Chicago and this district, as you pointed out, it meanders pretty far west and up a little north.

I mean, it goes all the way out to west Chicago and DuPage county.

Takes in portions of the old six congressional district that Congressmen Caston now represents.

And then it goes up into Desplaines and some of those communities around O'Hare Airport.

So there's a fair amount of turf here that is really gonna be unfamiliar with these two candidates.

Of course, both of them are gonna be fairly well known in Chicago.

I think the key thing here is, you know, what does organized labor do?

I mean, I think they really, really hold the cards in a race like this because, you know, they have the infrastructure, they have the forces on the ground to make a difference.

And, you know, my guess is the powers that be, you know, the Senators, Durbin and the governor and people like that at the higher reaches of the party are probably gonna stay out of this and just sort of let things kind of evolve as they do.

But I think, you know, you've got two established candidates.

Ramirez is a member of Chris Welch's leadership team.

Villegas is a former floor leader for Mayor Lightfoot.

They've had a bit of, I wouldn't say estrangement, but a little bit of tension there.

And so, you know, they both have an established base of supporters.

The real interesting question is, you know, this district was drawn in a way to make it a majority Latino district, but in the event that these two candidates submit nominating petitions that are on the ballot, you know, there is room for a third candidate potentially to slide in there and take advantage potentially of having that Latino vote, that is an advantage right now, be split in half.

So, you know, that's a bit of a wild card.

Nobody has emerged yet that I know of that would fit that bill, but there's a lot of unknowns here with that race and it's a free for all.

- Right, and this is also, you know, as we've talked about many times now, it is remarkable because this is part of the ongoing you know, blue democratization of the suburbs and 10 years ago, this would have been an outcome that we, I don't know, it would have been kind of inconceivable.

But also Dave, I wanna briefly mention Catalina Lauf.

She had ran previously for the 14th district.

She came in third in the primary in 2020.

The district is of course held by Lauren Underwood.

She is making another run just briefly, she's gonna challenge Bill Foster, who has had some staying power even after losing one race.

You know, he went back into it.

So just briefly about the matchup between those two, potentially.

- Well, I mean, you know, Lauf is, you know, she hasn't won and so she's got that kind of tag as a electoral loser kind of thing going on.

And I think that, you know, the real key for her is she gonna be able to get Donald Trump involved in some way?

And if so, what does that mean in that district?

I mean, of all the districts that were carved up, that one actually, the Foster one, in spite of him being, you know, established as a congressman there, that one is a little dicier for Democrats because, you know, I think in the governor's race, if I'm not mistaken, that one was a it was under 5% that Pritzker won it by, I think.

And so, I mean, it could swing either way, especially if we're talking about a wave election for Republicans.

And so, you know, Foster I know is not taking this lightly.

I think he knows that there is potential for a wildcard happening in that district.

I think in Lauf, you know, she's somebody that's very much part of the Trump wing of the party.

I'm not entirely sure how that brand of politics will sell in that district.

And that's kind of the big unknown.

But again, if she gets Trump involved, if Trump puts up an endorsement, I have a hard time thinking he would come into that district but that would, you know, certainly change the dynamics a lot and put pressure on Foster.

But right now, I think you have to kind of give the advantage to him just by virtue of him being the incumbent.

- Sure.

And Jason, you know, Mary Miller, she's been a wild card since entering the race in 2020 to replace Shimkus.

So as a freshmen, she has continued to kind of live up to that kind of reputation.

Obviously she is the one who on January before the capital insurrection out at a rally at the Capitol grounds, she said, Hitler was right about (static cuts off speaker) we have to win the hearts and minds of children.

She, as the freshmen, she's kind of grown out of her, you know, she either has to challenge Rodney Davis or she challenge my boss, and she still hasn't given an indication of which one she might challenge.

But this week, we did get maybe a hint when she voted against (static cuts off speaker) Rodney Davis, of course, and my boss.

Now the other Republicans voted for it.

And you know, her reasoning (static cuts off speaker).

To this day, no one in the Biden administration has been held accountable for the withdrawal in Afghanistan.

She opposed new diversity training requirements.

Jason, do you think that this might signal she wants to run against Rodney Davis versus Mike Bost?

- Yeah, we're still waiting for that big decision to happen.

And, you know, she hasn't given any outward signs, but if you sort of read between the lines of sort of the competing statements that Mary Miller and Rodney Davis offered after that military spending vote, you know, there is some things to see as you mentioned.

Mary Miller mentioned, you know, she was still, she didn't vote for the military spending because... And actually, you know, one of only 19 Republicans in the whole US House that didn't vote for the military spending.

So that sort of sets her apart to begin with.

But yeah, as you mentioned, you know, uncomfortable with how Biden handled the sort of chaotic and tragic withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.

You know, and then she also cited those hot button issues for, you know, those white right wing Republicans in terms of vaccine mandates for military members and, you know, forcing some critical race theory training on military members as well.

But those are the things you mentioned in her statement, but if you look at Rodney Davis' statement, you know, he points out only 19 Republicans voted against it.

And he put a link to the roll call.

He never called out Mary Miller by name, but a quote in his news release was we must never allow our military to be defunded, which is what voting no on the spending bill would have done.

So I think kind of using that triggering terminology of defunded, we all saw what the reaction was, you know, a couple of summers ago when we brought up, you know, defunding the police and how the Republicans use that as sort of a rallying cry against the Democrats and other progressives who were kind of not necessarily supported it, but were in that camp of rethinking about how we fund police.

Rodney Davis sort of invoking bad terminology to sort of set his position apart from those who voted against it.

We're sort of seeing the lines starting to be drawn where I think we couldn't maybe see a Rodney Davis versus a Mary Miller race.

- And of course, we're talking about these three races in large part because of the congressional remap.

A lot of these things wouldn't have happened without it, but on the legislative remap side, Dave, after many, many months, finally, 2021 redistricting might be coming to a close after this week.

Oral arguments were made in front of a three judge panel in Chicago.

I called in to the hearing for all seven hours of it.

It was quite long.

But tell me a little bit about what do you think stood out in those seven hours of oral arguments?

You know, the attorneys for the Democrats that, you know, two are defending the maps that they made, say crossover racial voting is the norm in Illinois.

You know, it's no longer, you know, we're no longer in the civil rights era.

Like, you know, they cited the diversity among our statewide elected officials.

Do you think that's enough to pass muster for the judges to say, okay, yeah, this is fine with voting?

- Well, you know, I give you a great deal of credit for tuning into that for seven hours.

That was...

I wished I could say I did the same thing.

I bailed earlier than that, but, you know, I mean, I think this is, you know, this sort of a Hail Mary for Illinois Republicans to try to block this.

And I think Democrats feel fairly confident, I think, that they're gonna prevail in this.

You know, I think that had they stuck with their original maps that were built around the estimates opposed to be actual census data, I think they would have had a lot more trouble and they knew that.

So that's why we saw them come back and redo it.

You know, it's hard for me envision any scenario where Democrats have this control of map-making taken away from them.

It would really kind of throw the redistricting process and redistricting law kind of on its ear.

I think because, you know, as much as Illinois is doing it and making these districts as dark blue as they possibly can in a democratic state, so is Texas.

Texas is doing just the opposite.

And so, you know, the court, the Supreme Court has held that it's given pretty wide latitude to the legislatures and to the states to kind of settle these arguments over political boundaries.

And so I think at the end of the day, that's gonna be what Republicans have to overcome in Illinois.

Now, you know, the three justice or the three appellate judges that are deciding this, two of them are Republican appointees.

So, you know, you could look at that and say, well, anything's possible.

Anything is possible, but I do think, you know, this is an uphill legal climb for Republicans to prevail.

And it's gonna be decided, I think in a pretty expedited way because of course circulating petitions begins in about a month.

And so I think we'll have this all resolved by that.

- Sure, I mean, that's definitely the hope.

But the judges did, they were remarking at the very end there that they had hoped to have an opinion done by Tuesday after the weekend, but they're gonna look for even more filings.

So maybe a little bit of a delay there.

But Jason, you know, once this finally comes to a close, you know, 30,000 foot view, what does this mean for 2022.

You know, beyond like, let's reconnect it to the governing side of things.

(static cuts off speaker) Under the first year of a new house speaker, Chris Welch, who is, you know, pretty much progressive, we've definitely seen a lot of progressives go through.

Do you think that, you know, the trend that's gonna continue and only snowball further?

Do you think that their, you know, democratic leadership is going to check themselves?

Or do you think that they say, well, we have a mandate?

- Yeah, through this whole process, it's always sort of been interesting to me on how this map fight has been between, you know, it's the Latin X community and the African-American community versus Democrats in Illinois, which, you know, throughout history, they're always been friendly with each other and working together and now they're sort of battling over this.

So it'll be interesting to see if, you know, Democrats are successful in making the maps work just leave them the way they are.

What that lasting relationship will be between sort of the democratic power structure in the general assembly versus, you know, those two minority groups.

You know, there's rifts that have developed in the past between those two sides, and I'll just be interested to see how that plays out in terms of what legislation the leadership gets behind and what causes they get behind.

- Yeah, and, you know, we've definitely seen the kind of rifts that you're talking about in a much more public way when it comes to Chicago city council ward remapping.

But, you know, obviously those tensions, to give Democrats credit, they have kept things behind closed doors.

You know, I wish we didn't have to talk about COVID again, but we do.

We are, of course, seeing another upswing in Illinois COVID metrics.

The first Omicron case was detected this week at Chicago in who had been fully vaccinated and received a booster shot.

However, you know, that person appears to be recovering at home never needing a hospitalization.

You know, Dave, Southern Illinois only has four ICU beds available.

This is kind of a deja vu of the Delta driven surge that we saw in September.

Southern Illinois is also of course the place that has the most COVID deaths per capita when we talk about in terms of the 11 regions the states split into.

Do you see something new happening here?

Or do you see, you know, we're just gonna continue on this same path?

- Well, you really have to kind of step back and feel for the healthcare workers in those hospitals that have just been constantly inundated in areas where there just isn't very good adherence to mask requirements and to, you know, the call to get vaccinated.

I mean, I know the area really well.

I mean, it's kind of where I grew up and I know I have a lot of contacts there.

And there still is a high amount of resistance.

You know, I hear from people, hey, we need to give it more time.

I don't know what's in it.

You know, it's sort of those kinds of arguments that we've heard over and over and over again that have been thoroughly debunked by, you know, just about every credible medical organization out there.

But yet there's still suspicion because of the way that this has been politicized.

So, you know, the fact right now is that those surges, I believe, are being fueled by Delta in Southern Illinois.

We haven't seen the Omicron extend that far yet.

I mean, the good news about Omicron from what we're hearing, is that, you know, for vaccinated people, they're still susceptible to getting that, but the disease itself is less severe.

And certainly if you've had a booster shot, then your chances are actually much better of contending with that.

But, you know, for those folks who continue to believe that the best route is to not be vaccinated, you know, the inevitability of this is that they may wind up in a hospital on a ventilator, or maybe in a morgue.

I mean, that's the reality of it.

And it's hard for people in that part of the state to come to terms with that.

Like, it won't happen to me.

But yet, I know so many people down there who know multiple people who have died from COVID, and it's still not making an imprint on a group of people there that just are so resistant to vaccines.

So unfortunately, it's gonna be a winter of this in Southern Illinois, and there's no way around it.

- Right.

And, you know, of course at this point two years into the pandemic and a year into vaccinations rolling out, a lot of people have made resistance to the vaccine part of their identity.

And we know from social science research that stepping away from that and admitting you're wrong, comes with a high social cost and so people are even less likely to do it.

- But, Hannah, I mean, seriously, think about it for a second.

Like, you know, the crux of the argument is, well, we don't know what's in the vaccine.

We don't know what's in it, but it's like, you know, you're sitting on a couch eating a bag of Cheetos.

What do you think is in the bag of Cheetos?

What do you think when you turn the faucet on in your sink?

What do you think is maybe in the water?

You know, it's just everywhere or in the air you breathe.

And that's the reality here.

It's a false argument and there's just no way around that, but yet, you know, it's killing people, and it's putting people in the hospital, and it's meaning that people who, you know, need to have treatment for heart disease or cancer or whatever, they're competing.

Or a car crash.

They're competing to get into the emergency room with these people who refuse to get vaccinated.

And so that's the misfortune of what's going on there now.

- Oh, a hundred percent.

Absolutely.

And Jason, I think a lot about our role as journalists and, you know, (static cuts off speaker) we, you know, at large as the media much as I hate that term, have made, you know, have normalized this both sides agreement as if, you know, legitimize the false argument that we, you know, there's a legitimate reason to not get vaccinated.

So, Jason, as you have been teaching student journalists this year, what kinds of conversations have you had?

What have you (static cuts off speaker) when it comes to how they can approach this more responsibly?

- Yeah, I mean, usually, you know, when I went through college and when you went through college, it was Journalism 101.

You know, get both sides of the story, be fair about it, give each of them, you know, equal billing and move on.

But as we've come into an era now where, you know, people seem to accept alternative facts when they're actually completely wrong, you know, we've had to adjust how we teach this.

You know, you send out a student journalist to an anti-vaccination rally or an anti mask rally or anti whatever rally, and you have to understand, you know, there's some truths that are drawn in the sand.

You know, vaccines work, masks help, Donald Trump lost the election.

Those sorts of just basic things that are true that some people still refuse to accept.

We're not gonna... We'll talk to them, we'll hear what they have to say, but in terms of getting, you know, equal billing in the story with, you know, a healthcare professional talking about the efficacy of vaccines and why you should wear a mask, those views are gonna get top billing.

And that's just the way it has to be.

Our responsibility as journalists is to, you know, distribute accurate information.

And if we're getting information that's not accurate, it's gonna get downplayed or eliminated.

And if I can just add one quick thing, just the frustration with healthcare professionals.

There's a great story and I was reading our local newspaper here in Springfield this morning.

Dean Olsen, just about the increases in hospitalizations in our local hospitals.

And he interviewed, Dean Olsen interviewed a nurse, who meant, you know, talking to patients laying in bed with COVID just not believing that they have COVID.

There was one quote that sort of blew my mind, you know, they took a blood oxygen reading that showed it was not looking good because the person has COVID and the patient asks the doctor, how do you know that your machine isn't lying about the blood oxygen level?

Which is like, it's just like bang your head against the wall sort of stuff.

So that's where we stand.

It's frustrating.

I just encourage my students you just have to just keep beating away at the truth and just using that as the best weapon you have to dispel all of the misinformation and disinformation that is clouding and distorting people's judgments.

- You know, Jason, that anecdote you lay out there is interesting.

It's almost kind of Darwinian in a way where, you know, if people choose to be deliberately ignorant, there are consequences to that.

And what you just laid out there is evidence of that.

- And there's no indication that, you know, Governor David Pritzker wants to put any sort of mitigations on the state again.

We've already been down that road.

And hopefully, as you mentioned, Dave, this Omicron variant, you know, scientific readings out of places where it's prevalent, very possibly less virulent.

Meaning, people get less sick, but it is more contagious.

Dave, at the very end here, lightning round, finally, you know, COVID had delayed this massive expansion of gambling in Illinois.

Delayed awarding six new casino licenses and delayed, you know, the full rollout of sports betting and other things.

Finally, this week, we have seen some progress and then of course last month we saw Rockford casino temporarily open in temps baseball.

That thing's built quick.

What does this finally mean for, you know, getting going on the promises that folks did in bi-partisan?

- Well, I mean, I think what you're seeing is the, as you point out, the pandemic has sort of slowed everything down, but this is a traditionally slow process because there's a high degree of vetting that has to occur with all of these applicants and, you know, making sure that people who don't have links to organized crime or other criminal wrongdoing in their paths get vetted.

So, you know, it's a situation where the state can certainly use the revenue.

That was the whole point of this.

But I would not be surprised.

You know, this is a very incremental move.

It's important.

It means things are moving along, but, but I'd still say we're a far ways away probably.

You know, we're still talking years before these are all up and running, you know, before we see something.

- All right, well, we are out of time for the day.

I'd like to thank our guests, Jason Piscia, Dave McKinney.

My name's Hannah Meisel.

Thanks so much for joining us on "Capitol View."

Catch you again next time.

(intense dramatic music) (soft calming sound effect)