A new conservative party could promote fresh ideas
Illinois Republicans have a problem that goes deeper than Darren Bailey, J.B. Pritzker, or any particular election. They have ceased to be competitive enough to impose much discipline on the party that governs the state. Democrats hold every statewide constitutional office and supermajorities in Springfield. Republican donors who once spent fortunes trying to change that balance increasingly appear to have concluded that another large check will merely purchase another large defeat.
That is an argument for something Illinois has never seriously developed: A conservative third-party modeled loosely, though not perfectly, on the party that changed New York politics beginning in the 1960s. The purpose would not initially be to elect a governor. It would be to make conservative votes valuable again.
New York provides the history lesson. In the early 1960s many conservatives believed the Republican Party had become indistinguishable from liberal Democrats on too many issues. Nelson Rockefeller personified the problem. Rather than merely complain, they organized. The results came quickly.
In New York City's 1965 mayoral election, Republican-Liberal Party John Lindsay defeated Democrat Abraham Beame, 44.99 percent to 40.98 percent. But William F. Buckley Jr., running on New York State's new Conservative Party line, took an astonishing 13.36 percent, or 341,226 votes. He actually won 25 percent of the vote in Staten Island.
Buckley had no realistic expectation of becoming mayor. His famous quip when asked what he would do if elected was essentially that he would demand a recount. His candidacy nevertheless demonstrated hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers wanted a political choice to the right of the Republican establishment.
A year later the pattern appeared statewide. In the 1966 governor's race, Rockefeller won with only 44.61 percent. Democrat Frank O'Connor received 38.11 percent, while Conservative Paul Adams drew 8.46 percent. On the left, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. took another 8.41 percent on the Liberal Party line. New York politics had become a genuine multiparty marketplace.
Then came James Buckley. In the 1968 Senate race, Republican-Liberal Jacob Javits received 49.68 percent, Democrat Paul O'Dwyer 32.68 percent, and Buckley, running as the Conservative Party nominee, an extraordinary 17.31 percent, drawing more than 1.1 million votes.
In the 1969 New York City mayoral election, Republican-Conservative John Marchi won 22.7 percent, while Lindsay, after losing the Republican primary, won reelection on the Liberal Party and independent lines with 42.4 percent. Democrat Mario Procaccino finished at 34.8 percent. Party labels had become instruments rather than prisons.
Finally, in 1970, James Buckley did what supposedly could not be done. Running as the Conservative Party candidate, he won a U.S. Senate seat with 38.75 percent, defeating Democrat Richard Ottinger at 36.77 percent, and Republican-Liberal incumbent Charles Goodell at 24.29 percent.
The lesson was not that third parties routinely win. They don't. The lesson was that a sufficiently large third party can force the major parties to take its voters seriously, while occasionally becoming strong enough to win itself.
Illinois has had faint versions of the same phenomenon. When Republican Senator Charles Percy lost to Democrat Paul Simon in 1984, Simon received 50.07 percent, Percy 48.21 percent, and Libertarian Steve Givot 1.25 percent, or 59,777 votes. Simon's winning margin was only 1.86 percentage points. No one can assume Givot's voters would otherwise have voted Republican, but when an election is decided by less than two points, a third party taking more than one point gets noticed.
The trouble is modern Illinois Republicans rarely make elections that close. In 2022, Pritzker defeated Bailey 54.91 percent to 42.37 percent. Libertarian Scott Schluter received 111,712 votes, or 2.72 percent. Even giving Bailey every Libertarian vote would not have made the contest close.
That helps explain why Illinois Libertarians themselves have become almost irrelevant. They mounted a serious ballot-access drive and submitted roughly 37,000 signatures in 2022, comfortably exceeding the 25,000 requirement. Four years later, the party failed to file statewide petitions. It reported collecting less than 10 percent of the required signatures, fewer than 2,500, subsequently its gubernatorial ticket was reduced to a write-in effort.
Money and organization vanished with the signatures. In 2022, the Libertarian Party of Illinois had budgeted $29,000 for ballot access and sought national assistance while using paid circulators. By 2026, Illinois Libertarians complained that the national party had not supported their ballot-access efforts in either 2024 or 2026. There is a constituency. There is no machine.
The same disease is afflicting Illinois Republicans on a grander scale. Richard Uihlein gave more than $12 million directly to Bailey in 2022 and another $42 million to Dan Proft's People Who Play By The Rules PAC. In 2026, Uihlein gave Ted Dabrowski $250,000 but otherwise largely stayed out of the governor's race. Proft's PAC, meanwhile, shut down this summer. That looks less like ideological surrender than donor exhaustion. Why spend another $20 million making a Republican candidate competitive enough to lose by 10 points instead of 13?
The irony is that the 2026 Republican primary offered exactly the sort of ideological choice a conservative party could institutionalize. Bailey is unquestionably more conservative than Pritzker. The two disagree sharply on abortion, guns, immigration, crime, energy, and the general direction of state government. But Bailey's fiscal message is largely conventional Republicanism: lower taxes, less waste, smaller government, and tougher oversight.
Dabrowski offered something more structural. His campaign argued for fundamentally reducing Illinois' cost of government, tackling pensions, restraining property taxes, reducing regulation, and changing the machinery that produces Illinois' chronic fiscal problems. Uihlein himself backed Dabrowski with $250,000. A Dabrowski-Pritzker contest therefore might have been less about personalities and culture and more about competing models of government. Instead Republicans nominated Bailey again.
Democrats understood Bailey's usefulness long ago. During the 2022 Republican primary, Pritzker and Democratic organizations poured tens of millions of dollars into advertising that weakened establishment Republican Richard Irvin while portraying Bailey as extremely conservative. The message ostensibly attacked Bailey; to a Republican primary electorate, it simultaneously advertised him.
Pritzker didn't write Bailey a check. He did something politically more valuable: Democrats helped select the opponent they preferred to face. That is the strongest argument for a conservative third-party in Illinois.
It would not exist merely to siphon votes from Republicans. It would exist to tell Republicans that conservative voters cannot automatically be delivered every November after being ignored or poorly represented during the rest of the cycle.
Illinois law makes the project difficult. A new statewide party needs 25,000 signatures, and to become an established statewide party its gubernatorial candidate must win more than five percent. Unlike New York, Illinois also lacks the same powerful tradition of fusion voting that allowed a conservative third-party to endorse an acceptable Republican while retaining its own ballot identity. The same drawback exists in Chicago mayoral elections with non-partisan voting. Both of those laws undoubtedly hold back underdog candidates.
That difference matters. A careless Illinois conservative party could simply split the anti-Democratic vote and guarantee Democratic victories. However, Illinois Republicans are already losing those elections. That changes the calculation.
The first objective should not be electing a governor. It should be five percent. Schluter already demonstrated in 2022 that an almost invisible Libertarian could receive 2.72 percent. A broader conservative party emphasizing property taxes, pensions, school choice, public-sector union power, crime, regulation, and government spending might reasonably aspire to considerably more.
Once it reached five percent, the party would have an organization, a ballot line and something politicians understand better than philosophical arguments: votes. The New York Conservatives began with William Buckley at 13 percent. Five years later James Buckley was a U.S. senator.
Illinois need not duplicate that history. It needs to understand its lesson. A political party becomes irrelevant when its voters have nowhere else to go. For decades Illinois conservatives have complained about Republicans, voted Republican anyway, and watched Democrats govern with increasingly little fear of losing power.
There are many things going against conservatives in Illinois. One of them is “conservative flight” to Florida, Texas, and other more free market states. Another is the flight of potential donors like Uihlein, Ken Griffin, and Bruce Rauner.
In 1936, Vermont was one of only two states to vote for the Republican Alf Landon. Eighteen years later in the seasonal classic “White Christmas” Danny Kaye’s character says, “Who knows, maybe we can dig up a Democrat." To which Bing Crosby’s character responds, “They’d stone him.”
Now, Vermont is the most left-wing state in the country led by Bernie Sandanista. Change doesn’t happen overnight, but it can happen.
Perhaps the missing ingredient is not another Republican (Republicrat?) candidate. Perhaps it is competition from a well branded candidate.
Ronald Reagan argued the GOP needed a banner of “bold, bright colors; no pale pastels,” by which he meant clearly stated principles rather than compromising until Republicans and Democrats became difficult to distinguish.
A new Illinois Conservative Party can push the GOP in that direction. That style of reform would be a huge win for Chicago voters.
