SPRINGFIELD — By sheer numbers, Illinois Democrats are in their healthiest position in a generation: controlling all statewide elected offices, locking in legislative supermajorities, dominating the state Supreme Court and holding 14 of the state’s 17 congressional seats. 

Much of this ascendancy can be chalked up to political realignment as diverse, highly-educated suburban areas gradually shifted blue while homogenous rural regions became more red.

In a state where more than three-quarters of the population resides in the Chicago metro area, this math has favored Democrats.

The dynamic only exacerbated with the backlash to former President Donald Trump’s administration and with cultivation from Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a billionaire who has sunk hundreds of millions into his campaigns and those of others.

And with Democrats in control of drawing the legislative and congressional maps in redistricting in 2021, their majorities were all-but-assured to be safe for another decade. 

It all sounds like a healthy Democratic Party of Illinois. 

However, many of these gains have actually been made in spite of the state party organization, which for years largely served as a vehicle for former House Speaker Michael Madigan — party chair between 1998 and 2021 — to send out campaign materials for state House Democrats. By law, state parties receive a significant postage discount. 

Many other Democrats have had to fend for themselves or rely on other organizations, such as the Illinois Democratic County Chair’s Association, for party-building programs.  

But, there are signs that things are changing at DPI, with leaders touting a successful campaign in local races this past spring, a new push on fundraising and the “partnerships” being forged among various Democratic officeholders, unions and interest groups that will help the party build from the “bottom up” and win more elections.

DPI chair Lisa Hernandez, a state representative from Cicero, is also amid a “listening tour” across the state, surveying key party stakeholders on what’s needed from the state party.

“It’s not going to happen overnight,” Hernandez acknowledged in a sit-down interview with Lee Enterprises at the party’s offices in downtown Springfield on Tuesday afternoon.

“For me, it’s very important to be building the infrastructure,” Hernandez said. “We’re not done. We’re a year in. We’ve met some accomplishments, but there’s a lot of work still to do.”

Hernandez has been in the role for just over a year, ousting U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Matteson, who was elected after Madigan resigned the role in March 2021. She had the backing of Gov. J.B. Pritzker and House Speaker Chris Welch, D-Hillside, among others.

Hernandez said there was “too much going on” to make wholesale changes before the election in November 2022. But in the months since, the party has been making moves, hiring Ben Hardin as executive director and building out a staff of about 15 people, the largest for an off-year in the organization’s history.

And earlier this year, the party sank more than $300,000 into local elections, most notably school board races where candidates backed by far-right organizations were running and appeared to have decent odds of winning. They boosted Democrats and ran ads against candidates they viewed as extreme.

By and large, the investment appeared to pay off. 

More than 70% of the 119 candidates the party backed in local elections in April won. More than 70% of the 102 candidates the party communicated against lost, according to DPI spokeswoman Allison Janowski. 

Jared Ploger, an Oswego District 308 school board member who won his race with DPI’s help, said the party’s mailers helped bring out voters that typically don’t vote in local races. 

“We took a gamble and we tried to reach out to people that don’t normally vote in local elections, and it worked,” Ploger said. “We saw more people show up.”

“I hate the fact that you have school board races (that are) partisan,” he added. “I’m not a fan. But I’m also not a fan of just taking it on the chin and sitting there.”

Hernandez said there were many lessens to be taken from the party’s effort to boost candidates in local races. Though she said the state party will still stay out of open partisan primaries, involvement in nonpartisan races will continue in future cycles.

“I think moving forward, in particular, the spring elections has offered us … insight as to the potential that we have,” Hernandez said. “So I would say we will continue to be working and supporting those local races.”

Patrick Cortesi, chair of the McLean County Democrats, said the state party has been a lot more open since Madigan left office and his “now working as a cohesive unit” with local party organizations.

“We have this real sense of team,” Cortesi said. “And so, it comes from the top down and it’s a lot easier to get that kind of attitude amongst our own party when you know the state party and the State Central Committee members are all involved in that process.”

Cortesi said it is not just financial support that’s important, but infrastructure that local parties can rely on. For instance, he’s asked the party if they could put together a team of election attorneys to be at the disposal of county parties. Believe it or not, it is not easy to find lawyers steeped in election law in many places, including McLean County. 

Kristina Zahorik, president of the IDCCA and a state central committeewoman, said that her organization “had been carrying a lot of what a lot of folks saw as kind of a state party function.” But that has started to change.

“I think certainly with the new leadership that we had with Robin Kelly, and now certainly with Chair Hernandez, you see kind of an opening up of the party and less of a siloing, which I think is really, really important,” she said. 

The state party is also ramping up its fundraising operation, including hosting a big-money gala in October in what party leaders hope will become an annual event. 

It’s also a reflection of the need to become self-sustaining. Right now, the party has largely been supported by the $12.5 million in contributions from Pritzker. But there will be a day when he is not governor and, by extension, the party’s leader and main benefactor. 

“I’m trying to get there but it’s still working on a way of sustaining what we have,” Hernandez said of fundraising efforts. “And although it’s been very helpful to get started with the governor’s support, I think I’ve been doing pretty good in building up that … structure.”

Some of this sounds like normal functions of state political parties. That’s because they are. Illinois just hasn’t had a normal state Democratic party in a long time, which makes moves towards normalcy newsworthy in ways they wouldn’t be in other places. 

In some ways, a lot of it is happy talk. When she reflected on her time leading the party, Kelly expressed many of the same sentiments that Hernandez is sharing now.

The question to be answered now is whether the state party can be effective in local races, execute its party-building directives and raise the money it needs to carry out those initiatives. 

“Now that I built this team and we have programming and tools in place that can be utilized, this tour that we’re doing is sharing that information now with stakeholders … to start building … that bench that we’ve been talking about,” Hernandez said. 

She said some “hard” conversations have been had in places the party has neglected in recent cycles, especially downstate. There will be more to come. 

“We’ll get there, little by little,” she said. “The Democratic presence is going to be felt.”

It certainly is different than it was a year or two ago.