The future’s uncertain as we pass into early 2026. A friend’s Christmas card spelled out that feeling and the angst over the new year:

“We may have survived 2025, but here comes 2026. So hold on tight, kids.” That’s one of the scariest invitations to look forward to what comes next in a new year.

But what will emerge in 2026? We can count on three things happening this new year. Call them three true outcomes.

First, Illinois lawmakers will finally tackle property tax reform. We know this because of the howls coming from Cook County and the city of Chicago.

For decades, Lake Countians and property owners in other suburban counties have griped about rising taxes on their homes and businesses. Once, Lake County taxpayers paid their property tax bills on a yearly basis.

But as taxes continued to rise, county officials decided to split tax bills into one half due in the spring, the other half in September. That solved the problem of perception, but not the crunch of increasing taxes fueled by soaring property assessments. The issue, though, has been property assessments that have been rising faster than inflation.

In parts of Cook County, those property assessments more than doubled in 2025, with tax bills so high that senior citizen homeowners in some minority neighborhoods can’t afford to pay them. That’s a triple-witching of voter volatility because home insurance premiums skyrocketed last year, accompanied by soaring energy costs.

In Lake County, we’ve become used to billowing tax levies. We have some of the highest in the nation, if not the highest.

It’s usually a contest between Lake and a tony Connecticut county on the exurbs of New York City over who has reached the ignominious pinnacle of taxation. Of course, much of one’s property taxes in Illinois goes toward schools, and some of it for other taxing districts, the most in any state.

In Cook County, the finger-pointing has been between Assessor Fritz Kaegi blaming the Cook County Board of (Tax) Review for high homeowner assessments by chopping levies on commercial properties. The tax commissioners blame the assessor’s office. Homeowners are not amused.

So a legislative solution will be hammered out in Springfield, decades after disgraced House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, promised property tax relief. Surely to be tackled by the super-majority Democrat legislature will be legislation curbing property tax sales and foreclosures. The debate over property-tax relief will be a drawn-out affair.

But rising taxes are not the party’s only issue that could give the state’s moribund Republican Party an opening in 2026. Nationally, many Democrats believe they have lost touch with Joe and Jane Six-pack, especially in the hinterlands and high-growth states.

After the drubbing Democrats received in the 2024 presidential election, there has been a bit of self-reflection. Our political parties do this after defeats.

Republicans did following the 1964 landslide by President Lyndon Johnson; Democrats when President Ronald Reagan won re-election overwhelmingly in 1984. In 1985, the Democratic Leadership Council was launched and adopted a pathway echoed after the 2024 debacle.

That being Democrats are inattentive to Americans’ worries about economic issues, blasé to national defense policies and overly reliant on social issues that few Americans besides progressive pols care about. Bill Clinton took that reassessment to heart and surprisingly defeated Republican incumbent President George H.W. Bush in 1992.

Some cracks in the state’s Democratic coalition have surfaced. The Illinois AFL-CIO, which represents some 1.7 million union members, last month failed to endorse candidates in the party’s heated March primary election for U.S. Senate, several Chicagoland congressional seats and state comptroller, where Lake County Treasurer Holly Kim of Mundelein is part of a quartet of candidates seeking to succeed retiring Comptroller Susana Mendoza of Chicago.

So expect Democrats to do the same deep cleanse in 2026. This despite the best efforts of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker to keep the party on a leftward bent, while deep-blue Land of Lincoln remains surrounded by red states.

The third true outcome of 2026 is undoubtedly the easiest to forecast. President Donald Trump will say several goofy things, which will even have his supporters saying, “Wha?”

Like the other day when Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about the nearly four-year-old war touched off by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Trump said Russian President Vladimir Putin “wants to see Ukraine succeed”.

That statement certainly was worthy of a bunker full of guffaws. Trump is either the most naïve president we’ve ever had when it comes to dealing with Russians and foreign policy, or he’s plain daffy.

We may know the answer to that more fully in 2026.

Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor. 

sellenews@gmail.com

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