Mark Kirk

And by the way, we've seen that before.

Mark Kirk, you guys probably remember who Mark Kirk was.

Mark Kirk, very, very ambitious congressman, ran for the U.S. Senate in Illinois in 2010.

He went, sorry, the state went from D plus 25 to R plus three.

He had a 28 point swing.

You know, I think one thing that it speaks to is just the the very weakened state of the Republican Party in Illinois right now.

The the funding of the party, the organization of the party in the time since United States Senator Mark Kirk lost to to Tammy Duckworth and, you know, Bruce Rauner lost to J.B. Pritzker in those elections.

It really has just fallen off in terms of of its ability to raise funds and also the the appeal to voters, particularly in the the, you know, population dense suburban Cook County areas and collar counties, places where Republicans used to do very well in Illinois, where they frankly just don't anymore.

And, you know, obviously the elephant in the room in that situation is that aligns with the time that Donald Trump has been on the political stage.

And it's stunning.

You think back a decade ago, I mean, you know, as the 2016 election was coming to an end, half of the statewide constitutional officers were Republicans.

Governor Bruce Rauner, the lieutenant governor Evelyn Sanguinetti, Comptroller Leslie Munger, and one of our U.S. senators, Mark Kirk, was a Republican.

So, you know, the idea that Illinois, you know, has always been a blue state, you know, that is a certainly recency bias at play.

And it's not like, but Republicans here have not had the money that the Democrats have had in the state of Illinois.

Again, we haven't had a Republican senator elected here I don't believe since Mark Kirk.

So you're talking 2010, he served his term.

So we haven't had a Republican senator since 2016.

A naval aviator told me it exists.

Congressman Mark Kirk tacitly told me it exists.

We have the DNI because officially it doesn't exist.

What Bob Lazar and Victor talked about, this agency doesn't exist.

And and the last time we had a U.S. open seat and the one I'm running for now with Durbin is retiring from is the first open seat since 2010.

And that open seat was won by a Republican, Mark Kirk.

Before that, we had Peter Fitzgerald, who won a U.S. Senate seat.

And we've had many others down the line.