The four Illinois legislative leaders did not have a spectacular primary day last week. House Speaker Chris Welch lost three incumbents to primary challengers. Senate President Don Harmon lost an appointed incumbent and an open-seat race. House Republican Leader Jim Durkin lost two incumbents and came up short in some other races. Senate GOP Leader Dan McConchie came away with one ding.

“We're not the party of Trump,” Senate Republican Leader Dan McConchie told an interviewer a couple of months ago. “I'm in the Republican Party and the party of Lincoln. And at the end of the day, the important thing is that we're standing up for ideas and ideals and not a personality. And that is what the Republican Party has been about for decades and what I believe we're going to be going forward.”

The state’s political world may have been shocked, but I doubt many in that world were surprised at the level of vitriol in Representative Sam Yingling (D-Grayslake)’s press release last week which claimed he’d been “attacked” by Governor JB Pritzker. Governor Pritzker’s “offense” was endorsing Representative Yingling’s Democratic primary opponent Mary Edly-Allen in the race to replace retiring state Senator Melinda Bush (D-Grayslake).

Illinois peaked at 27 U.S. House seats after the 1910 Census and subsequent reapportionment. That lasted until the 1940 Census, when Illinois dropped to 26 seats in Congress. We’ve been steadily losing ground ever since. It’s not that we lost population, it’s that other states in the West and the South grew much faster. California had just eleven congressional districts as a result of the 1910 Census. It now has 53.