I commissioned a We Ask America poll on April 21 of the races for Illinois governor, comptroller, and treasurer. But I forgot to put the candidates' party labels in the poll's questions. The results came out very weird.

Bruce Rauner led Governor Pat Quinn 49-38 in that poll. Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka trounced Lieutenant Governor Sheila Simon by an astounding 56-29 margin. And Representative Tom Cross led Senator Mike Frerichs in the state treasurer's race 33-20.

The Topinka crosstabs were bizarre. The Republican was leading among Democrats 55-30, ahead in Chicago 57-23, and among African Americans 55-22. No way.

Garbage in, garbage out, as they say, so I dumped the poll and ran a new one on April 27. This time we identified the candidates' party affiliations.

The results were strikingly different.

Out of power for a dozen years and hobbled even before that by anti-patronage court rulings, Illinois' Republican-party infrastructure has all but collapsed.

So part of GOP gubernatorial nominee Bruce Rauner's task is to try to somehow rebuild a grassroots infrastructure.

It won't be an easy job. Republicans have never, in the modern age, been able to match the Democrats' ability to dispatch patronage armies to the state's distant corners because of the Democrats' Chicago and Cook County patronage bases. The Republicans' local organizations are essentially hollow these days, and they have no troops to speak of.

Before the primary, Rauner's campaign had ambitious hopes of opening as many as 50 field offices throughout Illinois. Those plans were scaled back as reality sank in. Finding enough experienced people to staff those offices would be next to impossible.

As I write this, hundreds of Americans are gathered in Clark County, Nevada, in support of cattle rancher Cliven Bundy in his fight to save his family's ranch from an aggressive takeover by the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM), an agency within the Department of the Interior.

The mainstream media's shocking lack of coverage of this story provides all the evidence Americans need to unambiguously indict it for the propaganda machine it has become. Massive resources are provided for weeks of endless speculation on a missing plane originating in Malaysia, but practically no coverage of well over 200 federal agents surrounding the Bundy ranch - fully armed and including trained snipers - high-tech surveillance, and a declared no-fly zone over this area of Nevada.

Any coverage by the corporate media has been glaringly slanted in favor of the government's position in this takeover, claiming that Bundy owes $1 million in grazing fees for his cattle that graze on federal land. The cattle of Bundy's family have been grazing on this same land since the 1800s.

What the media isn't mentioning is that Bundy's cattle grazing on a small section of nearly 600,000 acres of barren desert land was never an issue until the early 1990s. Coincidentally, that is when Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) initiated a study to designate huge swaths of land in a six-state area for solar-energy development to accommodate a Chinese corporation that wants to build at least one solar plant that includes Bundy's property.

Instead, the media mentions a highly questionable threatened tortoise that purportedly faces extinction due to trampling by Bundy's cattle. Noticeably absent from reports is the BLM's own extermination of large numbers of the very same tortoise it claims to be trying to protect.

Two worries are obviously driving driving much of Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan's personal legislative agenda this year: low Democratic turnout in an off-year election for an unpopular governor and Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner's millions in campaign spending.

"If you're an African American on the South Side, what motivates you to vote for [Governor] Pat Quinn when you wake up election morning?" was the blunt assessment of one longtime Madigan associate last week.

For example, Madigan signaled last week that despite his past reluctance to raise the minimum wage and his longtime alliance with the Illinois Retail Merchants Association (which is leading the charge against it), he's not opposed. Calling the idea a matter of "fairness" and "equity," Madigan told reporters last week: "I think you'll find the opposition to raising the minimum wage comes from people that have done pretty well in America, and for some strange reason they don't want others in America to participate in prosperity."

Asked if he was referring to Rauner, Madigan asked: "Who?"