By PETER W. COLBY and PAUL MICHAEL GREEN

Patterns of change in suburban voting Recent elections imply a surge in democratic voting in Chicago's suburba. A closer suggests a slow erosion of treaditional Republican strength caused by Democratic migrations to the suburbsand by the growing willingness of suburbanites to split tickets. But by no means is there a party turnaround in the suburban 5 1/2 counties: no Democratic presidential or gubernatorial candidate has carried any part of the area since 1964.

[EDITOR'S NOTE:
This article, along with four others co-authored by Colby and Green in Illinois Issues, will be reprinted in one chapter of Illinois Elections: Parties, Patterns, Reapportionment, Consolidation, published by Illinois Issues. Tentative publication date is November 15, 1979.]

LIKE ancient Gaul, Illinois is divided (politically) into three parts: Chicago, Downstate and the 51/2 suburban counties around Chicago (Cook County outside Chicago plus the surrounding counties of Lake, McHenry, Kane, DuPage and Will). This suburban 5 1/2 county area contains the largest number of voters in the state, and population growth is booming.

Suburban development, it is generally believed, has boosted Republican vote power in Illinois. Decades ago, the "country towns" surrounding Chicago were viewed as exclusive GOP territory. After World War II when Chicago's population began to drop and the suburban population started to grow, Republican vote totals grew also. The population has shifted, but the political battlelines between Chicago and the "suburban 5l/2" have followed the Democratic v. Republican pattern established in Chicago decades ago: the center v. the periphery. Today, the Democratic center has expanded from its inner-city base to include most of Chicago, and the Republican periphery has moved outward from Chicago's outlying neighborhoods to the far edges of the collar counties. In national and most state elections, peripheral suburbanites follow their basic social and economic interests and vote Republican. In local elections and some state races, however, these same voters will often support popular Democratic candidates.

Neither the new center nor periphery is politically or economically homogeneous. Obviously there are city centers sprinkled throughout the suburban 5l/2 and conversely there are peripheral type communities inside the city of Chicago. These scattered discrepancies notwithstanding, we believe an overall analysis of voting trends inside the six-county area finds a metropolitan Republican periphery v. a Democratic city center. But within the GOP periphery the surging suburban constituency is not diehard Republican anymore; it is independent enough to vote for selected Democratic candidates. Before 1945, the suburbs housed a rather homogeneous upper-middle class who tended to vote heavily Republican. They were not a sizable force in influencing election returns. But after W. W. II, scholars and commentators writing about suburban voting described a burgeoning, homogeneous, middle-class suburban development that was predicted to make the Republicans a majority party. In 1952 record Republican majorities in the suburbs across the nation swept the popular Dwight D. Eisenhower into the presidency. As reported in

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Time, Col. Jake Arvey, chairman of the Democratic party in Chicago, complained, "The suburbs were murder." Two theories advanced by Robert C. Wood in his classic 1958 study, Suburbia: Its People and Their Politics, sought to explain why the suburbs were becoming exclusively Republican. Wood's Theory of Conversion states that urban Democrats become suburban Republicans as soon as they give up their rented flats and buy a home in suburbia. They're quick to abandon their ethnic identity and become one with their new neighbors whom they know to support the Republican party, the party that cares more about property rights, and that reinforces the new arrival's status as a man coming up in the world. Wood's second theory, Transplantation, asserts that people who leave the city for the suburbs have already acquired a middle-class self-image and are moving to join their social brethren in the suburbs. The upsurge of the suburban Republican vote, according to the theory, is attributable to the desire of upper-class residents to move out of the city. If Wood's theory is correct, all suburbs would eventually become Republican and middle class.

The old theories

The forecast was wrong: The suburbs are neither exclusively middle class nor exclusively Republican. America is now a suburban nation, and suburbia is almost as diverse as the nation's total population. As the suburbs continue to grow with new residents from urban, Democratic areas, most suburban areas have become more, rather than less, Democratic. Although there is a positive relationship between increased social status and a preference for Republican candidates, the large numbers of working-class people who moved to the suburbs after 1945 create variety in status, communities and political affiliation. Moreover, later studies of suburban voting report that upward social mobility is not uniformly accompanied by a change from Democratic to Republican partisanship. "Transplantation" is now bringing Democrats and independents as well as Republicans to the suburbs, and young new voters growing up outside the city will not necessarily become Republicans.

The effect of suburban Chicagoland on Illinois politics has increased tremendously (see table 1). In 1944, votes cast in the suburbs accounted for 16 percent of the state total votes in the presidential election. By 1976, over one million more votes were cast in state elections at the suburban voting booths. The suburban electorate now contributes 33 percent of the votes in state elections; in the 1976 presidential election 26 percent of the Democratic total and 43 percent of the Republican ballots were cast in the suburban 5 1/2

Although the suburbs are not exclusive GOP territory, Republican candidates have run substantially better in the suburbs than statewide in virtually every race. Since 1932, Republican candidates for both president and governor have consistently scored about 10-12 percent better in the suburbs than in the state as a whole (see table 2).

Discounting the unusual three-way 1912 presidential election race (Woodrow Wilson, D; William Howard Taft, R; Teddy Roosevelt, Progressive), only two Democratic presidential candidates have ever carried any part of the suburban counties. In 1932 and again in 1936, Franklin D. Roosevelt eked out pluralities over his Republican foes in Will County, and Lyndon B. Johnson carried Will and Lake counties in his 1964 landslide over Barry M. Goldwater.

Democratic gubernatorial candidates have done only slightly better than their presidential running mates. Again, not including 1912's three-way race (Edward Dunne, D; Charles S. Dennen, R; Frank H. Funk, P), only three Democrats have won governor's contests in the suburban region. Henry Horner in his 1932 defeat of Len Small carried suburban Cook, Lake, Will and DuPage counties. In 1936 Horner repeated his Will County triumph, and in 1948 Adlai E. Stevenson II also won Will County. Finally, in 1960 Otto Kerner beat William G. Stratton in Lake County, and four years later he bested Charles H. Percy in Will County.

In sum, since 1900, six of the 11 Democratic presidential and gubernatorial victories in the suburban county area occurred in Will County. Lake County had three Democratic wins, and DuPage and suburban Cook each had one Democratic victory. Since 1964, however, no Democratic presidential or gubernatorial candidate has carried any part of the suburban 5'/2. Only Democrats Adlai E. Stevenson III and Alan J. Dixon have shown any strength in the suburbs.

Population boom Population patterns, of course, are an important factor in understanding voting patterns. In 1950, the city of Chicago had twice the population of its suburbs. By 1975, however, the population of the suburbs had reached 3.9 million while the city had declined to 3.1 million people. The accompanying graph depicts the recent and projected growth of the suburban counties - DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry, Will and suburban Cook (henceforth, suburban Cook will refer to that portion of the county not in Chicago).

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Suburban Cook now contains more than half of the 3.9 million suburban population. Just under one million in 1950, suburban Cook has grown to about 2.3 million people. By the year 2000, its population is expected to be about 3 million, reflecting a growth rate of about half that experienced from 1950 to 1975.

As suburban Cook County's growth slows over the next 20 years, the five surrounding collar counties are expected to grow even faster than they did from 1950 to 1975, when their population doubled. By the year 2000, the collar county population is projected to rise to 2.9 million — almost equal to that projected for suburban Cook.

DuPage is the fastest growing and second largest county in Illinois. It jumped from 154,000 in 1950 to 553,000 in 1975 and is projected to double to about one million residents by 2000. Lake County is right behind DuPage at 407,000, and is expected to nearly double that by the end of the century. Will and Kane counties have more than doubled their population since 1950, and both may almost double again by the year 2000. Finally, McHenry County is also burgeoning and is expected to grow to 241,000 by the end of the century.

Each county has its own unique population distribution which may affect its voting trends.

Cook is mainly city upon city. There are 29 municipalities in Cook with populations over 25,000, and 98 more municipalities of lesser populations. The only room for growth in Cook is in the northwest corridor near O'Hare Airport and in the southwest area.

DuPage County is the quintessential suburban boom land. While the county has over half a million people, its largest city, Elmhurst, has only 45,000 people. Lake and Will counties are also growing quickly, particularly along their borders with Cook County; but the population of these two counties, unlike DuPage, is 25 percent urban, with Waukegan (65,132) and adjacent North Chicago (42,639) in Lake County and Joliet (74,401) in Will County. Lake and Will also still contain considerable unincorporated territory between their suburban developments and urban centers, while DuPage is largely a giant tract suburb.

Kane County, further west, currently has half its population in two large cities
- Aurora (76,955) and Elgin (59,754)
- and the other half in rural areas. But the Fox River Valley, along the county's eastern border with DuPage, and northwestern Cook are beginning to experience suburban development. And in the future, Kane may well come to resemble Lake and Will counties.

Finally, McHenry County, the smallest collar county and the furthest from Chicago's Loop, contains only two cities over 10,000 population— Crystal Lake (14,541) and Woodstock (10,226). McHenry is growing fast, particularly in the southeast corner nearest Chicago and along the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, but it is still generally a county of small towns and farmland.

The suburban counties all have Republican majorities with winning percentages sometimes above 60 percent. The counties are not equally Republican, however. DuPage, McHenry and Kane counties are consistently more Republican than the suburbs as a whole, while Will County and, to a lesser extent, Lake County are more Democratic than the entire suburban are (see table 3). Cook, partially because it casts the dominant portion of the suburban vote, roughly parallels the areawide totals.

Suburban ticket splitters

The results were astounding. Democrats did even better than four years ago during the post-Watergate debacle for Republicans." Don Rose, a liberal political activist, also writing in the Chicago Sun Times, concurred: "The Republican majority in Cook County suburbs has shrunk to a point where we may never see a GOP candidate elected to a countywide office." Rose concluded that the Republicans need 66 percent of the suburban vote to offset the Democratic margins in Chicago but, in 1978, that GOP base shrank to 57 percent. These interpretations imply that there has been a sudden upsurge in Democratic voting in the suburbs. In reality, there has been a slow erosion of the previously solid Republican territory as a result of two trends: the number of Democrats moving to the suburbs, and the growing willingness of suburbanites to ticket split, especially at the local level. The signs are fairly clear if not unequivocal. For instance, in 1968 no Democrats held any of the countywide offices in the five collar counties. Ten years later only DuPage County could make this claim, and even here Democrats have made some slight inroads at the county board level. The other four collar counties have Democrats currently holding county office. In 1978 Kane and Will counties elected Democrats in one-third of the county races while Lake County Democrats won a quarter of the contests. McHenry County residents reelected their popular Democratic sheriff, Art Tyrell, for a third term. The total number of local Democratic officeholders in these five counties during the last decade is not great, but the number of Democrat "firsts" is significant: Lake County elected its very first Democratic circuit court judge in 1964, and in 1970 elected Grace Mary Stern as county clerk. She is only the third Democrat to hold office in Lake County since the Civil War. In 1976 Will County

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elected George Sang-meister as its first Democratic state senator in the county's 140-year history. In Cook County the Democrats — on the strength of their Chicago vote — controlled six of the nine major county posts 10 years ago. Since then very few Republicans have been successful in countywide races. At present, State's Atty. Bernard Carey is the lone Republican county officeholder, and he faces an uphill 1980 reelection bid if the Cook County Democrats nominate a blue-ribbon suburbanite to run against him. Among the 30 Cook County townships, the governments of four of the eight largest - - Thornton, Niles, Worth and Bremen — are in Democratic hands for the first time in their histories. While there has been undeniable GOP slippage in local races, much less erosion has taken place in state and national contests. Democratic inroads for these statewide candidates have more to do with candidate popularity than with party affiliation. There have been only three Democratic winners in the last 22 statewide contests.

Michael J. Bakalis in 1970 had a suburban Cook victory over Ray Page in the race for state superintendent of public instruction and a narrow Will County triumph in 1976 over George W. Lindberg in the comptroller's contest. And both Adlai E. Stevenson III and Alan Dixon have carried the Cook suburbs and had successes in the collar counties. Most remarkable has been Dixon's ability to win DuPage County in his two secretary of state races in 1976 and 1978. Like the local races, these political matches show increased Democratic energy in these areas but by no means any major party turnaround. Because of the personal popularity of Stevenson and Dixon and the caliber of their GOP opponents, the Democrats have avoided shutouts in the suburban 51/2. Yet the Democrats' best showing has been to carry Will County and suburban Cook in only 27 percent of the last 22 statewide races.

The fortunes of local Democratic candidates in the suburban 51/2 can be seen in the 1976 Cook County returns. In 1976 every Democratic national, state and county candidate — except Dixon — lost suburban Cook County. The point is that at the local level the Republican tide has not been turned, but the Democrats have slowed their surge and in isolated cases even pushed back the GOP. Total suburban Republican strength in national and state elections is still massive, and though party vote percentages may be stabilizing, the more vital category of winning vote margins is increasing due to continued suburban population growth.

Cook County trends

A careful look at Cook County suburban township 1976 returns reveals that only one township, Stickney, had an overall Democratic average above 50 percent. Three other townships, Calumet, Niles and Lemont, barely missed being Democratic areas but the remaining 25 townships showed average Democratic vote percentages ranging from Bremen's 45.4 percent to Barring-ton's 22.1 percent. Perhaps the most telling statistic was that in over half of the suburban Cook townships the average Democratic vote was below 40 percent. (Berwyn's vote was not included since it was counted with the city of Chicago.)

Three of the four relatively strong Democratic townships - Stickney, Calumet and Lemont — are located in southern Cook County. Each township has a potent ethnic, blue-collar, working-class population which is large enough to give certain Democratic candidates winning pluralities. Niles Township just north of Chicago contains a large and politically active Jewish population centered in the village of Skokie. The Niles Township Jewish voters, often former Chicagoans follow traditional ethnic voting patterns and support Democratic candidates despite being incredible ticket splitters! Another reason for the Democratic upsurge in Niles Township has been the mercurial 10th District congressional campaigns of Democrat Abner Mikva.

An office-by-office breakdown in suburban Cook reveals that Jimmy Carter won only Evanston Township, though he came within 75 votes of also carrying Niles. Republicans won most of the other races by heavy margins (Carey had a 71 percent plurality over Democrat Edward Egan in the state's attorney race), yet Democrats Dixon, Bakalis (for comptroller) and Morgan Finley (for clerk of the circuit court) were also winners in Evanston Township. Republican gubernatorial candidate James R. Thompson crushed Michael J. Hewlett everywhere in the state. In suburban Cook, Hewlett's best townships were Calumet and Stickney, but even there he lost by nearly a two-to-one margin. The numbers changed little in the attorney general race where Republican incumbent William J. Scott trounced Cecil A. Partee with 67 percent of the suburban Cook vote. Dixon stopped the 1976 GOP parade with an astounding 60 percent of the suburban vote. The downstate Belleville Democrat carried every township except Barrington and Cicero in demolishing William C. Harris. Bakalis was the only other state Democratic candidate to carry a suburban township; he carried five.

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On the county level, circuit court clerk candidate Finley was the top Democratic votegetter with a 46 percent average vote while winning 10 townships. Recorder Sidney J. Olsen won five townships against his nondescript GOP opponent, while Democratic state's attorney challenger Egan was unable to carry one township in his landslide loss to incumbent Carey.

Many political observers view the University of Illinois trustee contests as the true measure of party strength in a given area. In 1976 Democratic trustee candidates won Stickney, Calumet, Lemont and Niles, thus confirming these four townships as the only pro-Democratic townships in suburban Cook.

A township breakdown of Democratic victories in the 10 races in 1976 (president, governor, attorney general, secretary of state, comptroller, state's attorney, recorder of deeds, clerk of the circuit court, municipal sanitary district trustee, University of Illinois trustee) reveals that only in their big four townships, did Democrats win. They were shut out in Barrington and Cicero townships and would have been shut out in 17 others, except that Dixon won them.

Democrats can be positive of support only in the four townships of Calumet, Lemont, Niles and Stickney in suburban Cook County, and except for Niles, these townships have small populations. The county's four most populous townships, Maine, Proviso, Thornton and Worth, all have GOP voting averages exceeding 60 percent. Further, the rapidly growing northwest part of the county includes the best GOP townships in Cook: Barrington, Elk Grove, Hanover, Schaumburg, Palatine and Wheeling. So, while the 1976 elections show that Democrats have established some pockets of strength in Cook and can expect to carry some traditional Republican townships because of the personal appeal of a candidate, they are operating in the midst of overall Republican strength.

Will County Democrats

Will County is the most Democratic of all the collar counties. It consists of one large urban center, Joliet; a series of industrial river towns like Lockport and Wilmington; several old rural towns and villages like Crete and Frankfort; a relatively high farm population; and several fast-growing suburban communities like Bolingbrook and Romeoville.

While Will is the strongest Democratic, it did not elect its first Democrat to the state Senate until 1976. Democrat George Sangmeister won because he appealed to those suburban voters who were willing to split their tickets for an attractive and competent Democrat. In the rock-ribbed Republican rural areas of Will County, Sangmeister was clobbered along with the rest of the Democrats, but his suburban appeal gave him enough votes to win, and his overall campaign should serve as a model for Democrats who want to win in the collar counties. Historically, political battle lines in Will County have been drawn between urban, ethnic and Catholic Joliet and Lockport on the Democratic side and the rural Protestant areas on the Republican side. Urban-rural animosity has been continuous since Will became a county in 1836. (Things got so heated following the Civil War that the county was nearly divided legally in 1869: eastern Will together with Rich and Bloom townships in Cook County would have formed a separate county with Monee as the county seat.) The Republican rural countryside has usually outvoted the Democratic cities in most Will County elections with the middle-class residents in Joliet and surrounding townships allied with the GOP rural voters.

new formula, along with the effects of Watergate, gave the Democrats control of the Will County board in 1974, the first time in history. Suburbanization has created a group of independent, undecided and ticket splitting voters in Will County. These voters are neither urban nor rural and reflect no traditional voting habits in the county. A precinct-by-precinct analysis of Democrat Sangmeister's 1976 state Senate breakthrough reveals the effect of the suburbanite vote on Will County politics. In 1976, black and ethnic Joliet and Lockport precincts were decidedly the best Democratic precincts in Will County. When precinct vote percentages for Democratic candidates for every office are combined and then ranked in order, only Joliet and Lockport precincts are at the top of the list. In fact, one has to go to the 49th best Democratic precinct in Florence Township before breaking the Joliet and Lockport pattern. Conversely, the worst Democratic precincts were in the rural areas located mainly in the eastern end of the county. The suburban precincts with large, heavy turnouts ranked mainly in the middle, but there's a definite edge for the Republican candidate. This fact allowed most GOP national, state and local candidates to carry Will County. In the case of Sangmeister, however, this pattern was broken. Like other Democratic candidates, Sangmeister's best areas were the Joliet and Lockport precincts, but Sangmeister's top 48 precincts included large suburban precincts from Frankfort (his home township), Plainfield and Monee townships. These are the precincts that provided his narrow 742-vote winning margin. For example, in Frankfort's 4th precinct Sangmeister received 69 percent of the vote while Carter garnered only 27 percent, giving Sangmeister a 213-vote margin and Carter a 259-vote deficit. Politics in the collar counties have been altered by the suburban invasion, especially in Lake and Will. Despite high mortgage interest rates, rougher zoning laws and the energy shortage, it does not look like collar county growth will slacken in the coming days. Emerging Democratic organizations in Will and Lake counties will undergo severe internal fights as the old central city Democrats in Joliet or Waukegan attempt to beat back party challenges from the newer suburban Democrats. Moreover, new alliances may be formed between conservative ethnic, big-city Democrats and conservative, Protestant rural Republicans. These old adversaries may be equally frightened at the growing demands of suburban Democrats and Republicans for more planning, stricter zoning, professional administrators and more public service. National and state voting trends may not change dramatically in the collar counties, but local political contests will become more and more like dog fights. The key issue will be which party can attract the more open and independent suburban voter while maintaining its traditional power base, be it in the city Or the countryside.

The new suburbanites

The Democratic party and especially some of its most popular candidates no longer concede absolute GOP supremacy in the suburban 51/2. Some Democratic inroads have been made and some Packets established because the suburbs are more heterogeneous and, thereby, ha.ve a more independent voting pattern. Certainly Wood's Conversion and Transplantation theories, which intended to explain why the suburbs were growing more and more solidly Republican, fall far short of explaining the independent and ticket splitting proclivities of the new suburbanite. Both of his theories ignore ethnic and religious factors and confuse the geographical division between city and suburb. As pointed out earlier, all suburbs are not middle-class, grass-roots communities. Today they have their share of the working class and lower-middle class populations which are extensions of similar neighborhoods in the city. In

22/ October 1979/Illinois Issues

other words, the same ethnic and socio-economic factors that divide voters in Chicago also divide voters in the suburbs. But the still prevailing political fact of life is that the higher overall socio-economic status of the peripheral suburban 5l/2 makes it Republican while the lower socio-economic status of the center city makes it Democratic; this division still largely accounts for the Republican voting behavior of the suburbs despite Democratic intrusion. Voting differences within the periphery and center are simply overwhelmed by the prevailing political climate which dominates. In our February article, "The consolidation of clout: the vote power of Chicago Democrats from Cermak to Bilandic," we compared Chicago ward results between the peripheral and inner-city wards. Not surprisingly these more affluent wards containing better educated and informed voters demonstrated a greater proclivity to split their tickets, to change party

It is true that archetypal suburban America's aspirations for local school control, crime free neighborhoods, less taxes, less welfare and more individual freedom make them prime hunting grounds for traditional Republican candidates. This is reinforced when the suburban voter hears, sees or reads the appeals in the media made by the Democratic candidate to the poorer, less educated and often minority urban voters. But the decline of party identification in America coupled with the impact of depersonalized television campaigning has left the suburban voter open to individual candidates from either party. This change has been well documented in the literature and is evidenced in the Chicago suburbs by the strong showings of Democrats Stevenson and Dixon.

In Don't Make No Waves — Don't Back No Losers, Milton Rakove comes closest to predicting the future of politics in developing-suburban communities. In a usually overlooked section of his book he writes:

"In essence, politics in these [new suburban] communities will be similar to politics in the city, where service rendered by the political organization will be the primary criterion for the voters. The services demanded by the voters will differ from those they asked for in the city.... In these communities politics will be geared for a long time to the bread and butter issues and to those candidates, regardless of party affiliation, who will do more to care for their needs and alleviate their problems."

In sum, the Chicago suburbs will be the new center of power in Illinois elections, and neither party can take the suburbs for granted.

Peter W. Colby and Paul Michael Green are professors of public service at Governors State University, Park Forest South. The authors wish to acknowledge the research assistance of Beverly Goldberg, Jean Lee and Kris Warning. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Second Annual Conference on the Small City and Regional Community, University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point on March 15, 1979.

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