Tom Kacich of the News-Gazette had brief history of political party control in Champaign County last month in an article that also included an interview with the president of the local Republican Party, Mark Ballard.
Tom Kacich | Only recently did GOP lose its hold on Champaign County
For most of its history, Champaign County was as reliably Republican as the state of New Hampshire or the western suburbs of Chicago. Republican presidential candidates won the county in all but one election between 1940 and 1988, and, until last December, the GOP usually held all but one or two countywide offices...
The GOP's hold on the county began to break in the 1990s and has accelerated this decade to the point where Democrats hold six of the nine countywide offices and 13 of 22 county board seats, and their presidential candidate has won seven consecutive elections between 1992 to 2016...
There have been 46 presidential elections in Champaign County's 186-year history and Republicans won 30, Democrats 12 and Whigs three (1840, 1848 and 1852). In 1912, Progressive Party nominee (and former Republican President) Theodore Roosevelt narrowly won Champaign County with 35.6 percent of the vote, versus 35.4 percent for Woodrow Wilson and 25.6 percent for Republican William Howard Taft.
That one-quarter of the vote for the Republican nominee (misleading as it was since Roosevelt had been a Republican) was the worst showing ever for a Republican presidential candidate in Champaign County. Second worst was George H.W. Bush's 35.6 percent in 1992 in a three-way race where independent Ross Perot took 18 percent of the vote in the county.
More information, including more recent trends and Ballard's take
here. It paints a bit of a dire picture for 2020, but anyone who has followed the ebbs and flows of political party fortunes knows, no gains last forever. Predictions in these uncharted waters may be more complicated than quantum physics.
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