We run competitive campaigns in downstate despite the counter wave. We should look at it from a neutral light at the very least.
I mean Brendan Kelly was basically the strongest recruit you could get there and he still lost by 4 even adding the Green party vote.
The 13th swung R but it didn't do so massively because of UIUC so its prety obvious to combine East St louis with UIUC in 2020.
They will probably do that but it would be a very ugly looking district.
Bustos should run for US Senate if Durbin retires in 2020. Her district will probably go Republican pretty soon.
How Democrats handle redistricting after the 2020 census will be really interesting here.
The 6th and 14th districts were initially GOP vote sinks, which will have to be fixed. You probably don't need to do much to Casten's district at least, but they'll definitely want to change Underwood's so as to make it more Democratic friendly.
I'm not as pessimistic on the 17th. A Peoria-Quad Cities-Rockford based district was never going to be a Democratic lock given the underlying politics of those cities and the margins Democrats got at the Presidential level weren't the norm when Obama was at the top of the ticket. I wouldn't be so sure it's shifted further away since 2016 either, it operates like a more Democratic version of IA-01. Though the big risk is if what happened to, say, Decatur industrially were to happen to Peoria or Moline, they probably couldn't recover from that.
The solution would be to snake it into Chicagoland, but that's not as simple as it might seem. There's DeKalb, but that's not that many people, and the 14th is currently sitting on almost all the other favorable Democratic territory in the West-Northwest suburbs.
What to do between the 12th/13th is more apparent, at least, after 2018. Most of the 12th will be ditched and you'll just figure out a district from Champaign down to St. Clair. It'll be ugly as sin, but you could even get rid of Decatur and end up having something around D+7.
