Marathon Pundit: St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Is Illinois turning purple?

Kevin McDermott, who writes for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, asks if "Illinois is turning purple?"

Obama's job-approval rating in Illinois, according to a Chicago Tribune poll taken earlier this month, hovers just over the halfway mark, at 51 percent — still well above some of the numbers he's seeing nationally, but more than 10 points down from the support he enjoyed here two years ago.

The race for Obama's open U.S. Senate seat has been neck-and-neck for months, with the Republican, U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk, edging in polls over Democratic state treasurer and Obama protégé Alexi Giannoulias.

Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn, a fixture in and around progressive Illinois politics since the 1970s, is badly trailing his conservative GOP challenger, state Sen. Bill Brady of Bloomington, despite the fact that Brady won his party's crowded February primary with just one-fifth of Republican votes. The latest Rasmussen Reports poll has Brady up 50 percent to 37 percent.

The Democrats' commanding majority in the congressional delegation might, according to the latest polls, be whittled down to just one seat in November, with Democrats all but assured of losing ground in the legislature.

Moree: "Is it (becoming) a purple state? It looks like it. There are a lot of races in play," said Brian J. Gaines of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

What's left out of the article is the fiscal disaster left behind by Rod Blagojevich and made worse by his two-time running mate, Pat Quinn. Illinois has a $13 billion deficit and the most underfunded pensions in the country. The Democrats--and their public-union pals--have abused the voters for eight years. The anger, which I don't think has peaked yet, is not just about Blago's crookedness. He had enablers.

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