Trump Massively Overperformed Yet IL Republicans Picked Up 0 Seats—Smoke-Filled Room—Episode 80

We have thoughts on what unfolded on election night and we couldn’t wait for our regular Smoke-Filled Room to dish out our takes. Plain and simple, Republicans in Illinois should have performed better. Let’s get into it.

Collin Corbett is joined by Cor’s political experts Chris Jackowiak and Michael Butler in this special episode. They begin talking about how Republicans won nationally and Trump overperformed throughout Illinois. 

Then they get into the Republican performance in the 7 main hold districts, where we’re all waiting for provisionals and late-arriving VBMs to see if we’ve held onto all our seats, and how Republicans failed to pick up any of the 9 state and federal pickup races everyone was watching.

Then Collin goes on an epic rant about how he’s sick of Republicans embracing losing in this state, trying to spin a weak showing on election night as a victory. Trump did 9% better in Illinois, yet we’re celebrating because maybe we didn’t lose seats. That’s a loser mentality. We discuss why, from a misallocation of limited resources, bad messaging, and a lack of infrastructure.

We close our election recap revisiting our predictions. We were 8/9 in our “lock” picks and 5/6 in our overperform/underperform picks!

00:00: Introductions
00:38: Trump and Republicans Win Big Nationwide
08:00: Trump Massively Overperforms in Illinois
11:10: IL Republicans Hoping to Hold All At-Risk Seats
21:24: Republicans Fail to Pick Up Any Seats in IL
39:39: Key Takeaways from the 2024 Election
01:02:09: Reviewing How Well We Did with Our Picks
01:07:56: Closing Thoughts