In the old days, DuPage County was purely Republican - providing statewide balance to the Democratic stronghold in Cook County. To this day, the DuPage County Board is 100 percent Republican. But some Democratic candidates of late have carried DuPage in state and federal races, and the blue party is hoping to make even more gains in 2008.
As the story in Sunday's Sun explains, many people who have traditionally voted Republican are tending to move out of DuPage County, while those moving into DuPage include a lot of Democrats from Cook. It seems as if the Republican Party in this state is still trying to recover from Gov. George Ryan's convicted on corruption charges and Jack Ryan's aborted Senate bid.
Should Republicans be worried about these trends, or will DuPage help right the Republican ship in Illinois and return balance to what is becoming one of the bluest states in the nation?
It seems that as people become more educated they tend to have more liberal views, at least when they are younger, so it isn't really a surprise that in a county where most people are well educated the number of Democrats would increase. The days when DuPage County was all conservative farmers are long gone. A lot of the citizens of areas like Naperville are young couples with young families, and statistics seem to show that people become more conservative as they get older, so maybe these liberals from Cook County will be Republicans in ten or twenty years.