Polls suggest Democrat will win Illinois this presidential election, as it has every time since 1992
Voters in Illinois are hitting their local polling places to cast votes in the 2024 election, including the headlining presidential showdown between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
According to the comparatively few polls conducted in the state, Harris is primed to win the state of Illinois on Election Day, continuing a trend that goes back more than three decades in presidential elections.
This year, Illinois is worth 19 Electoral College votes, one of the largest prizes in the country. Only four states have more electoral votes: California, Texas, Florida and New York. (Pennsylvania, also with 19 votes, is tied with Illinois for fifth.)
Still, Illinois is not considered a high-priority battleground state – voters here have reliably voted for Democrats statewide for more than three decades in presidential elections. (More on that later.)
A handful of polls have shown Harris holding a significant double-digit lead over former President Donald Trump. An ActiVote poll taken between Sept. 3 and Oct. 5 found Harris with a 59% to 41% lead over Trump, an 18-point margin for her. That margin is about on par with Joe Biden's win in Illinois in 2020.
A recent history of voting for Democrats
A win for Harris in Illinois would be the ninth straight presidential election in which the Democratic candidate won the Prairie State.
The last time a majority of Illinois voters picked the Republican candidates was back in the 1988 general election when 50.7% of the electorate opted for George H.W. Bush, who would go on to serve as the 41st president. But just four years later, Illinois voted for Bill Clinton – although he only won a plurality of votes – who would go on to defeat Bush in the 1992 race.
The most lopsided recent race in favor of Democrats in Illinois was in 2008, when Barack Obama earned 61.9% of the vote. Obama was a sitting U.S. senator representing Illinois at the time.
Before 1992, Illinois went for Republican presidential candidates in six straight elections between 1968 and 1988.
Two of those elections featured Ronald Reagan as the GOP nominee. While Reagan made his name as an actor and then governor of California, he was born in Tampico, Illinois, in the northwestern part of the state.
