Just A Year Ago and About Sixty Years Ago

Demographics change and elections have consequences.  Electoral results for Illinois from 1960 to 1988 showed that Illinois was a swing state in elections for the presidency.

Nixon thought he got screwed in the election of 1960.  He blamed it on Mayor Daley and the Cook County Democratic Party.  Johnson carried the state handily in 1964, as did Nixon in 1968, and overwhelmingly in 1972. Gerald Ford carried Illinois narrowly in 1976. Ronald Reagan won easily in 1980 but did not get a majority of the votes cast and then won decisively in 1984. George H.W. won a slight majority of the votes in Illinois and the Presidency in 1988.  Since 1992 the state has been solidly a Blue state

It should also be noted that the population of Illinois has declined since 2014 and its political has slumped from 27 to 20 representation.

Cumulative voting was adopted in Illinois in 1870 at a time when a number of deep divisions, political, economic, social and cultural all ran along a single line, that separating the north and the south of the state. The original purpose of cumulative voting was to reduce the severity of that north-south split by insuring the election of some Democrats from the Republican north and some Republicans from the Democratic south.

A year ago the Capitol Building was under a violent siege in at best in another attempt to muddy the picture regarding the results of the 2020 election. Hundreds of people have been charged in the "riot" or any of several other terms for what happened.

In 1960 Richard Nixon conceded with enough grace to be elected and reelected. What happened before during and after the Watergate Break In and subsequent cover up was dealt with in a bi-partisan manner. The country moved forward with Ford and Rockefeller.

Meanwhile, two very close elections in Florida with Bush and Gore (2000) and Trump and Clinton (2016), both losing candidates conceded. And in both elections the losing candidates won the popular vote.

The legal proceedings against those charged and ongoing investigations are not over but the political efforts to forget, ignore, pardon, deny what happened by the losing candidate during the last presidential election is wrong.

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