It doesn’t take a professional auditor to conclude the Illinois Republican Party is stuck in a rut, but the state GOP is hoping one can get them back on the path to relevance.
Nearly 12 years removed from their last statewide election victory and long relegated to super-minority status in Springfield, Republicans have tapped former DuPage County Auditor Bob Grogan to chair the state party, aiming to revitalize the suburban base that has largely abandoned the GOP under President Donald Trump.
Grogan spent 12 years as an elected watchdog keeping tabs on various arms of the county government, and he has no misconceptions about his new volunteer post recruiting candidates, fundraising and, most importantly, attempting to unite a fractured party.
“You get blamed for everything and credit for nothing,” Grogan told the Sun-Times. “I’m not in it for the glory. I like to say professionally, what I do is I fix broken things. And that’s my audit background, where you find problems, and you don’t play ‘gotcha.’ You just say, ‘Here’s a list of solutions. Let’s try to go out and do it.’”
He’ll need a long list in the wake of his predecessor, Kathy Salvi, who wasn’t able to make many statewide inroads before Grogan unseated her in a May vote by the Republican State Central Committee.
“She was more aspirational, and I’m more operational,” said Grogan, who doesn’t embrace Trump quite as enthusiastically as Salvi did. Grogan compared the president to an “elephant in the china shop.”
“We share a lot of the same goals. We definitely don’t share a style,” the Downers Grove resident said, referring to Trump. “I come from a totally different background. I’m a boring CPA. He’s a reality TV show, New York real estate developer … But he’s got the hardest job in the world, and I probably have the second hardest job in the world, being chairman of the Illinois Republican Party.”
Trump has certainly complicated matters for the state party in the suburbs, which provided the lifeblood of the Illinois GOP for generations. Former President Joe Biden won DuPage County by 18 percentage points in 2024.
Grogan contends the “evolution in the suburbs” started under former President Barack Obama.
But he acknowledges the headwinds the MAGA movement has brought to suburbs that used to be reliably red.
“[Trump] brought in blue-collar voters that weren’t ours before, and that’s a good thing and it’s a challenging thing,” Grogan said. “Blue-collar voters need to be enticed a little bit more. They need to be excited a little bit more.”
Grogan doesn’t push Trump’s false conspiracy theory of widespread voter fraud costing him the 2020 presidential election, and Grogan says his party needs to embrace mail voting the president has sowed doubt about.
But the new chair is quick to note “no system is zero-fraud and zero-error” — including the one in DuPage County that saw him lose his bid for a third term as auditor.
“In 2020, I lost by 76 votes out of a half a million, and I will tell you that the error rate was probably north of that, because we threw out over 800 ballots,” Grogan said. “People should know that every vote does count, and we want to count every vote accurately.”
As for abortion rights that remain popular and important to many suburban voters, Grogan, who calls himself pro-life, decried Illinois as “an abortion destination state, and I don’t think that’s what the average suburban, pro-choice person really wants.
“They don’t want late-term abortions. They don’t want taxpayer-funded abortions for folks that aren’t even citizens,” Grogan said. “Abortion tourism is not something that they would really endorse.”
And he’s undaunted by the odds playing on heavily gerrymandered, Democratic-drawn maps.
“Voter patterns change, and they evolve. I have optimism … that eventually governance matters, and I think that the governance of the state of Illinois, and city of Chicago, leaves a lot to be desired,” Grogan said. “That old definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.”
But Republicans are running Darren Bailey again this November against Gov. JB Pritzker, four years after the southern Illinois farmer got trounced by the billionaire governor who’s now heavily favored to win a third term.
Grogan backed Ted Dabrowski in the GOP primary and now says Bailey “has definitely come back at it with a different approach … We have structural problems. But if you only believed polls, Hillary Clinton would be president.”
More importantly, Grogan said, “There is definitely a lot more JB fatigue than there was six years ago.
“You bring up the governor’s name, and there’s a grimace. Where they were giving the benefit of the doubt a couple cycles ago, they’re not so happy,” he said, pointing to COVID-19 business restrictions under Pritzker early in the pandemic and the governor’s potential White House ambitions in 2028.
“A lot of people are getting the impression he’s looking over the person’s shoulder at New Hampshire, and the recipe for New Hampshire and Iowa is not the recipe for Illinois,” said Grogan, who’s tasked with working up a fundraising rebound, too.
The Democratic Party of Illinois’ $1.2 million cash on hand at the end of June roughly quadrupled the state GOP’s total. Meanwhile, Bailey entered the summer with about $128,000 in his campaign fund compared to more than $3 million for Pritzker, who can cut another massive check anytime he pleases.
“We’ve had an over-reliance on one or two donors on the Republican side, which means that we’ve been lazy on developing infrastructure for small-dollar donors and such that really should be our bedrock,” Grogan said, referencing the likes of conservative megadonor Richard Uihlein.
A lot of it will take basic leg work and candidate recruitment. “Even if they aren’t going to win someplace, and obviously some … districts are really hard, I think that a well-crafted dialogue with voters has up-ticket and down-ticket effects,” Grogan said. “The first step is they have to meet us, and then they’ve got to hear us, and then they’ll like us. And you can’t do that just by listening to the screamers on Facebook.”
It’s also about changing the mindset of Republicans who “kind of suffer from almost a Stockholm syndrome, that they’ve been so long outside of power that they no longer identify [with] what it’s like … to get power,” Grogan said.
“So we argue about how many angels dance on the head of a pin, as opposed to how to most advantageously take back a House seat,” he said. “Fratricide is not a great campaign strategy.”
“We are in the super minority, and we’ve been there for a long time. We haven’t held statewide office for quite a few years now. But the same was said 40 years ago — like the governor’s mansion was ours exclusively,” Grogan said.
“There’s no magic flipping of a switch … We actually have to not fight about things that aren’t really as determinative to the average person trying to make their mortgage payment or their rent payment,” Grogan said. “We have prescriptions for many of the ills. At some point, I think the voters are going to stop digging deeper and look out of the hole that they’ve dug themselves into.”