Illinois 14th

The Illinois 14^th, Rep. Dennis Hastert’s district, which went Democratic in a special election yesterday, as described in Barone et al., The Almanac of American Politics 2006, 594:

The 14^th Congressional district straddles the line between metropolitan Chicago and Downstate Illinois. It gets close to 30 miles to Chicago’s Loop, in Western DuPage County, with two great Chicagoland landmarks—Cantigny, the estate of Colonel Robert McCormick, longtime publisher of the Chicago Tribune, and FermiLab, the world’s fastest energy particle accelerator nd employer of some 2,500 people—icons of political conservatism and high technology within two miles of each other. The 14^th also contains the Fox River Valley … To the south is Kendal County, the fastest-growing county in Illinois, where new subdivisions are growing up … Farther west, amid what may be the world’s richest cornfields, the 14^th passes through DeKalb, long the world’s leading manufacturer of barbed wire, and goes on to Lee County, including Reagan’s boyhood home in Dixon. Since the 2001 redistricting, the 14^th moves farther west, almost to the Mississippi River, to include farmlands in parts of Whiteside, Bureau and Henry Counties. This was traditionally some of the most heavily Republican territory in the country. … There descendants, in this extension of Chicagoland, remain mostly Republican today.

Past voting: Hastert, 69% 2004, 74% 2002. George Bush, 55% 2004, 54% 2000. Cook Partisan Voting Index R +5.

Afterthought: I could have added that Hastert's district, though "Republican," is not one of the most Republican in the nation. I can't find a rank-ordered listing of the Cook Partisan Index, but I do note that the Alabama 6th gets a Republican ranking of plus 25 (link) (many Dem districts rank in the 30s). Now, if the Dems knock off the Alabama 6th, it will be news.

Afterthought to Afterthought: Underbelly central reposes in the California second, with a Cook index of Republican plus 13--we're part of the red-state interior of blue California.