Four seats on Illinois's closely divided Supreme Court are up for election next year, and one key race that could determine which party winds up with the majority might attract a much bigger name than usual: Politico's Shia Kapos reports that Republican Rep. Darin LaHood "could be interested" in running for the 3rd Judicial District, conservative-leaning turf that stretches from the southern Chicago suburbs through Peoria all the way across the state to the Iowa border.
LaHood, who hails from a well-known political family, might be eyeing the contest in part because Democrats could soon eliminate his 18th Congressional District and throw him in with another Republican, since they control the redistricting process and Illinois will drop from 18 districts to 17 thanks to reapportionment.
The 3rd District is also open, for an unusual reason: Last year, Democrat Thomas Kilbride became the first Supreme Court justice to lose a retention election in Illinois history after he failed to win the 60% supermajority he needed to earn another 10-year term.
As a result of that loss, state law requires a new election be held at the next available opportunity—in this case, Nov. 2022. Unlike a retention election, where voters simply vote "yes" or "no" on keeping an incumbent in office, this race will be a traditional partisan affair between multiple candidates, hence the possibility of a LaHood candidacy. Kilbride's court-appointed replacement, Democrat Robert Carter, has said he won't run, so Democrats will need to find a new candidate of their own, too.
The 3rd District will be a major battleground because if Republicans flip it while holding a seat in the neighboring 2nd District, they'll also flip control of the court, which Democrats control 4-3. The 3rd is a particularly ripe GOP target because it voted for Donald Trump 51-47 last year, and in a typical midterm, that sort of lean would likely create a serious headwind for Democrats. That same factor should help Republicans hang on to the 2nd District, which backed Joe Biden 55-43, especially since Justice Michael Burke is seeking re-election.
(There are also retention elections in the 1st and 4th Districts, which are respectively held by a Democrat and a Republican, but the incumbents should both be heavily favored.)
The ultimate stakes, however, are even higher. Five years ago, as Stephen Wolf explains in a new piece, the Illinois Supreme Court struck down a Republican-backed ballot initiative on redistricting that would have prioritized compact districts over fair outcomes. Maps drawn to reflect these priorities would have locked in an unwarranted advantage for the GOP thanks to a decades-long history of racist redlining and white flight segregation in Chicago that has left voters of color heavily concentrated in urban areas.
A Republican-run court could, however, greenlight such an initiative, which in turn could lead to perverse outcomes, such as Democrats winning fewer seats than Republicans in Congress despite winning more votes in statewide races, as they almost always do in solidly blue Illinois. The same outcome could even happen in the state House and Senate, handing Republicans control of the legislature.
Undergirding worries about potential congressional and legislative maps is a very problematic map for the Supreme Court itself. Illinois is one of just four states that elects the members of its top court by district rather than statewide, using a map that hasn't been redrawn in over half a century. That's led to extreme malapportionment, with the rural 4th and 5th Districts in the conservative southern part of the state now home to fewer people combined than the 2nd District, which is based in the Democratic-leaning Chicago suburbs.
Republicans have benefitted from this state of affairs over the past decade, which federal jurisprudence doesn't view as a problem because the courts say judicial districts don't have to have equal population, the thinking being that judges aren't representative officials. But just because lawmakers don't have to redraw the court's map doesn't mean they can't do so. In fact, they're empowered to do just that, and it's possible they will: Reporter Dan Vock says there have been reports "that new judicial maps are in the works," though he adds he's been unable to confirm them yet.
Democrats in the legislature may be eager to come up with new lines that shore up their majority on the Supreme Court, but doing so would also correct a serious imbalance that boosts one part of the state over another for no justifiable reason. And that, in the end, could leave LaHood out in the cold, both on the congressional front and the judicial.