Chicago City Wire

As dozens of Texas Democrats returned to Austin last week after spending two weeks in Illinois to block a Republican-led redistricting vote, critics are calling the move political theater that only highlighted the hypocrisy of Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

The lawmakers left the state to prevent a quorum after Gov. Greg Abbott reconvened the state legislature to push through a new congressional map set to flip five House seats from Democrat to Republican control ahead of the 2026 elections.

Illinois, where Democrats control 14 of 17 congressional seats despite Republican Donald Trump winning 44% of the state’s vote in 2024, is arguably the most gerrymandered state in America.

Few understand Illinois politics better than Paul Vallas, former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, former Illinois budget director, and recent Chicago mayoral candidate who was the top vote-getter in the 2023 primary but narrowly defeated by Brandon Johnson in the runoff election.

Vallas, a lifelong Democrat, pointed to what he calls the “one-party rule” in Illinois and took direct aim at Pritzker’s hypocrisy for hosting the Texas delegation while ignoring his own state’s anti-democratic practices.

“At the end of the day, it’s a one-party state. I think states like Illinois, Massachusetts and California are poster children for gerrymandering and its negative impact,” Vallas told Chicago City Wire. 

Vallas emphasized the vital role of competition in fostering compromise and accountability in a functioning democracy.

“That's what having a competitive political field is all about,” he said. “It really forces you to compromise. It forces you to have a debate. It forces you to listen to other things. It provides a check and balance that only the best democratic institutions can. So gerrymandering wrecks that off.”

Vallas pointed to Illinois’ long history of Democratic dominance as the root cause of the state’s political dysfunction. 

“The maps are not only impacting obviously our congressional delegation, but they've literally given the Democrats veto-proof majorities in both the House and Senate,” Vallas said. 

In the General Assembly, Republicans control just 33% of the seats in the State House and 32% in the State Senate.

In recent legislative sessions, Democrats have silenced Republicans by stripping them of their right to debate key bills, while redirecting millions of dollars in grant funding to Democratic districts, deliberately sidelining Republican areas.

For Vallas, the issue is bigger than partisan maps.

“Solidifying of power in the hands of the Speaker or in the hands of the President of the Senate, because of the map, really they have undermined democracy, not only in terms of a two-party system of democracy, but it's undermined the debate within the Democratic Party itself, and I think it's really been damaged,” he said. “So yeah, gerrymandering is a cancer.”

Watchdog groups such as Common Cause and Princeton’s Gerrymandering Project have given Illinois’ map an ‘F’ grade, calling it a national example of partisan abuse.

Illinois Republicans pursued legal action to challenge the state’s maps earlier this year but were denied by the Illinois Supreme Court, which ruled they had waited too long to file the challenge.

Pritzker blasted Texas Republicans for “stealing seats” during Meet the Press with Kristen Welker, but declined to answer direct questions about Illinois’ own partisan map calling such concerns a “distraction.” 

In response to Texas’s off-year redistricting, Illinois and other states have indicated they might similarly redraw their maps to favor Democrats.

“Democrats control 14 of the 17 House seats,” Vallas said. “So if he's talking about redrawing the maps to kind of offset what Texas is going to do, what's he going to do? Eliminate all the House seats?”

That dominance, Vallas argues, has been preserved through meticulous and undemocratic map-drawing dating back to former House Speaker Michael Madigan, who is the longest serving legislative leader in the country’s history having served as speaker for 38 years and is now set to begin a 7.5 year prison sentence in October for public corruption. 

Vallas contrasted today’s political environment with his early days in Springfield in the 1980s.

“When I went to work for the legislature in the 1980s, the majorities were very, very thin,” he said. “So you always had to build coalitions. You had to be receptive to what the other side had to offer.”

As California Democrats push forward with their own mid-decade redistricting plan, aimed at gaining five new seats to counterbalance Texas’ GOP gains, Vallas highlighted the irony of Illinois Democrats portraying themselves as defenders of democracy.

“In California, Newsom, of course he's in competition with Pritzker in the race for the presidency, says he's going to redraw the California maps, but among the 52 congressional seats, only nine are Republicans, so they can't gerrymander any worse,” Vallas said. 

Meanwhile, former President Barack Obama publicly endorsed California’s plan to redraw congressional maps mid-decade, calling it a measured and responsible response to Texas’s new GOP-favoring redistricting.

However, Obama’s stance contrasts with his own political history. He benefited from the very tactics he now criticizes, voting for a gerrymandered map in 2001 after winning his first Illinois State Senate seat in 1996 in a heavily gerrymandered district where he successfully petitioned to have his opponents removed from the ballot.

Newsom is not alone. Other states have indicated they may redistrict as well. 

“The governor from Massachusetts indicated that she was going to take action, but there's not a single Republican in Congress, so I don't know what maps she's going to redraw,” Vallas said. 

During his appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Pritzker was mocked for the absurd shape of Illinois’ districts. 

“Have you ever seen the (Illinois) congressional map?” Vallas said. “Leonardo da Vinci’s portraits of the circulatory system have more coherent boundaries. It’s like what Pritzker joked about on Colbert—that it looked like it was drawn by a kindergartener. Well, it sure looks like it.”

Pritzker’s response, that a kindergarten class could’ve drawn the map, was meant to deflect, but Vallas said it backfired.

“I don't want to get into his biases, you know, but the bottom line that I'm pointing out—even Colbert could not ignore that,” Vallas said. “And obviously, in some of the televised interviews he did, I thought that the mainstream press was more objective than they usually are. I mean, they could not deny the fact that Illinois may very well be the most gerrymandered state in the country.”

“I mean, the response that a kindergartener drew the map, and trying to claim that they gerrymandered right, it seems to me what he was saying was, ‘Hey, we gerrymandered right,’ you know, because we gerrymandered after the census” 

Gerrymandering, Vallas said, is not just about political power, it has real consequences for governance and quality of life.

“If you look at all the analysis out there, Illinois residents either pay the highest taxes or close to the highest state and local taxes in the country,” he said. 

Vallas then highlighted the stark racial and economic disparities within the state subsequent to Democrat policies.

“[When] comparing Blacks to Whites we rank 50th,” he said. “We rank dead last in economic equity as measured by economic indicators, income, home ownership, employment, education, etc. We rank dead last. So how does the highest-tax state in the country rank 50 in equity?”

He also addressed the demographic shifts fueled by these inequalities.

“People exiting, on average, earn $38,000 more than those people coming to Illinois,” he said. “So we're, in a sense trading middle- and upper-income residents for lower-income residents, and in recent years, migrants.”

He also blamed one-party rule for policy disasters like prolonged COVID-19 lockdowns and the closure of Chicago public schools for 78 consecutive weeks.

“The spike in violent crime in Chicago during COVID was driven, was heavily driven by the fact that you had 230,000 kids that were not in school for seven consecutive weeks,” Vallas said.

“There was a 50% increase in school-age youth murder, and there was a historic increase in murders, you know, attempted murders and carjacking. Violent crime committed by school-age youth. Over half the carjackings were committed by school-age youth, you see. So that was all a product of, in some cases, policies that would be being driven by a single party with very little dissent.”