Tracking the Populist Rise

Where have we seen greater tumult in local Republican parties?

2023 Meeting of Republican Committee of Merrimack County, NH (photo by author)

This week the Colorado Republican Party deposed its Trump-aligned chair, Dave Williams, in a move that Williams has rejected as illegitimate. This is hardly an isolated incident — several state Republican parties have been riven by internal factionalism and contested power struggles in recent years, particularly as a wing associated with Trump’s bombastic style has sought to wrest power from a more traditional set of Republicans focused on the nuts and bolts of management.

But these struggles haven’t happened uniformly. In some parts of the country (e.g.: Georgia) traditional party leaders more in line with the Reagan-Bush wing of the party have withstood conservative populist insurgencies, while in others those leaders have been toppled easily. What explains where we’ve seen the populist rise?

For an APSA paper I will be presenting next week in Philadelphia, I took a somewhat unusual approach to this problem, just focusing on county Republican leadership in Illinois. Why Illinois? This is the only state (to my knowledge) that actually records and reports the identities of county party chairs in its government blue book. This enabled me to examine the identities of the party chairs in each of Illinois’ 102 counties going back to 1999, seeing which counties have had greater turnover in party leadership.¹

The chart below shows the “volatility” of county chair positions — that is, the average percent of counties with new county chairs in any given cycle. Republican county organizations are, on average, about five points more volatile, although not as much in the most recent cycles. Yet it’s not clear that the rise of Trump produced any sort of disproportionate volatility on the Republican side. (The bump in 2017 below is mainly a result of there tragically being no blue book from 2015, and 2017 is absorbing four years of turnover instead of two.)

Turnover in county chair positions by party in Illinois, 1999-2021

I looked at several different features of the county profiles and populations to see which had useful correlations with party chair volatility. For example, it looks like county partisanship matters a great deal. The least volatile Republican parties are in the more conservative counties in Illinois.

County Republican Chair Volatility and County Presidential Vote in 2020

Then I looked at changes in the white share of the population in each county.