CHESTER, Ill. _ He is a top Democratic recruit, a man party officials have eyed for years and who is now running in one of the most competitive districts in the country. And on a Thursday night in late May, he stood before a room of irate Democrats, defending Donald Trump.
"Let me say this in response a little bit: I think there's a lot of anger in the country," Brendan Kelly told the gaggle of grizzled attendees here in southern Illinois' 12th Congressional District, as anti-Trump barbs began to fly.
The town hall gathering, held in a fluorescent-lit, wood-paneled meeting room where a Bud Light-emblazoned clock kept the time, was supposed to be about Social Security, pensions and Medicare. And for awhile, it was. But then the Trump-bashing began from the audience: "No one is a bigger liar in the country than the President or Sarah Sanders." Trump is "an immoral, draft-dodging punk."
At first, Kelly, a burly Navy veteran and current state's attorney, tried to engage, aware that the insults represented a minority viewpoint in this district that backed Trump by 15 percentage points: "I'm running in a district that voted for President Trump, and also for (Democratic Sen.) Tammy Duckworth overwhelmingly. The same people. Why do you think that is?"
But the complaints continued, and so Kelly pushed back.
"The circumstances we find ourselves in are about more than one person, more than one office," he said. "It's about a whole lot of things that have been done wrong to southern Illinois for about 20 to 30 years."
"We've gone from hating Bush to hating Obama to hating Trump," he added. "We've been hating for a long time," and I'm not sure that has necessarily helped anybody, particularly here."
The 12th District of Illinois, like so many old industrial hubs, is struggling economically. White working-class voters here helped President Barack Obama twice win the district _ Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee, was considered the candidate of the rich _ before it flipped for Trump. Indeed, this is one of 21 districts that voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump last time, contributing to full GOP control of Washington and scrambling traditional Republican and Democratic coalitions.
In 2018, as Democrats fight to retake control of the House and begin to mull the next presidential campaign, Kelly is testing whether the results of 2016 in districts like this _ where strongly pro-union, pro-gun rights voters from Minnesota's 8th District to Iowa's First District abandoned their longtime historical ties to the Democratic Party _ were a Trump-fueled aberration or a realignment reality.
And the results of his race will show whether Democrats here and nationally have any prayer of winning those voters back.
