Darren Bailey — farmer, Christian, patriot, MAGA adherent, etc. etc. — has decided to make another run for governor next year. Bailey, you may recall, lost to JB Pritzker in 2022, taking 42 percent of the vote. Here’s a prediction: if Bailey runs again, he’ll lose again, even worse than he did last time. Why? Because now, Donald Trump is president.

The Illinois Republican Party has been in sad shape this entire century. Since 2002, when Rod Blagojevich ended the Republicans’ 26-year hold on the governorship, the party has won one Senate election (Mark Kirk, 2010) and one election for governor (Bruce Rauner, 2014). It has never controlled the state house or the state senate and is now in super-minority status in both chambers. That’s as sorry a streak as the party has put together since it was founded in the 1850s. Republican candidates traditionally visit Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield and rub the nose on his statue for good luck. The nose has been rubbed shiny, but Republicans aren’t having any luck. Maybe because they’ve stopped acting as the party of Lincoln and started acting as the party of Trump. Republicans are in a Trump Trap, and they can’t get out.

“I really don’t follow the party too closely, because it’s become so irrelevant,” says Jim Nowlan, a former Republican state representative who ran as the party’s nominee for lieutenant governor in 1972. “Republican leadership is out of step with suburban values, which tend to be more moderate on guns and abortion than the party. After Rauner, it has no money, and it has no true north magnetic needle pointing it anywhere, except for the Southern Illinois Republicans who are out of step ideologically and stylistically with the suburbs. I think if the Republican Party in Illinois is to re-forge itself it will have to do so from the suburbs with candidates who are moderate on social issues and conservative on fiscal issues.”

That’s not going to happen this year or next, because the Republican Party is under the thumb of Trump. Trump isn’t just unpopular with Illinois Democrats. He’s unpopular with the kinds of Republicans who win statewide elections in Illinois. Last year, former Governor Jim Edgar, former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, and ex-representatives Adam Kinzinger and Joe Walsh all endorsed Kamala Harris for president. Kinzinger even spoke at the Democratic National Convention here in Chicago. Thanks to Trump, Illinois is now a one-party state.

“One party rule leads to arrogance and bad policy and sloppiness, which we do see in Illinois, but there’s no way to combat it when you’re one third of the legislature and hold no statewide offices,” Nowlan says.

Trump is a significant figure in the decline of the Republican Party because he has helped make permanent the realignment of the suburbs — the swing region of Illinois politics. In all three of Trump’s elections, he lost Lake, DuPage, Will, and Kane counties, which had all been Republican since Lincoln’s time. Since taking office, Trump has relished attacking Illinois in general, and Chicago in particular. He’s called the city a “hellhole.” He’s threatened to dispatch the National Guard to fight crime here, and he actually sent Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to detain undocumented immigrants. He’s called Pritzker “incompetent” and “probably the worst [governor] in the country.” These may be the petty bleatings of a president who is pissy because he can’t win Illinois, but they’ve ruined the party’s brand here. The Republicans are not going to win a single statewide election in 2026, not for U.S. Senate, not for a constitutional office, and they’re not going to improve on their three seats in Congress, either.

Another aspect of the Trump Trap is that as the Republican Party in Illinois has shrunk, it has been reduced to its most right wing elements. The party is strongest in ultraconservative southeastern Illinois, where Bailey hails from. In choosing nominees, it demands candidates who are allied with Trump. Bailey has accepted Trump’s endorsement, posed for photographs with the president, and called him “a leader who understands what it’s like to take on the corrupt establishment and put the people first.” It’s impossible to win a Republican primary without fealty to the MAGA movement, but it’s impossible to win a general election as a MAGA candidate.

Will we ever again see a functional, competitive Republican Party in Illinois? Not as long as MAGA is the party’s animating principle, which it will be as long as Trump is president, and probably for a cycle or two after he leaves the White House. Illinois needs two strong political parties, but thanks to Trump, we only have one.