Five Republican candidates seek opportunity to challenge longtime U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin in November

Heading into the 2020 campaign season, Republican leaders were concerned about finding a strong candidate to challenge Sen. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 ranking Democrat in leadership.

Representing the GOP on the March 17 ballot is an underfunded group of five candidates, many pursuing unorthodox strategies in seeking the nomination in the only statewide seat up for election this year.

One candidate is a former Democrat and onetime suburban county sheriff who has said he believes that “God had a hand” in electing President Donald Trump.

Another is a Downstate social media agitator who spurred a suburban police investigation after saying she brought a gun and ammunition into a candidate forum at a high school to “prove a point” about safety, only to say at a later event that she “misspoke” and had her gun locked in her car.

There’s a perennial candidate who has run unsuccessfully for a variety of offices from both political parties, most recently as a Democratic candidate for governor, who wants to split Illinois into three states.

Two candidates are making their first bid for public office. One contends a possible independent bid by Willie Wilson will siphon off black votes in Cook County and give him a path to defeating Durbin. The other wants gun education in schools.

The candidacies of Mark Curran of Libertyville, Peggy Hubbard of Belleville, Robert Marshall of Burr Ridge, Tom Tarter of Springfield and Casey Chlebek of Glenview are a reflection not only of Durbin’s stature in Illinois and his well-funded campaign account, but also a symbol of the diminished state of the Illinois GOP as it deals with the absence of former Gov. Bruce Rauner and his checkbook.

Durbin, 75, is a formidable political force in the state. He was first elected to the Senate in 1996 with 56.1% of the vote, and the only remotely close race since was in 2014 when he beat Republican state Sen. Jim Oberweis by more than 10 percentage points.

Federal Election Commission records show, Durbin, the No. 2 ranking Democrat in the Senate, entered this year with nearly $4.5 million available to his campaign.

None of the GOP candidates come close. Tarter had raised more than $113,000, including a $50,000 loan to his campaign, and had nearly $49,000 available on Jan. 1. Curran raised $88,580, including $10,000 he loaned his campaign and had $20,000 to start the year. Curran’s expenses included $9,264 paid to his son for “strategy consulting."

The others had less than $10,000 on hand to start the year.

The candidates share many tenets of conservative political ideology. They pledge support to Trump and his policies. They back gun-owner rights and disapprove of “red-flag” laws that remove firearms from people deemed dangerous. They back tougher border security, including Trump’s wall. They contend public schools are indoctrinating children with liberal ideology and a push toward socialism. They are against a single-payer, Medicaid for All health care system.

All but one, frequent candidate Marshall, a radiologist, are adamantly opposed to abortion rights.

Curran, 56, the former three-term sheriff of Lake County, is perhaps the best known in the field. Last August, Curran conceded his 137-vote loss for reelection to Democrat John Idleburg, ending a tenure that began in 2006 when he ran as a Democrat. Two years later, he switched parties to become a Republican, winning in 2010 and 2014.

In his public appearances, Curran, a former state and federal prosecutor, has sought to infuse religion into his campaign to bolster his support for comprehensive immigration reform while opposing abortion and same-sex marriage.

He goes so far as to cite divine intervention in Trump’s victory as president.

“You study America, you study all these crazy things that happen and it’s clearly God’s provenance. Look at Donald Trump and they (nonbelievers) think we’re freaks in this room right now, because we think that maybe God had an interest in having a president that was going to protect human life,” Curran told supporters at an event in December.

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Curran told the group that in 2016 the media “all declared Hillary Clinton the president and it didn’t happen. Now they laugh at us that maybe God had a hand in it. That’s because we believe.”

While Curran is firmly behind Trump now, that hasn’t always been the case. In a 2018 radio interview, Curran said, “We as Republicans should look to take him out in some way or form because ultimately, he’s horrible for our brand.”

But outside the Lake County Right to Life Christmas party last December at a Wauconda bar, Curran posted a video to address criticism over his support for the president.

“I have criticized the president in the past and I’m not going to deny that. But by the same token, I am the only one out of all of the candidates in this race who can say they publicly endorsed Trump in 2016,” he said. “I’m all in. I stand with Donald Trump and I’ll defend Donald Trump.”

Hubbard, 56, is a Navy veteran who worked as a “court officer” in St. Louis and also is a retired IRS tax analyst. She has sought to portray herself -- often using provocative language for shock value -- as an African American who ”dared to leave the Democratic plantation.”

She has gained publicity from social media videos including one in which she decried Democratic efforts to get rid of the Electoral College. Billing herself as a history expert, she said the Electoral College was created to prevent Texas, California and Florida from electing favorite-son candidates as president -- though those states didn’t enter the union until 60 years after the Constitution was ratified.

Moreover, the Electoral College gives more populated states, such as Texas, California and Florida, more electors than less populated states. In reality, the system was created by the Founding Fathers to provide a check on the decisions of voters and to avoid a direct popular election of the president.

Hubbard found herself engaged in a more recent controversy involving a Feb. 13 after-school candidates forum at Hinsdale Central High School.

Speaking at a central Illinois event on Feb. 18, Hubbard recounted how she entered the suburban school, noted stickers proclaiming no guns allowed and showed someone with the school her concealed-carry firearms permit.

“I walked in with a concealed carry and I had a gun and three clips and nobody checked,” Hubbard said, contending suburban schools were less safe from mass shootings than inner-city schools because urban schools have metal detectors.

After a school and police investigation was launched, Hubbard gave another version of events to the Barrington Township Republican Organization two days later.

“I locked my gun away. But I took my clips with me, my clips, magazines, whatever you want to call it, that’s what I did,” she said. “I was trying to make a point.” Hubbard called news reports of the investigation “fake news” and said “the other day at the forum I misspoke” about taking her gun into the school.

Hinsdale police closed their investigation, in part citing “inconsistent and contradictory statements by the candidate herself.”

Tarter, 67, a recently retired urologic oncologist, said his wife Julie, who has long worked for the Sangamon County GOP, sparked his idea to seek to challenge Durbin.

He acknowledged in an interview with the Illinois Channel in January that a Durbin victory was “the prevailing thought, even within the Republican Party.”

“I was going to retire comfortably in three years. But I just couldn’t tolerate the idea of a Dick Durbin coronation and I didn’t want to golf and garden and read and write while Rome burns,” he said.

Like all of the GOP candidates, Tarter said he opposes Democratic proposals for Medicare for All as a solution to curb high medical costs.

“The Democratic presidential candidates are eating each others’ children over health care right now. Medicare for All is a lie,” he said at a forum in Washington, Illinois, near Peoria, earlier this month.

“This is just a single-payer plan that makes insurance and deductibles and copays illegal,” he said. “Republicans need to lead on this issue and they can do that if I am elected senator.” Tarter said he would immediately push expanded health savings accounts and transparency in pricing.

Tarter also has pushed for zero-base budgeting and warned of an increasing federal deficit. “We have to think about our children in order to do this and it’s better if congressmen have children,” he said.

Tarter said the potential independent candidacy of Wilson, who has made unsuccessful bids for Chicago mayor and the Democratic presidential nomination, could siphon African American votes away from Durbin and, coupled with black support for Trump, could provide him with the 20% vote total in Cook County he thinks is needed to win.

Chlebek, 70, emigrated from Poland to the United States in 1967 and got an engineering degree in computer science from the University of Illinois. He entered the field of information technologies, once known as data processing.

Chlebek said he views his entry into the race coming from a socialist Poland as an opportunity to “educate people about the perilous outcome of the socialist policies” and “convince the young generation of Americans that the Utopian world everything free for all and the world of plenty is just a dream vision which ends in the collapse of the society or worse in the mass killings.”

Chlebek said he supports legal immigration to help the nation’s economic growth.

“What we need to do is accommodate immigrants because, just like myself, I’m an immigrant and I came here through due process of law and followed the rules and everybody else should follow the rules,” he said.

He also said that as a strong supporter of gun rights, he would “introduce to a younger generation at school level ... guns and the danger of how to use guns inappropriately.”

Marshall, 76 has gone the furthest among the candidates attacking the control of Chicago Democrats over Illinois government. At a Downstate forum, he told the audience they could elect their own governor and have their own constitution if the state was carved up and Chicago was its own state.

The Republican primary race has gained little attention, in part because of the candidates’ lack of money as well as their eccentricities.

But as some more moderate Democrats fear a presidential nomination of Bernie Sanders as endangering party candidates seeking lower offices in November, Curran, of Lake County, offered a contrasting view for Republicans.

“If it’s not a good candidate running for the U.S. Senate,” he said, “everyone down-ballot gets killed.”

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