Modeling IL-14

Special elections are impossible to model, you have no idea who will show up and there's no recent past performance to base expectations on. So take all of this with a HUGE grain of salt. But I took the performance of the last three cycles and tried to model what a 50-50 election would look like:

COUNTY	R	D
BUREAU	44.76%	55.24%
DeKALB	46.27%	53.73%
DuPAGE	51.58%	48.42%
HENRY	46.61%	53.39%
KANE	49.10%	50.90%
KENDALL	59.52%	40.48%
LEE	53.84%	46.16%
WHITESIDE	34.54%	65.46%
Totals	50.00%	50.00%

So when returns start coming in tonight, if you're trying to get a sense of who's up and who's down, this is as good of a baseline as I can give you.



ETA: Methodology

If you're interested in the methodology here, I took the results in the district from 02, 04 and 06 and figured out what part of each candidate's overall vote total came from each county. I then averaged the three and reapplied it to a 50-50 election. For example, in DeKalb County the percentage of the democratic candidate's total vote that came from that county was 10.91% in 2006, 13.10% in 2004 and 11.64% in 2002 for an average of 11.88%. Repeat this process for each county and for each party candidate and then pick any arbitrary turnout total and apply the percentages to get the above table.