Mitt Romney has been declared the winner of the Illinois primary by Fox News less than an hour after polls closed in the state, with the spread in the exit poll reported as 44%-37%. But looking at the returns coming in things look better for Romney. Admittedly, the first returns came disproportionately from Romney territory (suburbs in Chicago’s Cook County and in Lake County just to the north), where Romney has been getting more than 50% of the vote. But with 49% of the state’s precincts reporting, Romney leads Rick Santorum 50%-33%, and that’s with only one or two precincts reporting from upscale DuPage County, just west of Chicago, the state’s second most populous county. I look for later returns to reduce Romney’s percentage, but when I look at the percentages from partial returns in Downstate counties, I wonder whether it will get down to 44%. And I note that in current returns Romney is carrying the counties which contain the larger Downstate cities, Rockford (Winnebago), Peoria (Peoria) and Springfield (Sangamon). Well, we’ll see.
