With the 2024 General Election just days away, this is an opportune time to take a look back at the presidential connections of Pekin and Tazewell County, and to survey our county’s presidential voting record.
As is well known here in Pekin, prior to his election as President, Abraham Lincoln frequently visited Pekin and Tremont while working as an attorney in central Illinois from the 1830s to the 1850s. Later on, President Theodore Roosevelt, well known as an avid hunter, once went hunting in the Spring Lake area of Tazewell County.
Much later, President Herbert Hoover made a remarkably quick whistle stop in Pekin during his doomed re-election bid on 4 Nov. 1932. On that date, President Hoover, racing at a feverish pace across the country in a valiant but ultimately vain attempt to secure reelection, made a disappointingly quick stop at the Alton Depot. His train was running late that day, so he barely had time to say, “Ladies and gentlemen,” before the train pulled away, making it necessary for several Pekinites to race down the track in order to try to give bouquets of flowers to the First Lady.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower also made a campaign whistle stop in Pekin on 2 Oct. 1952. Eight years later, John F. Kennedy campaigned in East Peoria before his election.
Then in June 1973, President Richard Nixon came to Pekin to dedicate the Dirksen Congressional Center here at the Pekin Public Library. Two years later, in August 1975, President Gerald R. Ford returned to dedicate the new library building. Pekin was next visited by Vice President George H. W. Bush in Sept. 1988 during his successful election campaign that year, giving a speech to a large crowd outside the Tazewell County Courthouse. His son George W. Bush visited East Peoria as president, but made no visits to Pekin.
During his U.S. senatorial campaign in 2004, Barack Obama made a campaign stop in Pekin, and later, during his 2005-2008 term in the U.S. Senate, President Obama visited the Aventine Renewal Energy plant in Pekin on 14 March 2005, also meeting constituents at the Pekin Public Library as senator. He later visited East Peoria as president, but never came to Pekin as president.
Now, regarding Tazewell County’s presidential voting record, Tazewell County Clerk John C. Ackerman has compiled a tally of which presidential candidate won Tazewell County in every General Election going back to 1828 (which was the first General Election after the county was erected by the Illinois General Assembly in early 1827).
Ackerman’s tally sheet shows that our county has been won by the Republican candidate in every election going back to 1996. Even more, since 1952 Tazewell County has gone for the Republican presidential candidate in all but two elections (Lyndon B. Johnson won Tazewell County in 1964, and Bill Clinton won our county in 1992). Tazewell will almost certainly go for the Republican candidate Donald Trump this year as well, just as Trump won Tazewell in both 2016 and 2020.
Throughout its history, Tazewell County has had a fairly good record of choosing presidents. We have chosen the winning president candidate 32 out of 49 times, voting for the losing candidate 17 out of 49 times. Prior to 1912, more often than not Tazewell County voted for the losing candidate: in that period, 12 times Tazewell went for the losing candidate and only nine times voted for the winning candidate. We have had two winnings streaks, from 1912 to 1956 and from 1964 to 1992, when we picked the winning candidate in every General Election. Since 1992, though, we have voted for the winner four times and for the loser two times.
Following is Ackerman’s complete tally sheet of whom Tazewell County voted for in presidential elections from 1828 to 2020:
