The Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate nomination spent the last Sunday of the primary campaign charting different routes to victory, with Loleta Didrickson calling in some big names to join her in jetting across the state, while Peter Fitzgerald drove to tried-and-true areas of support in southern and central Illinois.
Didrickson, the state comptroller, sought to lure undecided voters and media attention during her five-stop fly-around by featuring her national campaign chairman, former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, and likely GOP gubernatorial nominee George Ryan.
The trio’s message was an attempt to counter the heavy spending of Fitzgerald, a conservative state senator from Inverness. Fitzgerald has made extensive use of television commercials and mailings to try to cast Didrickson, a social moderate, as too liberal for Republican voters in Tuesday’s primary.
Dole, the 1996 Republican nominee for president and a fixture in Didrickson’s early television commercials, said her stance as a social moderate was needed to help broaden the party’s base. Two years ago, he said, a gender gap among women on issues such as abortion rights and assault weapons helped cost him the presidential election.
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“She’s a mainstream conservative, not a fringe conservative, not a hard right, not inflexible,” Dole said. “Sometimes we let the people on the far right define that word (conservative).”
Noting Fitzgerald’s opposition to abortion except when the life of the mother was in danger, Dole said Didrickson’s Republican rival was “out there on the fringe on that issue.” Dole also suggested incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun has been “saying a few prayers” for a Fitzgerald victory on Tuesday because he would be easier to defeat in November.
In stops that included Chicago, Rockford, Moline, Springfield and Champaign, Didrickson acknowledged that Fitzgerald’s use of $7 million in personal funds and loans has had an effect on voters. Her own campaign, lacking Fitzgerald’s resources, has had difficulty trying to pin a label on him.
“Don’t let anybody try to describe who we are in the Republican Party,” she said. “We are a party of mainstream conservative fiscal values. That is who wins in the state of Illinois.”
Ryan, who encouraged Didrickson to run for the U.S. Senate, said he has worked hard on her behalf and is responsible for helping to raise about $200,000 for her campaign fund.
Fitzgerald, meanwhile, spent the day in much the same way that he has since Thursday, when he embarked on a 13-city tour of the state that is scheduled to end Monday in Dixon, the boyhood home of former President Reagan.
His staff has dubbed the tour, largely by recreational vehicle, as the “The Fitz Blitz.” But while his advertising has been delivering a hard-hitting message to voters, the RV tour is low-key.
Traveling to Marion, Newton and to Champaign on Sunday, where he and his rival attended a local Republican fundraising event, Fitzgerald has maintained a constant theme of working to rev up his base of conservative voters and energizing his volunteers.
That has meant ratcheting up the volume on his call for a decidedly conservative social agenda: Lower taxes while imposing government restrictions on abortion and Internet pornography.
Didrickson is supported by Republican Party bosses who think Fitzgerald is too conservative to win in November. But, said Fitzgerald in one of his most effective applause lines, “We will have the intensity of the people who feel and believe in a cause.”