Daily Kos Elections is pleased to bring you our calculations of the 2020 election results for Illinois’ 18 congressional districts, where yet another surge in ancestrally Republican territory helped Democrats hang on to a seat in the Chicago exurbs that they flipped in 2018. You can find our detailed calculations here, a large-size map of the results here, and our permanent, bookmarkable link for all 435 districts here.
Two years ago, in one of the most colossal upsets of the midterm blue wave, Democrat Lauren Underwood, then a 32-year-old nurse who’d never sought office before, defeated Republican Rep. Randy Hultgren in Illinois’ 14th District, making her the youngest Black woman ever elected to Congress. Last year she drew a far weaker opponent in perennial candidate Jim Oberweis, a state senator who was so despised by his own party that a major Republican super PAC tried to defeat him in the primary, but Underwood wound up winning by a closer-than-expected 51-49 margin.