“But in interviews with close to 30 people over three days in Galesburg, conversations are dominated by issues much closer to home, like rising local crime, racial strife and whether life can return to an approximation of normal after a deadly pandemic. And their voices matter because it is places like Galesburg, among a few dozen swing congressional districts in the country that will have an outsize voice in the midterm elections next year…”

Mailee Smith, of the Illinois Policy Institute: “If SRJCA 11 passes, Illinoisans will see less accountability and higher costs across government…Whatever a collective bargaining agreement contains would be the law of the land, and union leaders would have strike powers or other constitutionally guaranteed rights to get what they want into those contracts.”

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker issued a disaster proclamation for Grundy County Monday after a massive fire at an industrial building housing hundreds of thousands of pounds of lithium ion batteries released plumes of smoke and poisonous fumes into the air.