Why a Democrat helped a Republican Navy veteran challenge his own party's incumbent

Where it started — Freeport

Josh Atkinson ran for mayor of Freeport. He had supporters. He had energy. He had people who agreed the city needed a different direction. What he didn't have was a unified story. His support network was fractured — not by disagreement over goals, but by an inability to converge on the best narrative to define what Freeport actually needed.

That fracture, by default, returned the incumbent and the entire old guard to power. Not because voters preferred them, but because the challengers couldn't produce a governing narrative coherent enough to displace the one that was already there.

The experience left Josh with a question: why is it so hard to build a coalition that holds together long enough to win? And it left me with a hypothesis: because no one is teaching people how narrative governance actually works — how the stories that define "what a community needs" get produced, who controls them, and why the ones that protect incumbents always seem to survive while the ones that challenge them fall apart.

The hypothesis

Josh and I came up with the idea together. The MOCSIE Architecture predicts that emergent narrative communities — groups of citizens who form around shared governance problems rather than shared party affiliation — require testing across partisan boundaries. If the ballot access system is structurally rigged to protect incumbents, it should be provable regardless of which party's incumbent is being challenged.

Josh, a Navy veteran from the Driftless Region, wanted to challenge State Senator Andrew Chesney on the Republican ticket. I wanted to test whether the selective enforcement patterns I'd documented in my research operated the same way when the challenger came from inside the incumbent's own party.

What we found

The answer was yes. The same attorney — Patrick D. Fogarty — simultaneously represented incumbents defending against objections to their filings while representing objectors seeking to disqualify Josh's candidacy. "Substantial compliance" excused complete omission of mandatory filings by incumbents Tony McCombie and Andrew Chesney. "Strict compliance" was demanded to disqualify the challenger.

About a dozen dedicated volunteers gathered 1,028 signatures on two-lane county roads where the houses are a mile apart — more than the 1,000 required. When approximately one hundred of those signatures were challenged on technical grounds, the margin between ballot access and elimination came down to the Board's discretion.

This became the evidentiary foundation for State Board of Elections Cases 107 and 108 — documenting a pattern where the rules are enforced in one direction only.

What it proved

The system isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed. Incumbency in rural Illinois has become almost a right under current rules and enforcement practices. The gerrymandering ensures that the primary is the only competitive election, and the petition system ensures that the primary itself is rarely competitive.

Opposition from both parties validated the experiment. When establishment Democrats and establishment Republicans both reject a challenge, it demonstrates that the barrier is structural, not partisan. That's the emergent narrative community in action — the coalition forms around the problem, not the party.