Get to Know A Legislator — Rep. Tom Demmer (R-IL)
As a Republican Representative of Illinois’s 90th District since 2013, Tom Demmer has turned his boyhood interest in former Presidents Lincoln and Reagan into a career of public service. Now a Co-Chair of the Illinois Future Caucus and the Chair of the Illinois House Republican Caucus, Rep. Demmer has sprinted through his legislative career. From intern at the White House, to member of the Lee County Board, and now as an Illinois Future Caucus Co-Chair, Rep. Demmer has no shortage of advice for young people looking to follow in his footsteps and run for office.
Rep. Demmer recently sat down with Millennial Action Project to give his firsthand account of addressing millennial challenges, building bipartisanship, and effectively engaging voters as a state representative.
MAP: What was the first moment that you remember considering public service?
TD: I have always been very interested in government. I think I came from an interesting place — my hometown is Dixon, IL. It’s a community of about 15,000 people, but it also happens to be the boyhood hometown of Ronald Reagan. So we used to take field trips to his boyhood home historic site, and you got this real sense that people who are in elected office aren’t all that different from the rest of us — that they grew up in the kinds of towns we did and had the same kinds of life experiences that we did.
Also, being from Illinois, there is a huge amount of connections globally to Abraham Lincoln — the places he lived and worked throughout Illinois before he was elected President — and I always thought that an important part of me considering elected office was that even though they are these kind of world figures, it humanizes them a lot more to see that they grew up in a place that wasn’t too different from anyone else. Just considering it was a reasonable thing to do and you don’t have to have a certain last name or some kind of connections to be able to get into elected office — really anyone who wants to step up can do that.
MAP: Was there any work or life experience that you had before running for office which you feel best prepared you for your time in the legislature?
TD: When I was in college I spent a semester interning at the White House in the Office of the Vice President. That was 2006 in Vice President Cheney’s office. It was a phenomenal opportunity — I loved everything about it. I certainly gained an appreciation for the complexity of the federal government. and for how much more there was to every story than the sound bites or summaries that you read or see in the news.
That was important to my appreciation of the fact that public policy is more than just the kind of arguments that get a bill passed or make a point on something — it is this large and complex network of people in government who work everyday to carry those policies out. A successful public policy initiative requires coordination — everybody on the same team from start to finish, and a lot of times that is unseen.
After I graduated college I moved back to my hometown and ran for county board right away. And that was an important experience for me to be able to see what it’s like to interact with people who really care about something affecting their everyday life, and how different that is from the big picture policymaking that happens at other levels.
MAP: What have you done in the legislature that you are the most proud of?
TD: Over the past two years, we have been in the middle of a historic budget impasse — we haven’t passed a state budget since 2014. And it’s been really a pretty chaotic and bad situation. But over the course of the last summer and the end of our regular session, I was one of the House Republican budget negotiators and we sat down every day with members of both parties and both chambers to work through and try to negotiate some kind of resolution to the situation. We ended up coming up with a temporary measure that got us to the end of the calendar year.
When I look at the kind of role I think it is important for legislators to play, I have tried to advocate for compromise, for bipartisanship, for honest discussions where you sit down at the table together and try to work through those issues. That was something that I was proud to be a part of because it was a significant challenge that we were facing as a state, and we tried to attack it in a pretty common sense way, and not through some of the grandstanding that people from both sides have been playing out in the public.
MAP: You just introduced a package of bills and constitutional amendments designed to address the statement that we have seen in the Illinois state legislature. What do you see as the biggest obstacle to progress regarding the budget impasse and legislative progress on the whole? Is the biggest obstacle partisanship or something else?
TD: I think partisanship has played a large role in this. We had quite a public battle between the governor and the Speaker of the House, and there has been a lot of accusations and charges back and forth between those two, and it’s been a significant hurdle for us. But also, one of the biggest reasons Illinois has this budget impasse is because we are trying to make up for decisions that were made in previous legislatures where a lot of hard decisions were pushed off for the future, so they’ve kind of snowballed. And so even more than partisanship in this current impasse, I’d say it’s this challenge of trying to provide good services today while also making up for decisions that were pushed off from the past. How do you collect taxes and provide services today while you are also kind of trying to pay your debt?
MAP: Do you have a strategy for resolving that challenge?
There is a measured approach you can take to this. I don’t think a lot of folks would say that new taxes alone are enough, or cuts alone are enough. I am certainly trying to approach this by saying that given the reality of the situation, we’ve got to have a combination of new revenues and reigning in our spending. And we also need to make some changes to the way that Illinois government operates, because we know that the kind of system that is in place today led up to this impasse. I think that we have been working in a bipartisan way trying to identify what are some of the forms both parties can get behind, where we can get both parties to support controlling our spending and making new revenue. The difficulty is that we are dealing with a pretty significant gap, so it takes more than one or two ideas to close it. And second, it’s a real balancing act with cuts, reform, and new revenue, so it’s quite a balance to strike.
MAP: Having a functional state budget is extremely vital, especially to millennials who rely on government support for a variety of services like college debt relief, healthcare, and education. What issues, then, are the most important to your millennial constituents?
TD: One of the most disturbing trends that we have seen in Illinois is that high school seniors are graduating and choosing to go out of state to college, and they might not ever come back to Illinois. So we’ve got these great young minds going out to better themselves and get a higher education, but they are not then finding the opportunities here in Illinois. The budget impasse is a huge part of that. It has created a lot of unpredictability for how financial aid and state universities are going to be funded in the upcoming years.
But beyond that, if we look at what opportunities are available today if you are a millennial, you’re a recent college graduate or graduate of a vocational program and you look around the state of Illinois right now, you aren’t going to find many opportunities. And I think that is a critical piece for us to address and will have consequences for years to come. So I’ve really been focusing on looking at these reform ideas that would make Illinois much more competitive and help us add economic opportunities for people of all ages and especially people looking to begin a new career.
MAP: Being engaged politically from a young age was something that definitely seemed to help you stay engaged and become involved in politics later on in life — so how do we keep our millennials engaged now, especially in such a partisan time?
TD: It comes down to individuals identifying what it is they care about and having some kind of trust in government — that if they make their case and share their beliefs then somebody in government can do something about it. As an elected official, I think it is important that we all do whatever we can to restore or rebuild that trust so people will bring issues they advocate for to us and have the belief that something can get done in a responsible way.
MAP: If you are speaking to a millennial who may want to run for elected office, what is your best piece of advice?
TD: It’s been a very good reminder for me several times when I talk to constituents or when I was campaigning, when you talk to people who are potential voters, that part of getting people interested in government is talking to them about how the policies affect them — bringing it down to the everyday level — and knowing that not everybody is quite as interested in politics as you and I might be.
One of the things I have tried most to do is take complicated issues, whether they are at the state or federal level — issues that are talked about a lot in the press — but try to find a way to communicate those with your average person. I think that a lot of times somebody who is politically interested from a young age, or really spends a lot of their own time reading about politics and government, can develop tunnel vision in assuming that everybody they talk to has the same background information that they do or approach the issue in the same way they do.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
As a tax-exempt nonprofit organization governed by Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, Millennial Action Project (MAP) is generally prohibited from attempting to influence legislative bodies in regards to policy and legislation. It is important to note guest authors frequently take firm stances on issues and policy matters that are currently being debated by policymakers; when they do, however, they speak for themselves and not for MAP, its board, council or employees.
Learn more about Rep. Demmer and the work being done in the Illinois Future Caucus on our website.
