Sean Casten Talks To Rural Voters In 'Deep Red' Dixon, Boyhood Home Of Ronald Reagan

DIXON, IL — Taking a page from Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “Fighting the Oligarchy” tour, Democratic Congressman Sean Casten ventured to Ronald Reagan’s hometown of Dixon, Ill., to speak to voters who claim their GOP congresspeople have not held a town hall in over a decade.

Casten is traveling outside the IL-06 district, which encompasses wide swaths of southern Cook and western Dupage counties, and Chicago’s Southwest Side, to speak to voters in deep red districts, like Dixon, “hardest hit by the turmoil in Washington, DC.”

“I was motivated to run for Congress in 2018 in part because my predecessor refused to meet with Illinoisans in person during the first Trump Administration,” Casten said in a statement. “Since the start of the second Trump Administration, voters across the country have been eager to engage with their elected officials, but House Republicans have been advised against hosting town halls. I’m thankful for the folks in Dixon and Carterville who came out for a respectful conversation about what’s happening in Washington.”

Ronald Reagan's boyhood home in Dixon, IL.

Except for Chicago and its six collar counties, and East Metro St. Louis along Illinois’s southernmost tip, the rest of the state is ruby red, and in some parts of rural Illinois, the prairie is crumbling. Casten is organizing town halls in GOP congressional districts, along with the Illinois Democratic County Chairs Association, to educate voters and give them the chance to talk to a live Congress member in their own community.

At Ronald Reagan’s boyhood home in Dixon before the town hall, a volunteer at the visitor’s center showed a 20-minute video of the late President Reagan. Dixon is immensely proud of its native son. Included were highlights of Reagan’s life — from his days as a teen lifeguard on the Rock River, where he is said to have saved 77 swimmers from drowning, to his fiery “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech demanding the Soviet leader to open the Berlin Wall.

“This is the kind of leadership the country needs right now,” the volunteer, Jerry, said, in addition to sharing ancient town gossip about Reagan’s alcoholic father.

Outside Sauk Valley Community College, where the town hall was being held, a few protesters were holding “Where in the world is Darin LaHood” signs — the Illinois 16th District congressman and a member of the house select intelligence committee.

Walking into the building, a man wearing a MAGA cap could be overheard saying, “I’m going to this, and I’m going to a MAGA rally, but I’m going to keep an open mind.”

“My friend Rita is an independent and says she will never vote for a Republican again.”

Despite all the tickets being reserved in advance, the auditorium was three-quarters full of mostly white, aging Baby Boomers. Two ladies from Morrison drove 30 miles to Dixon to hear what the congressman had to say. Both had attended the “Hands Off” protest in Sterling earlier this month, and a few weeks before that a pro-Ukraine rally in Dixon.

“My friend Rita is an independent,” one of the pair told Patch. “She says she will never vote for another Republican again.”

Most knew about last month’s aborted town hall in Downers Grove, when Casten was shouted down by pro-Palestinian supporters and local police shut down the meeting out of safety concerns.

>>> Watch the Dixon, IL, town hall in its entirety.

Casten did not sugar coat his answers to the audience, where the prevailing mood in the room was fear and worry over the dismantling of the federal government and the attack on the U.S. Constitution. Next comes terror.

“We are neck deep in a constitutional crisis right now,” Casten said. “Not because the president disagrees on policy, we’re in a constitutional crisis because the president is violating the constitution and not enforcing the law and is not being held to account.”

Early into Casten’s introduction, who shared that it was a fascinating — and bizarre — time to be in Congress, a Trump supporter stood up and yelled, “first admit there is an economic crisis,” before storming out of the auditorium.

“Bye-bye,” the audience called out.

Casten, who was born in 1971, said the first president he remembered was Ronald Reagan, and that he voted for Republicans George H.W. Bush and later, Bob Dole, who both lost to Bill Clinton in the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections, respectively. He also said nice things about Dixon’s most famous citizen, Ronald Reagan, particularly the president’s role in the Montreal Protocol.

Right off the bat, an audience member asked what Congress was doing to protect Social Security, that Trump senior advisor and DOGE head Elon Musk has called a “Ponzi scheme.”

IL-16 voters claim the Adam Kinzinger and Darin LaHood never held a town hall.

Casten said he co-sponsored a bill introduced by John Larson (D-CT) that would apply FICA to annual earnings above $400,000, and ensuring that millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share by closing the loophole of avoiding FICA taxes.

“It’s the right fix. We came close to passing it last year, we just need three Republican house members. Hopefully, we can do that in this term,” Casten said. “These cuts are hurting folks, and we need to do better oversight at this moment, which we can’t do because Speaker [Mike] Johnson is blocking our vote. It’s a solvable problem."

He claimed to have a number of republican colleagues who are privately horrified by Trump’s actions, but are afraid to stand up for fear of being doxxed at their homes.

“I get the fear. I’ve had people like that in front of my house during my time in Congress,” Casten said. “We shouldn’t be asking people in public office to assume that degree of courage, but I think it’s required of the job right now. I think all of us need to keep reminding ourselves, law enforcement and the military, there’s a reason we take an oath to the constitution and not a king.”

"When I was a little kid, Sterling was the hardware capital of the world."

A woman wearing a MAGA hat said Sterling has changed for the worse since Northwest Steel and Wire went bankrupt because of foreign competition.

“When I was a little kid, Sterling was the ‘Hardware Capital of the World.’ We were thriving. People were happy, people were shopping,” she said. “Would tariffs bring back American jobs, or is it going to be completely bad?” (Watch Casten’s answer).

Another woman asked about “the daily fire hose of nightmares” coming out of the current Trump administration. “Do you see Congress standing up anytime soon?

“We’ve gone from apathy to fear to anger,” Casten said. “I think that’s actually healthy because the next thing after anger is action."

A man listens intently to US Rep. Sean Casten at a Dixon town hall

His biggest concerns were Elon Musk's hacking into the Secretary of Treasury and copying citizens’ private data, which he said could compromise agents' lives embedded in hostile countries, or others providing intelligence to the military.

“We still don’t know what he took,” Casten said.

Of the national security perils currently facing the nation, he called the Signal chat scandal discussing war plans on an unsecured protocol that inadvertently included a journalist the most obscene of all.

“The fact that no one piped up and said, ‘children, this is not the channel where we have that conversation,’ is massively frightening. I don’t know how long it will take to fix it.”

Casten stated that most Americans are good, virtuous people who know what we have is worth preserving.

“If an overwhelming majority of Americans fight for it, we’ll kick their ass,” he said, telling the audience to stand collectively and hold the middle. “And if the overwhelming majority of Americans are sitting around waiting for someone else to fight for it, we’re going to lose.”

Watch the Dixon, IL, town hall in its entirety.

Photos by Lorraine Swanson/Patch