Super Tuesday was not supposed to mean anything in Illinois. The state has voted Democratic since George H.W. Bush’s campaign. The Land of Lincoln became Obama Country, so much so that Sen. Barack Obama’s only real concern was that voters would be so assured of his victory that they’d complacently skip voting.

That didn’t happen.

Obama’s victory over Sen. Hillary Clinton, nearly 32 percentage points, couldn’t have surprised anyone paying attention to the rumbling momentum of the Illinois junior senator. Leading up to the Feb. 5 Illinois primary, the Democratic campaign was on a trajectory dictating that each candidate’s future was only as certain as the last state’s outcome.

Obama surprised Clinton in Iowa caucus. Clinton returned the favor by surprising Obama (and pollsters across the nation) in the New Hampshire primary. At the conclusion of South Carolina’s primary, Clinton was in a position no one could have foreseen: frantically bailing water out of a leaky campaign.

Illinois advanced its primary by six weeks, an announcement generally considered a strategic move favoring Obama by both taking advantage of his (shortsightedly) projected anonymity and thereby making his likely success in Illinois more important on the national stage.

By early February, Obama had long shed any anonymity and was one of the most recognizable public figures in the nation. Illinois’ primary position changed from truncating the consideration for which voters had time to underlining Obama’s momentum. Obama’s immense success in the Illinois primary was an obvious end to a straight-forward scenario.

Although Illinois is generally considered a moderately red state overpowered by the cerulean swirl of Chicago, it has not been considered a Republican threat since the first president Bush administration. Illinois is not completely barren of popular Republicans. U.S. Congressman Everett Dirksen (R-Ill.) was both popular and influential in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Republican Congressmen Henry Hyde and Denny Hastert were elected overwhelmingly in their Illinois districts.

But this year, the Republicans were playing with the casino’s money. Polling reports never showed more than 25 percent support for the GOP. According to CNN’s exit poll statistics, Republican voting behavior in Illinois was long decided before the primary arrived in the state. Nearly 72 percent of registered Republican voters said they decided whom to support a week or more before Super Tuesday.

Of those who made up their minds in advance, nearly half of them had decided to vote for Arizona Sen. John McCain, whereas 26 percent settled on Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. This suggests that there was a strong personal dislike for Romney. Illinois Republicans have generally been moderates, focused less on social issues such as religion and immigration and more on economic issues.

Romney attempted to parlay his business career into an advantage and a surprise success over the favored McCain. When it came time to vote however, voters, including those who said the economy was their primary concern, chose McCain. Those same polling results suggested that Illinois voters saw Romney as the closest heir to the Bush throne, something that in this state was seen as negative by 60 percent of right wing voters.

Illinois had the third highest voter turnout of all the primaries up to and including Super Tuesday, trailing only New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

If the only surprise born from the Republican Illinois primary results was the incongruence between the issues important to voters and the manner in which they voted, the lone surprise for the Democrats was the ferocity with which Illinois voters sent their message.

More than 20 states inhabited elementary school gymnasiums and retirement homes on Super Tuesday to produce more voters than any other year. The last time turnout was near this high was in 1972 during a boiling point in another unpopular war.

But that’s ancient history.

It was going to take a miracle for a Republican candidate to have a Nixon-like showing powerful enough to eclipse the Democrats and their mantras of hope and change.

All race and gender issues aside, Illinois had a particular conundrum in that the state had previously gushed over Bill Clinton in both 1992 and again in 1996. He was a Democrat who turned the U.S. economy around and appeased Republicans in so doing

Additionally, it remained to be seen whether Illinois voters would identify with Obama’s current state representation or with Clinton’s childhood roots in Illinois. Less than 18 months earlier, Obama was a parlor trick. To hear most politicos discuss Obama in the fall and winter of 2006, he was supposed to be the fresh-faced junior varsity ballplayer trying to usurp Clinton’s varsity position.

It was cute, but it wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen; not with Clinton’s experience, support and finances. Clinton was supposed to be a powerhouse in Illinois, a state that drooled over her husband for eight years.

As voters scuttled into polling places on Feb. 5, many viewed Illinois as a big state promised to Obama, it would lessen the impact of Clinton’s probable win in New Jersey. But it wasn’t always that way. Illinois was one of the first Democratic states to embrace Obama, which is a statement of greater magnitude than a simple nod to the hometown hero. Illinois is not only the sixth largest state and therefore wields a great deal of influence, but the overwhelming support Obama has received from moderate Republicans and independents goes a long way toward defining his electability.

Even Bill Clinton wasn’t as successful in attracting opposing constituencies in Illinois as Obama.

The lesson learned in Illinois can be teased from the state voting results. By Super Tuesday’s conclusion, Clinton walked away with a small handful of powerful states, the places in which she had either long ago hammered her stakes or happened to represent in the U.S. senate.

Obama took everything else.

If Obama becomes this nation’s 44th president, Illinois will surely be seen as both an integral and an influential state in the process. Almost 33 percent of registered voters turned out in Illinois on Feb. 5, beating the previous record set in 1980 at 29.9 percent.

Nearly 500,000 more Illinois voters were registered in this year’s open primary than in 2000, equaling a total of about 7.17 million registered state voters. The numbers favoring Obama have been surprising, pointed and indeed indicative of the trajectory of Obama’s campaign.

Nine out of every 10 black voters supported Obama on Feb. 5, a constituency all but owned by Bill Clinton during his tenure and a base long believed also to belong to Hillary. Obama also edged out Clinton among white voters and women, albeit by lesser margins.

The message remained clear, Obama truly is Illinois’ favorite son.

Illinois appeared to be a barometer for the rest of the country before the rest of the country was aware of it. As voter turnout records bloat and split open from one state to the next, the question is why?

Voters don’t normally invade the polls unless they have a compulsion to do so. State-by-state, primary-by-primary, Obama’s pistons continued pumping faster and faster, while Clinton’s campaign engine sputtered and stalled. The voters of this blue state voiced their hesitant support for McCain and might very well support Clinton should Obama fall from the race.