Illinois Primary Winners? We LOVE Illinois Primary Winners!
Good results all around despite a flood of GigantoPAC spending.
Voters in Illinois still need to show up and vote in November, but it’s also such a solid-blue state that yesterday’s Democratic primaries largely determined who’ll be elected this fall, barring any big (or awful) surprises between now and then. Let’s take a look at the results and see what kind of “Dems in disarray” nonsense the pundits are blabbering about.
Hello, Senator (Almost) Juliana Stratton
In the biggest of several races for open seats, Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton won the primary for the US Senate seat held by Dick Durbin, who’s retiring after five terms. With 90 percent of the votes counted, Stratton was well ahead of Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, with 40 percent to his 33.32 percent. Six-term congresswoman Rep. Robin Kelly, who retired from the House to run for Senate, came in third, with 18.2 percent of the vote.
Should Stratton win the November matchup against Republican nominee Some Guy Who Was Illinois GOP Chair Don Tracy, which she should, she’ll make a little history by joining Sens. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Maryland) and Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Delaware) and becoming one of three concurrently serving Black women in the Senate for the first time ever. Get ready for Elon Musk to complain that three out of 100 is some kind of Great Replacement of white men in the Senate.
Also, we would like to apologize to Sen.-probably Stratton for an egregious oversight in our story yesterday on the Illinois primary: We’d somehow forgotten that she ran this wonderfully rude campaign ad with lots of people saying “Fuck Trump,” including her soon-to-be colleague Tammy Duckworth, who endorsed her campaign.
Stratton was also endorsed by Gov. JB Pritzker, who let’s not forget is a billionaire himself and gave at least $5 million to a super PAC supporting her. She may also have been helped by backlash to a $10 million ad campaign from “Fairshake,” a pro-cryptocurrency super PAC that just wants the fake money industry to never ever be regulated. Like Durbin before her, Stratton has been an unabashed critic of crypto, as have Duckworth and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who also backed Stratton. The crypto industry’s support of Krishnamoorthi, who has voted in favor of bills it favored, may have ended up hurting him instead. Hey, let’s hope.
Stratton has been a fierce critic of Trump’s ICE invasion of Chicago, and vowed she’ll work to abolish ICE, saying it’s simply too rotten to be reformed. She also supports Medicare for All and a $25 minimum wage, and has made clear she supports ousting Chuck Schumer as Democratic Senate leader in favor of “someone who’s going to fight” more vigorously against Trump’s attacks on democracy.
Hello, New (Almost) House Members, Too
There were four D primaries for open US House seats, which seems like a lot for one election cycle, we think? In the closely watched District 9 primary for the seat held by much-loved Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who’s retiring after serving 27 years, Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss won a crowded 15-candidate race with 29.4 percent of the vote. Biss narrowly beat out Kat Abughazaleh, who got 26.1 percent in her first run for office. We’ve been big fans of Abughazaleh, a former Media Matters researcher who’s out to shake up Democratic politics and break the party out of its focus-group habits, but as we said in our preview of the contest, Biss is a big ol’ progressive too, with endorsements from Schakowsky and from Warren, and we’re perfectly happy to see him advance to the House. Abughazaleh is just 26, and she’s got a great future in politics ahead of her.
The other House primary winners include one “new” member who’ll actually be returning to Congress, former Rep. Melissa Bean, a moderate who lost her seat to a Republican in 2010 but won the primary to replace Krishnamoorthi in District 8. She beat seven other candidates, including progressive tech business guy Junaid Ahmed, who was endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Another comeback attempt didn’t go so great, and we’re fine with that. In the race to fill the District 2 seat that Robin Kelly left to run for Senate, Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller beat Jesse Jackson Jr. Jackson resigned his congressional seat in 2012 and then went to prison the next year for being a grifty grifter, back when we actually sent politicians to prison for that.
And in CD 7, the race for a successor to Rep. Danny Davis, who’s retiring after serving since 1996 — that’s 15 consecutive terms — went to state Rep. La Shawn Ford, who defeated 12 other candidates in another crowded field. With 90 percent of the vote tallied, Ford had 23.9 percent, Chicago Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin 20.5 percent, and union organizer and SEIU guy Anthony Driver came in third with 11.3 percent. Ford had the endorsement of Davis, and was also targeted by that cryptocurrency super PAC Fairshake, whose ads against him were so nasty that he threatened to sue the group for defamation. Fuckin’ crypto jerks!
Progressive Candidates Win, So Cue The Dumb ‘Left Can’t Win’ Takes
The New York Times suggested in its election takeaways piece (archive link) that even though Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win last fall gave a lot of progressive candidates big dreams for 2026, the Illinois primaries might have put an end to that nonsense. Three very progressive candidates — Stratton, Biss, and Ford — came out on top in the contests for US Senate and two of the four open House seats. Three out of five might look good to you, but to the Times, it meant “A progressive push for House seats mostly flopped,” which neatly leaves out Stratton’s win and doesn’t mention Ford at all. Instead, the Times tried to create a trend out of very mixed results:
The Congressional Progressive Caucus’s political arm had endorsed four candidates, but only one, Mr. Biss, prevailed. Both of the candidates backed by Justice Democrats, the left-wing group that has toppled past moderate Democratic incumbents, lost. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont had endorsed two candidates. Neither won.
The Grey Lady acknowledges that two candidates endorsed by Elizabeth Warren won (Stratton and Biss) and that progressive Kat Abughazaleh came in second to progressive Biss, but sniffed that “the left could hardly claim the results as a mandate, or even as momentum.”
Aren’t you glad you shifted your New York Times subscription dollars to support Wonkette instead?
AIPAC Isn’t Godzilla
The Times was on firmer ground, and in plenty of company, in noting that spending by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) had decidedly mixed results in Illinois, following the group’s embarrassing dick-stepping in New Jersey’s special election primary last month. Just two of the House candidates AIPAC supported — Bean and Miller — won their primaries, and in the two races where AIPAC proxy PACs spent most heavily, its candidates lost. It was an open secret that AIPAC was behind two brand new super PACs blandly named “Elect Chicago Women” and “Chicago Progressive Partnership, both of which spent heavily in Illinois. The Times, being useful for a change, noted that AIPAC “acknowledged its quasi-hidden hand only after the results were in,” although it didn’t give any details.
In District 9, state Sen. Laura Fine came in third, after the proxies spent $4.4 in direct support for her, and another $1.4 million trying to sink Biss, plus $1.2 against Abughazaleh. And in District 7, AIPAC’s out-in-the-open super PAC, the United Democracy Project, spent another $5 million supporting Conyears-Ervin, who also lost.
“Elect Chicago Women” had better luck in the 8th District, where it spent $4 million helping Bean regain office, and a third AIPAC-linked group, “Affordable Chicago Now” — these fronts are so good at names! — spent $4 million to elect Miller.
Happily, the cryptodorks mostly lost, wasting millions trying to sink Stratton and Ford, neener, neener, neener. And “Leading the Future PAC,” a super PAC funded by OpenAI, got bupkis for its million-dollar ad buy for Jackson, who actively courted the AI industry money. Good thing he didn’t go all in and have his hands surgically altered to have six fingers each so he’d really fit the image.
Get your six-fingered hands out and ready to type, it’s time for OPEN THREAD.
[WaPo (gift link) / NBC News / CNN / NYT (archive link) / Politico]
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Harry wants to know who that handsome cat is on the other side of the window.
https://substack.com/@ziggywiggy/note/c-229851826?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc
Hey guys. Not feeling good at all today. Physically basically fine (headaches, and scrapes and bruises and a few chipped teeth that will need to be looked at). Emotionally not great. Very labile. Keep getting teary, thinking of how much worse it coulda been. Kind of waiting for another shoe to drop. Feeling jittery.
I took another evening off work, so there's that.