Illinois! The Funnest State To Type In A Sans-Serif Font! Also, It Has Primaries Today.

Not really any bad choices among the frontrunners, either.

LOL, the built-in AI alt-text software labeled the Bean sculpture as a ‘black car on a city street’ at night. Photo by Jan Weber on Unsplash

It’s Primary Day in Illinois, and that pretty much means Democrats in the Prairie State will be electing their next US senator and a bunch of members of Congress. “Land of Lincoln,” sure, but the Illinois electorate doesn’t much care for what Lincoln’s party has become a century and a half later. We suspect Lincoln wouldn’t either.

The two biggest races in the state — or at least the two getting the most attention and ridiculously large amounts of outside spending — are the D primaries for US Senate, to pick a nominee to replace retiring Senator Dick Durbin, and for the state’s sapphire-blue Ninth Congressional District, where voters will choose a successor to Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who’s retiring after serving 27 years in the House.

Here’s the good news: We like four of the five people polling the highest in those two races, and we can certainly live with the fifth, and you’ll just have to keep reading to see who that person is. If you’re in Illinois, you probably already guessed!

Illinois District Number Nine, Number Nine, Number Nine

The CD-9 race got a feature story on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday this week, which we listened to while waiting for the puzzle. (We’d be one of the contestants who completely freeze up on the phone call, so we know better than to send in the weekly answer even when we get it.) There are 15 Democrats running in the primary, but the nomination is likely to go to one of the two progressive candidates at the top of most polls, Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss (D-Generation X), and former Media Matters researcher and political social media person Kat Abughazaleh (D-Gen Z), who at 26 is a first-time candidate, but has also attracted tons of national attention and fundraising support for her willingness to take on the Democratic Old Guard, and for combining her campaign with mutual aid efforts for Chicagoans targeted by ICE. Back in September, at the height of the protests in Chicago, Abughazaleh got tossed around by ICE goons outside the detention center in Broadview, which just boosted her national profile further.

The NPR story couldn’t resist pointing out that her campaign events include “weekly knitting circles” where she talks politics with supporters and potential future constituents. Abughazaleh says that bipartisanship is nice and all, but not at the cost of compromising away everything that matters to the people you’re supposed to be representing:

"Bipartisanship is negotiating different approaches to a similar goal. I think that goal should be: everyone can afford housing, groceries and health care with money left over to save and spend. I think that is the true center," she said. "We can't just look at compromise as getting your hand cut off and being grateful they left you your pinky."

She welcomes the inevitable comparisons to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani (hey, check out his St. Patrick’s Day message, it’s great!) and says hell yes the party needs to break out of its stultifying tendency to focus-group everything and play it safe.

"It means risking power. It means not being able to have a stranglehold on donors and on re-elections," she adds. "If [Democrats] actually wanted to have your name live on in a way that's positive, you would be uplifting the 'Mamdanis' of the world and not trying to shut them down."

Biss, for his part, is also unapologetically progressive, but as a mayor has a bit of established-politician credibility too. He’s been endorsed by Schakowsky and by Elizabeth Warren, and emphasizes that he will seek to unify the party’s establishment and activist tendencies to get change done. He was also, until recently, the target of intense opposition spending from AIPAC because while he’s Jewish, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, and a supporter of Israel, he’s also said that Israel shouldn’t count on a “blank check” for military support after its war in Gaza.

AIPAC abruptly pulled funding for those ads after Analilia Mejia won the New Jersey primary in February, in part because its super PAC went overboard with negative ads portraying incumbent Tom Malinowski as insufficiently progressive. In Illinois 9, AIPAC has been trying to build up support for its preferred candidate, state Senator Laura Fine, through direct support of around $4 million, and by trying to split progressive support for Abughazaleh with support for another progressive, Bushra Amiwala. And also by trying, until last month, to take down Biss.

Then the attacks on Biss stopped, and another new super PAC sprang up, running negative ads against Abughazaleh, including one really dumb spot suggesting she’s secretly not a progressive because when she was a teenager she’d written some pro-GOP stuff for her high school newspaper. Yeah, lots of multidimensional chess!

Nonetheless, going into the primary today, Biss leads most polls, though Abughazaleh is a close second and has raised the most money. Fine is running third in polling. We think Abughazaleh is pretty terrific, but we also think Biss is good; either one will be a good member of Congress.

Big Spending, Two Awesome Senate Candidates, One ‘Well OK Yeah He’d Be OK Too’ Candidate

All the drama with AIPAC spending and Abughazaleh’s viral campaign has somewhat overshadowed the primary campaign to replace Dick Durbin. But there’s plenty of drama there, too. The frontrunner in the polls is Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, who has an assload of his own money to throw at the race; we rate him as “An OK Democrat Whose Friendliness to Big Tech Makes Us Nervous.” He’s a moderate, but he’s also solidly anti-Trump and he supports increasing the minimum wage to $17 over five years and the ability of adults over 50 to buy into Medicare, so we could certainly live with him.

We like the two women running for the seat a lot more, though. There’s US Rep. Robin Kelly, who’s served six terms in Congress and is definitely more to the left, and Lt. Gov. Julia Stratton, who has the backing of Gov. JB Pritzker and also has solid progressive credentials. Several years back, Pritzker pushed to replace Kelly as chair of the state Democratic party with a candidate he preferred, but she says she’s long over that, and it hasn’t been a consideration for her in the Senate race.

All three have been solidly against ICE’s invasion of Chicago. Stratton has called for ICE to be abolished, saying that the agency “cannot be reformed.” So has Kelly, who also introduced articles of impeachment against Kristi Noem. Krishnamoorthi is more open to keeping ICE or replacing it in some form, but with significant reforms so that it’s no longer “Trump’s ICE.” He also emphasizes his own background as an immigrant to bolster his opposition to Trump’s mass deportation policies. As a member of the House Oversight Committee, he has a long history of putting Republican witnesses’ feet to the fire, but only metaphorically because he apparently knows Wonkette’s commenting rules.

One thing worth noting is that the cryptocurrency industry has thrown millions at the Illinois Senate race through the “Fairshake” PAC, which has spent $10 million in ads against Stratton. Stratton has the endorsement of Liz Warren, mostly for her willingness to stand up to crypto.

Kelly has been endorsed by the Congressional Black Caucus, which also criticized Pritzker for endorsing Stratton, who is also Black, but not in Congress. Kelly notes that Stratton had only limited experience in the Illinois Lege, serving only one term before Pritzker chose her to be lieutenant governor.

Honestly, we like both Kelly and Stratton a lot. And we certainly won’t object if Krishnamoorthi wins, either. He led Stratton by just two points in the most recent polls, with Kelly a distant third.

Now how on earth did we get through this Illinois roundup without a single Ferris Bueller reference? Anyone? Anyone?

OPEN THREAD!

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Congratulations AIPAC, You Played Yourself!

What Public Officials Are ICE Goons Arresting Today?

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[NPR / Politico / NBC News / Reuters / American Prospect]

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