Tomorrow is Primary Day in Illinois, where the Democratic contests are the only real games in town.
On the ballot: a fierce and unpredictable primary contest to succeed the retiringSenator Dick Durbin, a handful of House primaries shaped by Middle East tensions and a test for Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, who has bet big on his lieutenant governor, Juliana Stratton, in the Senate primary.
To make sense of it all, I turned to my friend and fellow Midwesterner Reid Epstein, an extremely proud native of Peoria, Ill., who just returned from a reporting trip to Chicago. Here are edited and condensed excerpts from our Slack conversation about what to watch tomorrow in Illinois.
Reid, thank you for joining. Why should our readers from outside Illinois care about what happens tomorrow? Are there any national implications?
Of course all of our readers around the globe — including Pope Leo XIV, who grew up in Dolton — should care deeply about what happens in Illinois, America’s best state. In this case, the Senate Democratic primary will tell us a lot about the political clout of JB Pritzker, a billionaire who could run for president in 2028. He is using his influence and millions of his own dollars to back his lieutenant governor.
Helping to elect Stratton, a Black woman, would end up being useful to Pritzker should he need to make his case to Black voters in a Democratic presidential primary in two years.
Illinois as America’s best state! I would like to have that debate someday. In the meantime — does it matter for Pritzker if Stratton loses?
If Stratton loses, it probably hurts Pritzker’s status in the state and would leave him open to other Illinois Democrats challenging him on one issue or another, but I’m not sure it would be meaningful otherwise. Either way, he has devoted significant time and resources toward helping her Senate campaign.
Pritzker himself is up for re-election this year, but that is not expected to be much of a contest regardless of who emerges as his Republican opponent, right?
Yes. After spending nine figures on each of his last two campaigns for governor, Pritzker is highly likely to sail to re-election in November. Illinois Republicans are disorganized and ill-funded, and right now it is looking like a bad year for Republicans anyway.
Back to the Senate primary contest — polls are all over the place, but they generally show either Stratton or Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, a well-funded candidate who would be only the second Indian American elected to the Senate, ahead. What has been the defining issue in this race?
Stratton has tried to portray herself as the most progressive candidate in the race. The policy differences, though, are matters of degree. Stratton wants to “abolish ICE,” while Krishnamoorthi says he would “abolish Trump’s ICE.”
For lack of an animating policy argument, the campaign has also been about the prospect of Black voters in and around Chicago splitting their votes between Stratton and Representative Robin Kelly, a Black woman whose record in office is to Stratton’s left but who is less well-funded. That could allow Krishnamoorthi to win on the strength of his support in Chicago’s suburbs and the rest of the state.
In the final weeks of the campaign, leading Black Democrats have fretted about possibly blowing an opportunity to elect a Black woman to the Senate.
Are there other differences along stylistic or governing or geographic lines?
In an Illinois Democratic primary, about 60 percent of the vote usually comes from Cook County, which includes Chicago. Stratton is from Chicago’s South Side and Kelly is from the south suburbs. Krishnamoorthi grew up downstate in Peoria and now lives in Schaumburg, a Cook County suburb northwest of Chicago.
For Stratton to win, she will need to win big margins in Chicago, especially on the South Side, and hold Kelly’s vote down in the south suburbs and across the city. Krishnamoorthi’s hopes rest on Latino neighborhoods in Chicago and winning big in the suburban collar counties that surround Cook and the rest of the state, which provide relatively fewer votes in a primary.
There are several House primary contests happening tomorrow, too.
In some of those races, debates about Israel — and the spending from groups seen as allied with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the major pro-Israel lobbying group — have become a central campaign issue. What are national Democrats watching in those races?
There are so many super PACs involved in the Illinois primaries that The Chicago Sun-Times made a helpful list of 26 seeking to influence races. Several of them are affiliated or aligned with AIPAC, which has increasingly become a toxic brand in Democratic politics but still has lots of money it is using to try to elect or stop certain candidates.
This is happening at a time when Israel’s popularity has plummeted among Democratic voters, and in some cases candidates have rejected AIPAC support.
What else should our readers be watching tomorrow?
Besides reports from White Sox spring training? One of the big questions I have is how turnout in some of these House primaries affects the Senate race. Some of the House candidates are driving progressive messages, and if they turn out left-wing voters, that could be good news for Stratton — or maybe not, if the vote is split with Kelly.
We are in an unusual period in politics in which there is not much (or any) reliable independent polling in these races. With so many candidates on the ballot, it is hard to predict what will happen.
Anything else you want to add?
It is time for The Times to place a full-time correspondent in Peoria.
quote of the day
“There should be a Project 2029 for Democrats.”
That was Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, speaking to my colleague Lulu Garcia-Navarro on The Interview, published on Saturday.
Pritzker, who has long tried to act as a foil to President Trump, argued that the Democratic Party should coalesce around an agenda the way Republicans did for Project 2025. Read (or listen to) Pritzker’s full interview.
A gun-wielding YouTuber runs for the House
Gun-rights activists have long been a force in Republican politics. But, as my colleagues Charles Homans and Thomas Gibbons-Neff write, no candidate with a credible chance of reaching Congress has had a profile quite like Brandon Herrera, a 26-year-old gun maker and influencer who is the Trump-endorsed presumptive nominee in a House district in Texas.
How Mamdani can play hardball
Behind Zohran Mamdani’s signature smile, the new mayor of New York City can be a ruthless operator, my colleagues Nicholas Fandos and Sally Goldenberg write in their revealing and deeply reported look at one of the Democratic Party’s newest stars.
Taylor Robinson and Ama Sarpomaa contributed reporting.
Katie Glueck is a Times national political reporter.
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