Don Tracy, a Republican former state party chair who casts himself a political bridge builder, won his party’s Senate primary in Illinois on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, and will begin the general election as a significant underdog in a deep-blue state.
Mr. Tracy, 75, who once worked as a truck driver and traveling salesman, campaigned on a centrist platform. A lawyer from downstate Illinois, he has vowed to place pocketbook issues over partisan agendas, and said his top priority in the Senate would be lowering prices, particularly energy costs.
“That’s one thing Democrats and Republicans I think agree on,” Mr. Tracy said in a recent interview, pledging that he would champion “common-sense solutions in Washington.”
The competition in Illinois is for an open seat that is being vacated by Senator Richard J. Durbin, a Democrat who is retiring.
Mr. Tracy’s victory comes as Republicans are on the defensive over gasoline prices that have surged as the United States wages a war in Iran (he supports the war effort), potentially adding to the political headwinds he could face in the November general election.
Mr. Tracy led the state’s Gaming Board from 2015 to 2019 under its last Republican governor, Bruce Rauner. Mr. Tracy has argued that single-party rule is damaging the state. “A one-party state is just not a healthy state,” Mr. Tracy said in the interview, decrying the state’s stagnant population growth and high taxes.
Illinois has not had a Republican senator since Mark S. Kirk left office. He captured a seat in 2010 but was defeated in 2016 by Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat now in her second Senate term.
Mr. Kirk, a centrist Republican from a wealthy area along Lake Michigan north of Chicago, rose to the Senate on a surge of suburban support. But the Chicago suburbs have been drifting toward Democrats for years, Republican analysts say, as voters there recoil from President Trump’s polarizing leadership.
That shift will pose a challenge for Mr. Tracy in a midterm environment that is widely seen as difficult for Republicans nationwide, Mr. Kirk said in an interview. Still, Mr. Kirk emphasized that he would not rule out Mr. Tracy, who he said “talks like a moderate.”
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