The Democratic Establishment held the line on Tuesday in Illinois.
“Who sent you?”
The question is of course a legendary one in Illinois, first made famous by being asked to a young Abner Mikva (later a judge and a representative) when he sought to break into Chicago Democratic politics in 1948. Mikva — then an anonymous law student at the University of Chicago — walked into a local party office seeking to do gruntwork in statewide Democratic campaigns, and was told off after informing the committeeman that he was a volunteer: “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.” (The phrase went on to become the title of a famous early oral history of the Daley years in Chicago.)
Perhaps there’s something to be said for insularity. After last night’s primary elections, Illinois — which in terms of its Democratic vote, is geographically concentrated in Chicagoland now more than ever — seemingly retains the old spirit: They know who they know, and they don’t want any new blood just yet.
By God, it’s almost amusing in its own mulishly obedient way. Last night Illinois progressives, flush with both national money and enthusiastic “out-party” rage against Donald Trump, running in one of the bluer states in the nation, got completely steamrolled by Governor JB Pritzker and the entrenched powerbrokers who have run the state for decades. The Daleys may be gone, the old Illinois “machine” may be a broken-down, rusted-out hulk . . . but the Democratic Party still gets what it wants here in the Land of Lincoln. (Alas: There will be no Jesse Jackson Jr. revival, folks. I had been crossing my fingers on that one, but nothing doing.)
In the senate primary to replace the retiring Dick Durbin — a ticket to a lifelong sinecure, in other words — Pritzker threw the weight of his money and institutional power behind his Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton, securing her victory with a 40 percent plurality of the vote. When last month I predicted Stratton as the guaranteed winner of this primary, I received pushback from readers who thought I was dismissing the candidacy of Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi (of the northwestern Chicago suburbs) too lightly. Krishnamoorthi had hustle, I’ll give him that — he was up on the air early and often, and dominated advertising downstate.
But nobody lives downstate, not after two decades of outmigration to other, saner lands. The voters live where the jobs still are — in Cook County and, to a lesser extent, Chicago’s collar counties. Everything else is table scraps. And after 21 years here it’s impossible even for a Republican not to understand at least a little bit about Chicago Democratic voters. (Krishnamoorthi originally hails from Peoria. To invoke the old phrase, “what plays in Peoria” typically cuts little mustard around here and in fact triggers the opposite reaction.) Put bluntly: The voter demographic that reliably shows up for a Democratic primary in Chicago wasn’t going to choose a guy named “Krishnamoorthi” over a black woman from the South Side running with the governor’s endorsement.
A slightly different dynamic was at work in the other marquee Democratic grudge match. In Illinois’s well-off, highly educated, and increasingly diverse ninth congressional district, worthless Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss ultimately held off even more obnoxious “internet influencer” and ultra-progressive maniac Kat Abughazaleh. It was a closer race than many expected, which is fine by me. As I mentioned in yesterday’s Carnival of Fools, conservatives in Illinois don’t have much natural political sustenance to draw upon — we scavenge upon the bloodshed and frequent indictments of elected Democrats — so I tend to root for blue-on-blue carnage.
But I’ll confess I’m thrilled that I won’t have to make the Great Abugazoo part of my ongoing political coverage, because everything about her activist shtick drove me mad. She wasn’t even interesting as a representative of the new youth progressive class — she was as generic a clout-chaser as could be imagined, a stock carpetbagger candidate whose naked opportunism ultimately cost her in a close race. Zohran Mamdani caught fire at the right moment against the right kind of recycled trash in New York, but it doesn’t seem like his magic translates anywhere else, even to the halls of the damned — which Evanston certainly qualifies as.
There is more to this than mere parochial state politics. Observers have been paying close attention to the Illinois Democratic primary as a key test of the barometric pressure on the left: Would the base swoon for extreme progressive candidates in an undeniably blue state, where winning a primary is tantamount to winning the general election? (Many journalists, in fact, wrote this story as a tale of Super PACs, as tens of millions of dollars from progressives and establishment sources alike flowed into every race.) The answer, as it turns out, is no. The Democratic Establishment held the line on Tuesday in Illinois: It still don’t want nobody nobody sent.
Correction: An earlier version of this piece misidentified Raja Krishnamoorthi as a representative from downstate Illinois; he grew up downstate, but currently represents the far northwestern Chicago suburbs.