Why Did Illinois Duck the DSA Wave?

As I’ve watched stormy Democratic primaries overtake my neighbors in Michigan and Wisconsin, with their angry throngs of DSA hordes o’ertopping the walls of the Democratic establishment like a scene out of the fall of Constantinople, I sometimes wonder: How did we avoid all of this madness in Illinois, of all places?

Because it’s not like Illinois has had much going for it over the past several years, specifically Chicago — which in political terms is just a different way of saying the same thing. (This demographic shift toward the city has happened within living memory, as downstate bled residents, the collar counties ringing the city turned blue, and Democrats cynically redrew state and federal district lines to draw ever more voting power toward the state’s Chicagoland center of gravity.) Talk to me about our fatally crippling state and local pension liabilities. Talk to me about Chicago crime, or the general state of post-Daley city governance. Talk to me about our mayor.

Yes, Chicago has 99 problems, and yet strangely the DSA isn’t one of them. Why? Even as two neighboring swing states are now set to dash to the hard left in their Democratic nominees, and House incumbents are being turfed out across the nation from New York to Colorado, how did the most Democratic state in the entire Midwest somehow manage to duck this wave? (Surely not because we deserve it.)

My theory is actually fairly simple, and I offer you three interlocking explanations:

• The old Illinois Democratic “machine” may be dead, but it still twitches with enough of a Lazarus reflex to get its way. As I wrote all the way back in March, whatever your opinion of JB Pritzker (mine is decidedly negative), his early endorsement of and active campaigning with Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton was key in securing her the open Senate nomination with a 40 percent plurality of the vote.
• Timing is everything. As I noted, the Illinois primary was held in March — long before the “DSA wave” began to crest nationally during the late summer turn to the Midwest in the primary calendar. But what if it weren’t? As glad as I am to see the back of repulsive DSA “influencer” candidate Kat Abughazaleh — she lost to slightly-less-useless Daniel Biss in the Evanston-area ninth district — I have a feeling she might have been heading to D.C. had the primary been held later on.
• Illinois has seen this movie before with Mayor Brandon Johnson, and is not interested in a repeat.

This is the real cause for Illinois (and specifically Chicago-area) Democratic coolness on the DSA’s promises of liberation and socialist revolution: We tried this once before, and it ended in nothing but regrets. After a drunken socialist bender between February and April of 2023, Chicago woke up with Brandon Johnson tattooed across its face. (In our defense, it was a close vote.) Now we’re getting ready to finally laser this political stain away next February.

Like many big-city progressive politicians of recent vintage, Brandon Johnson is not “technically” part of the DSA; he merely overlaps on all of their policies, promotes and is promoted by their candidates, and had to actually request that they not endorse him in 2023, for electoral reasons. And there is no more debate in the city of Chicago and its environs about whether Johnson or the DSA-like policies he has enacted while in office have been good for the city.

We have stumbled in a daze here in Chicago from one tire-fire to another over the last three years: the flood of Biden-era illegals, the Shotspotter debacle, the flash mobs of violent kids, the $1.2 billion city budget shortfall, the deteriorating safety of public transit, self-dealing with the Chicago Teachers’ Union — the list is endless, and that’s before you mention losing the Bears to Indiana. All Chicagoans have gotten for their troubles is one diversity initiative after another (including Johnson’s pet project, slavery reparations).

For my own amusement, the other day I asked Grok (X’s AI bot) to rank the top six potential candidates for the 2027 mayoral election; Johnson ranked sixth. (For those who simply assume that whatever comes after Johnson will inevitably be worse, the current front-runner is Secretary of State Alexis “Sexy Lexy” Giannoulias, so you just may be right.)

But it is this, more than anything else I think, that explains why the DSA never took off in the Land of Lincoln, despite theoretically being as fertile ground for a takeover as New York City turned out to be. Here in Chicago, we’re so tired of drowning in incompetent activist government of the sort that the DSA stands for that we’re looking longingly at the old-fashioned corruption of someone like Giannoulias to rescue us.