A recent wave of Democratic primaries in Illinois were, in miniature, a preview of what the party must decide nationally in 2028.
Inside a sun-drenched dining room within the Montclare Senior Residences on Chicago’s Southside, JB Pritzker, the billionaire governor ofwith eyes on a Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, appeared before a crowd of African American elders ahead of last Tuesday’s primary elections.
Beside him stood Illinois Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton, his endorsed candidate for the U.S. Senate. “We need to send somebody to Washington on our behalf who’s a fighter,” Pritzker said to applause. Though cellphones went off more than six times over the course of the morning’s speeches, the crowd watched attentively. “I want to introduce you to our next United States senator, Juliana Stratton.” Further applause echoed through the room as Stratton, dressed in a purple turtleneck and wearing a necklace that read “persist” walked to the center of the room. “I am Juliana Stratton,” she said. “I am running for United States Senate because I want to take your voices to Washington. I want to fight for those of you in this room.”afterwards, Stratton explained, “When I ask people, ‘What are you looking for?’ they don't always come to a policy conclusion. They say, ‘I'm looking for someone to go to the mat fighting for me,’ so first and foremost, that's my key responsibility, to fight for the people of Illinois.”this cycle. It was on the lips of every candidate, in every district, at every level. But not every fighter won. The results of the federal-level primaries, a significant portion of them to fill seats vacated by retiring incumbents, sorted the Democratic Party into three legible camps: an Activist Left that ran on movement energy and small-dollar donations, a Technocratic Center that ran on institutional relationships and corporate money, and a Progressive Establishment that split the difference—credentialed insiders who refused corporate cash and campaigned like fighters. One of those camps won decisively., I don't know that Democratic Party primary voters are as far to left as people think they are, and I think the results in Illinois reinforce that,” Doug Sosnik, the Bill Clinton’s White House political director, toldNext January, Senator Dick Durbin, 81, will be exiting the Senate after 30 years in the upper chamber, 20 of them as Democratic Whip, making him Chuck Schumer’s second in command. Retiring alongside him in Illinois are four House Democrats with political decades who all hold top Democratic positions on powerful House subcommittees, positions attained in part by their seniority representing firmly blue districts in one of the Democratic Party’s most important strongholds. Given Illinois' standing in the Democratic firmament—it’s the fourth largest for Democratic donors behind California, New York and D.C. according to Open Secrets—and the significance of those retirements, how the party voted this election could very well predict which course it takes in 2028 when Democrats will be tasked with choosing a standard-bearer to challenge MAGA in the post-Trump era. Two years after Kamala Harris's defeat, the Democratic Party remains without a cohesive identity, as the 2024 loss uncrowned its established leadership without anointing heirs. If the primary results indicate anything, it’s that the credentialed Progressive Establishment, who’ve embraced the label of “fighter,” could be poised to seize the role of heir apparent.To understand who won and why, it helps to map the ideological terrain. Three distinct camps competed across Illinois' open primaries—each with a different theory of what the Democratic Party should be and how it should fight. The results were not evenly distributed. This map roughly mirrored that of intra-party factions in the U.S. House of Representatives. There, Democratic lawmakers can join three ideological caucuses: the Congressional Progressive Caucus , the NewCoalition , and the Blue Dog Coalition. The CPC, with 100 members, is the most liberal; the NDC, with 115, occupies the center-left; the Blue Dog Coalition, with just 10 members, represent the party's conservative flank. But in Illinois' 2026 primaries, the real contest was among three camps that only partially map onto that formal architecture. “I think these things bleed over a little bit, but generally speaking, some of the winners definitely represented the left edge of the possible,” David Dayen, executive editor ofOn the activist left, the theory is confrontation without qualification. The system is broken; the party has enabled its failure; the answer is organizing, movement-building, and nominating candidates who look and speak like the streets rather than a Congressional cloakroom. These campaigns run on small-dollar donations, treat their offices as mutual aid infrastructure, and measure success as much in cultural resonance as electoral math. When entering the campaign office of Kat Abughazaleh, one is not to hang their coat at the front rack. After this reporter presumptively hung his coat amongst the others, he was told by a volunteer, “Those are actually there for our clothing drive. If you hang it there, someone may take it.” Beyond the racks, a skeleton at least 10-feet tall looms in the office’s center in front of a back section where yellow walls are plastered with artwork and vintage-inspired campaign posters reading messages like “Resist Fascism! Liberation Now!!!” Presiding in a stuffed, orange couch sits Abughazaleh, the 26-year-old former Media Matters reporter turned influencer and activist who dared to challenge the district’s beloved,14-term incumbent Jan Schakowsky in March of the prior year.when asked if she saw herself as representing the anti-establishment wing. “As far as the tear it all down thing, I mean, the status quo wasn't working. It does need to be totally changed, but we don't need to tear it down. Trump is already doing that.” Abughazaleh campaigned to the left of her progressive opponent, Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, branding herself in video ads as a fighter “who will stand up to ICE, tell white supremacists to screw off, fight an economy that works for the people not billionaires.” With over 320,000 Instagram followers and over 350,000 TikTok followers, Abughazaleh leveraged her platform to become the race’s top fundraiser, taking in over $3 million via over 57,000 grassroots donors. She utilized those dollars in an unconventional way. Using her office as a mutual aid hub, she said, her team had fed and clothed thousands of people in the district. Volunteers gathered at the office for knitting circles to make clothes for the needy, and Abughazaleh said they’ve had two different mosh pits at campaign events. For people involved, 29-year-old volunteer Mia Orlando toldWhile Abughazaleh ran the most prominent Activist Left campaign of the race, In Illinois’ 7th District, this community-centric approach to leftist campaigning rematerialized in Anthony Driver Jr. and Kina Collins, both of whom have backgrounds in community organizing. In that race, they ultimately split the left-flank vote, clearing the path for state Representative La Shawn Ford, the favored candidate of the Progressive Establishment who was endorsed by the district’s incumbent representative, Danny Davis.On the other end, the Technocratic Center offered a different theory of the party: Governance is complex, Washington is transactional and the candidate with the deepest institutional relationships and the most sophisticated policy fluency is best equipped to deliver results. The problem, in the Trump era, is that the Democratic base doesn't primarily want results. It wants a fight., who has served Illinois’ 8th Congressional District since 2017, said he felt like the outsider in this race. A member of the NDC, he attained far less support from elected politicians.before the election, Krishnamoorthi emphasized he’d draw on his entrepreneurial mindset to address technological challenges of the 21st century, differentiating him from his peers. “I am not the establishment candidate,” he said, “and I don't think I ever came out of that even when I first ran for office.” Robin Kelly—the third contender in the Senate race, who raised $3 million—perhaps fits least neatly into this category but offered a variation of the profile, particularly when it came to her campaign’s emphasis on Washington relationships. Though she held the endorsement of three of the four founding members of “the Squad,” including Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib and Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, her campaign was also firmly linked to the Washington establishment, with endorsements from former Democratic House Whip Jim Clyburn and the Congressional Black Caucus. Kelly’s campaign relied on corporate PAC money, and the progressive credentialing couldn't paper over that structural liability. High-profile leftist endorsements don't transfer cleanly to candidates who take corporate checks. The base has learned to read the funding architecture, not just the endorsement list. In Illinois 9th District, this faction was represented by state Senator Laura Fine. Endorsed by the NDC chair, Representative Brad Schneider of Illinois, Fine accepted corporate PAC money and was the favored candidate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee , a pro-Israel lobbying group that has become a boogeyman of the progressive left. AIPAC’s preferred candidate in the Illinois 7th race was Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin, an MBA whose campaign emphasized her financial acumen.The third camp—the one that won—doesn't resolve easily into the familiar left-versus-center binary. Its candidates are credentialed insiders who speak like outsiders, academically trained technocrats who campaign as fighters, institutionally backedwho reject corporate money. It's a new hybrid: call it the Progressive Establishment. Its intellectual lineage runs directly through Senator “I transitioned from being an academic to a candidate for office through organizing and activism,” Biss, who ran in the 9th District, told. “Simultaneously, I think people are looking around at government, and saying, ‘Hey, it sucks.’ There’s a lot of well-intentioned people who seem to not be able to make a lot of change…So, it was just a matter of making sure that we were sharing both sides of my personality and record.” Before getting into politics, Biss served as a professor at the University of Chicago, a similar background to Warren, his endorser, although she taught law at Harvard University while he taught mathematics. Stratton also went to law school, working as an administrative law judge for several government agencies before pursing office. Many of Warren’s protégés filled the top ranks of the Biden administration and implemented an expansive policy agenda that surprised those who viewed the former president as a staunch moderate. It’s those sorts of people and that sort of background, deep technical expertise paired with activism and fiery language, that has proven potent in the Trump era. As the Trump administration has made battles with America’s top universities a priority of its culture war, college campuses have become an ever-fertile breeding ground for the left. However, in Democratic politics, voters and party insiders have been loath to allow the activist student to supplant the activist professor.While the clashes between these three cohorts played out differently across the ballot, this election’s results told a consistent story: nuance beat purity on the left, and fighter beat dealmaker on the center. The Israel-Palestine conflict was a prominent test case of that theory, particularly in the race to represent Illinois’ 9th District which isJewish. AIPAC spent heavily against Biss and Abughazaleh in favor of Fine. Yet Biss, who’s a Jewish liberal Zionist, and Abughazaleh, who’s Palestinian and wants to cut off Israel’s military aid, still found themselves in conflict. Biss allied with like-minded interest groups, like the pro-two state solution group J Street, to fund his campaign and leveraged his stance to gain a strategic edge over his opponent. “People who were between myself and Kat saw that I had a nuanced position on the question of Israel and Palestine, and they saw that Kat took a position that was more hard line,” Biss said. “I believe to my core that the background and experiences and nuance that I bring to this issue will make me a deeply effective fighter for justice for Palestine, but we had to have some complicated conversations with voters” Whilst Abughazaleh was on the rise, Fine was on the fall, and Biss said he drew in her supporters once they realized Abughazaleh could win the race. Amid this dynamic, Skokie School Board member Bushra Amiwala who also running an anti-Israel campaign that was amplified by AIPAC-aligned groups which ultimately propelled her to attain 5 percent of the vote that could’ve otherwise gone to Abughazaleh. Biss, who had the endorsement of Schakowsky, beat Abughazaleh by over three-and-a-half points—a margin that reflected the ceiling of the activist-left coalition when faced with a credentialed progressive running a more institutionally anchored campaign. The gap between them wasn't ideological distance so much as institutional mass.she was unimpressed by Biss securing the endorsement of Warren. Her reasoning: “She’s a center right Democrat.” Just days before, Warren turned out over 150 supporters at noon on a Friday who pledged to vote and rally their friends to support Biss. In the 7th District, dynamics played out similarly as Conyears-Ervin placed second whilst the activist lane to was split between Driver Jr. and Collins, allowing Ford—who had the endorsements of Illinois’ state House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch and state Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford—to pull ahead.Stratton beat Krishnamoorthi by seven points, despite trailing in most polls ahead of Election Day and losing the fundraising battle. Endorsed by Warren and committed to opposing Schumer if he seeks another term as the upper chamber’s top Democrat, Stratton will head to Washington with a disposition that’s sure to appeal to the party’s aggrieved base that’s grown discontent with figures like the man she’ll be replacing. Like Krishnamoorthi, Kelly’s reliance on corporate PAC money proved a key differentiator between her and Stratton, who refused such donations. Instead, Stratton’s campaign was backed by Pritzker and his family fortune made through the Hyatt Hotels Corporation. Stratton made this difference a campaign issue as she pledged to take on the wealthy. In the process, she picked up the backing of Illinois’ incumbent Senator Tammy Duckworth as well as Welch and Lightford. Swirling in the background beyond campaign style differences were state party dynamics as well. When Pritzker was running for governor in 2018, Kelly endorsed Biss who went on to lose to Pritzker. In 2021, Kelly became chair of the Illinois Democratic Primary, with the support of Durbin despite Pritzker backing a different candidate. However, a little over a year later, Kelly dropped her reelection bid after concluding that her opponent, Elizabeth Hernandez—who was backed by Pritzker—had more support. Hernandez remains chair to this day.. “I know people wanted me to win, but for their various reasons, they chose not to vote for me, so I stepped back so the people that were out there voting for me, they didn't have to feel the pressure that I know some of them were getting.” Kelly suggested Pritzker’s wealth gives him a greater influence over the Illinois Democratic Party than a governor would normally have. “I know in my race, people have kept their mouth shut,” Kelly said. “They think it's better for them, even if someone hasn't specifically whispered in their ear.”Despite the wins of Stratton, Biss, and Ford, the Progressive Establishment's night wasn't total. Former Representative Melissa Bean won her 8th District seat back with AIPAC support by beating Warren’s endorsed candidate, nonprofit executive Junaid Ahmed. Bean fits the Technocratic Center mold and had the support of Schneider, yet it’s notable her victory came with a Duckworth endorsement and a bio noting her ability to “fight for what matters.” Donna Miller, who won in the 2nd District with the backing of Schneider and AIPAC despite facing a Warren-endorsed challenger in state Senator Robert Peters, also leaned into the fighter monicker, using the word three times on her campaign bio page alone. The rhetorical capture of"fighter" as the Democratic default is now virtually complete, with candidates across the Democratic spectrum emphasizing the monicker, no matter their ideology and governance style. Yet, while Democratic voters want a fighter, they appeared less interested in one focused on fighting against an establishment that has become increasingly rooted in Warren-style progressivism. The combination of the Biss and Ford victories, in addition to the win by Stratton, paint a nuanced picture of what the Democratic base may be seeking in its future candidates. Biss and Ford faced anti-establishment candidates to their left who failed to gain traction. Meanwhile, Stratton bested Krishnamoorthi and Kelly who each hold deeper ties to Washington and the business community. The ideological sweet spot that resonated wasn't simply"left of center." It was a specific formula: credentials that signal competence, rhetoric that signals combat, and funding architecture that keeps the corporate taint off their brand. Candidates who had two of the three won. Candidates who had one lost.Progressivism comes in different flavors, yet it's clear the kind that won in Illinois embraces an experienced, technocratic approach to governance, which accounts for the institutions, paired with the words of a fighter and the media persona to matchMany of these individuals come from backgrounds in academia and governance and run campaigns that take an adversarial approach to the billionaire class. With the top one percent holding over 30 percent of America’s wealth, this message has value. Yet, in a postera where campaigns are marked by multi-million-dollar spending, how to fund a campaign always remains a question. If one relies on small dollar donors and activists like Abughazaleh, they may neglect the institutional-backing and interest group support that propelled a candidate like Biss. If one relies on corporate donors like Krishnamoorthi and Kelly, they may that face accusations of being beholden to big business that Stratton was able to evade by relying on the personal wealth of Pritzker. If one relies on a benevolent billionaire backer, well: “Dare to dream that we ever live in a time when the Illinois Democratic Party and the Cook County Democratic Party are not the personal fiefdom of one person,” former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a backer of Kelly, toldThat's the unresolved tension at the heart of the Progressive Establishment's emerging coalition: it campaigns against the billionaire class while depending, structurally, on a specific kind of wealth. Illinois showed how progressives can resolve the tensions between costly campaigns and independence from corporations via the support of the Pritzker. At presidential scale in 2028 though, there may be no Pritzker available—and no obvious answer to the question of how a credentialed insurgency gets capitalized. In the era of Trump, a Democrat must be a fighter. A brand centered around working with Republicans and cutting deals with the private sector doesn’t jive well with that. However, as an increasingly college-educated party, it’s clear the Democratic base values knowledge and experience. Pair that with a fighter’s rhetoric, and one may just secure their seat within the Progressive Caucus or perhaps even the party’s presidential nomination come 2028.
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