Main Takeaways From 3/17 Primaries

By: Sam Massey

Inhabitants of Illinois voted on March 17th in primaries that were supposed to be sleepy mid-cycle affairs, with only an incumbent governor practically running unopposed, a Senate seat opening up, a handful of competitive House races in Chicago’s collar districts. What emerged instead was a diagnostic X-ray of the American left’s structural problems and residual strengths. The left needs to build on these strengths and address our problems before the next cycle.

Progressives built multiracial coalitions, proved they could win at statewide scale when properly organized, and showed up with enough votes to sweep nearly every competitive race. They also lost a good amount of them. The gap between the left’s electoral potential and its actual results has never been clearer, and the Illinois results isolate exactly where the breakdown occurs: in the unglamorous work of consolidation, the willingness to clear fields, and the organizational muscle required to turn scattered enthusiasm into disciplined victories. Here are my 3 main takeaways from the Illinois Primaries.

1. Lack of consolidation behind progressive candidates is directly killing leftist momentum at-large

The left has a numbers problem right now, and it’s self-inflicted. While there are one to two candidates in a primary running on an establishment message, there are three to five progressives.

This is best shown in IL-8, where Melissa Bean won with just 31.8% while Junaid Ahmed pulled 26.6%. Add even a fraction of the votes scattered among Yasmeen Bankole (9.6%), Kevin Morrison (9.0%), and Dan Tully (12.7%), and Bean loses. In IL-2, Donna Miller secured the Democratic nomination with 40.4% of the vote in an incredibly crowded 12-person primary. Among the field was Warren-endorsed Robert Peters, who barely reached over 10% himself due to the sheer number of candidates.

The pattern held in IL-7, where La Shawn Ford won with 24.1% in a twelve-candidate scrum, and in IL-9, where progressive Daniel Biss edged out Kat Abughazaleh 29.6% to 25.9% while Laura Fine took another 20.4%. While Biss is a progressive in an American political context, Abughazaleh was the ideal candidate for the national left.

Barely a single winner in these contested races broke 40%, with only Miller in IL-2 barely clearing it. The left had the numbers of voters, but our true Achilles heel is clear. What the movement lacks is a mechanism to prevent three, four, or five progressive candidates from cannibalizing each other while establishment-backed candidates cruise through with pluralities. Especially in races that should be easy wins. There is a strong chance that if a runoff system was in place in Illinois, IL-8 and IL-9 would be represented in Congress by Junaid Ahmed and Kat Abughazaleh next session.

This isn’t a new problem, of course. One of the problems in 2020 is that progressives did not consolidate around Bernie Sanders at the rate or magnitude that the establishment consolidated behind Biden. Remember, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out and endorsed Biden within 24 hours of each other. Warren would never endorse Sanders. Illinois 2026 shows it’s metastasizing. Progressive organizations, despite undeniable growth, still lack the coordination infrastructure to clear fields the way centrist and pro-Israel coalitions do. The left can’t keep running 5 candidates when the establishment systematically consolidates around 1. All it does is allow the establishment to win key races.

2. Despite high profile House losses, Juliana Stratton’s Senate win is still a signal of strength for the American Left

Juliana Stratton won the Illinois Democratic Senate primary with 40.2% of the vote, defeating Raja Krishnamoorthi (33.1%) and Robin Kelly (18.1%) in a race that became a proving ground for whether progressive politics could survive at statewide scale.

The context, though, made her win even more significant. Progressives had just absorbed a string of House losses across the state: AIPAC-backed candidates won in IL-2 and IL-8, the preferred progressive lost in IL-9, and IL-7 went to a progressive who has served in the Illinois legislature since 2007. The narrative was writing itself: the left can’t consolidate, can’t compete, can’t win outside safe districts. Then Stratton became the only candidate in any contested primary to decisively break 40%.

She did it despite being dramatically outspent on the candidate side. Stratton raised $2.8 million compared to Krishnamoorthi’s $24 million, a 9-to-1 advantage that would serve as an uphill battle for any candidate. What closed the gap was $16.3 million in outside spending supporting Stratton, compared to just $680,000 backing Krishnamoorthi. Labor unions, progressive organizations, grassroots groups, and Governor JB Pritzker poured resources into a statewide race and proved they could compete with establishment money when properly mobilized.

Senate races are structurally harder for progressives to win than House races. They require broader coalitions, higher name recognition, and the ability to organize across diverse geographies rather than in a single urban district.

Stratton won in that arena, carrying massive margins in the Chicago inner city and overperforming in the suburbs (which include but are not limited to Raja’s own House seat). The outcome was not one of inches, but by seven points statewide. The House losses matter. But the Senate win matters more. It’s the difference between “progressives are collapsing” and “progressives can’t consolidate, but when they do, they win big.”

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3. Overperformances with minority demographics by leftist candidates again disproves the myth that American progressive politics is overwhelmingly white

The myth that progressive politics is a white phenomenon keeps getting resurrected. It dies down with wins that structurally prove otherwise, like Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York City last year (where CNN exit polls showed him winning 57% of Black voters, 52% of Latino voters, and 62% of Asian voters, compared to just 45% of white voters). His establishment opponent, Andrew Cuomo, ran a whiter coalition (46% white, 38% Black, 39% Latino). The rhetoric gets revisited every time establishment talking heads need to discredit the leftist movement. In Illinois, this myth died again.

Precinct-level data from IL-9, as articulated by Adam Carlson with data provided by VoteHub, showed Kat Abughazaleh, the leftist candidate, overperformed in areas with the highest concentrations of Black voters (west and south Evanston). Daniel Biss, who won the race, actually did best in the whitest parts of the district.

The clearest evidence came from the Senate race. Juliana Stratton, a Black woman running as a progressive, won 40.2% of the vote. Robin Kelly, also a Black woman but backed by big interests and the establishment, took home just 18.1%. Black voters split along ideological lines, and they chose the progressive by 22 points.

This isn’t something to ignore. It’s a pattern that keeps appearing in data across states the deeper we get into primary season. The “progressive base is white college kids” narrative is empirically false. Again, it persists because it’s useful. It lets centrists dismiss progressive losses as the result of demographic narrowness, rather than organizational failure or financial disadvantage. The story isn’t that progressives can’t win Black and Latino voters. It’s that they did win them, and still lost because they couldn’t consolidate.

Conclusion

The Illinois primaries revealed the crisis of progressive execution. More than endorsements, more than funding, more than use of new media. Juliana Stratton proved that when the left consolidates, it wins decisively, even against better-funded establishment opponents, even at statewide scale. Precinct data from IL-9 and the Senate race demolished the myth that progressive politics can’t build multiracial coalitions. But those victories and moral wins don’t change the fact that AIPAC-backed candidates and others bought by big interests won congressional primaries they should have lost. And preferred progressives came in second when they had the votes to come in first if the left had consolidated. Chicago’s left still can’t do what New York’s left has learned to do: pick one candidate, clear the field, and finish the job. Until progressive organizations build the discipline to consolidate before primaries rather than hope for runoffs to save them, the establishment will keep winning pluralities in fields the left should dominate.