Illinois Looks Settled

The governor’s race already looks settled. They are selling Durbin’s seat the same way.

March 17 named the tickets. Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton won the Democratic nomination with 40.4 percent. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi took 32.7. Rep. Robin Kelly took 18.3. Former Illinois Republican Party chair Don Tracy won his primary with 40 percent over attorney Jeannie Evans at 22.8. The general is November 3.

They have sat for television. They have not sat together.

You can read my blog on the 2026 Illinois governor’s race here.

WTTW put Tracy on Chicago Tonight April 1, a week after the primary. Birthright citizenship was at the Court that day. He said the current rule is “weird,” that a vacation birth or an illegal presence should not mint a citizen, and that he would wait on the justices. He said he is running because he has been a lawyer and a small-business owner who had to make payroll.

Watch Tracy here: [VIDEO]

Five days later the same program put Stratton in the same chair. Medicare for All. No war in Iran on the terms Trump set. Health care as a right. She said nine rural safety-net hospitals could close. The host played Tracy’s line on government-run insurance. She pointed at Illinois: lower drug prices, a billion dollars in medical debt erased, the birth-equity work she led.

Watch Stratton here: [VIDEO]

That is the closest the race has come to a joint appearance. They have not debated. Tracy told The Center Square in July she would not lock a date. Her spokesman said she “welcomes the opportunity.” I have not seen a stage on the calendar.

Stratton has done more national television. Meet the Press NOW after the primary: abolish ICE, Kristen Welker asking if she was left of the party, Stratton answering with Operation Midway Blitz and “this agency cannot be reformed.” She was on the same show in December 2025 as a primary candidate. CNN’s The Lead. Ana Navarro in late August. USA TODAY’s The Excerpt last week, the father-who-could-not-go-to-the-Capitol story. Chicago Newsroom 2.0 in June.

Tracy has done more downstate and public radio. Illinois Public Media’s 21st Show at the end of July — fifty minutes in Urbana on Iran, immigration, the filibuster, and what he calls Stratton’s “extreme socialist ideas.” WSIU In Focus September 2. Rockford News First September 4; they asked Stratton that week and she was unavailable. Capitol News Illinois sat with him in July; he called himself the underdog. Saturday he was in Mt. Sterling telling a GOP dinner, “Don’t vote for crazy, vote for Don Tracy.” The State Journal-Register caught both of them separately in mid-August and printed it September 17. FOX 32’s Paris Schutz had him when he announced.

The polls are thinner than the interviews.

I cannot find a public head-to-head general-election poll of Stratton versus Tracy. Pollsmax said so as of September 20: “No General Election Polls Yet.” The New York Times Illinois Senate page still carries the March primary tables. What exists instead is the rating and the market. Cook Political Report, Inside Elections, RealClearPolitics, Fox News: Solid D. Sabato, Decision Desk, The Economist: Safe D. Kalshi this morning: Stratton about 98 cents. Polymarket: about 96 percent. One model that invents a number without a survey prints Stratton 60, Tracy 40. That is a guess dressed as math. I am recording the guess. I am not treating it as a field poll.

On the statewide evidence since 2010, this is not a toss-up. Mark Kirk won that year and lost to Tammy Duckworth in 2016. No Republican has won a statewide race here in a decade. Harris carried Illinois by about 11 points in 2024. Biden had 17 in 2020. Tracy has never won statewide. He is 76. As of June 30 he had raised about $2.5 million to Stratton’s $5.9 million. Forecasters are not waiting on a late suburban swing. I am not calling them liars. I am asking a narrower question than they are.

Stratton went hard left to win the primary. That is not a slur. That is the platform she ran. Abolish ICE, on Meet the Press and in the victory speech. A $25 federal minimum wage. Medicare for All. The February ad had six people, including Sen. Tammy Duckworth, saying the two-word sentence about Donald Trump. Her line in the spot: “They said it. I didn’t.” Pritzker put at least $5 million into Illinois Future, the PAC that spent about $12 million to lift her over Krishnamoorthi. You do not talk that way if you think you have to persuade Naperville twice.

She also told the primary she would not vote for Chuck Schumer as Democrat leader. Krishnamoorthi said he would hear the pitch. Kelly said it depended on who else ran. Stratton made it a contrast. “I’m the only person on this stage that has said so.” The morning after she won she told reporters the position had not changed. Voters were “fed up with business as usual.” Fox called it a snub. Illinois should be a gimme for her. Snubbing the man who still runs the caucus is not how a gimme usually talks.

Did he endorse her? Not in the primary. Duckworth did. Pritzker did. After the race was called, Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand put out the institutional sentence: proud to congratulate her, excited to welcome her as the next senator from Illinois in November. That is a congratulations. That is not a primary endorsement. He needs the seat. She already told him she will not vote to keep him as the Democrat leader. Those two facts can live in the same building. They do not mean he will go out of his way if DuPage gets difficult.

Cook County will take her. I am not pretending otherwise. Cook is where Democratic statewide candidates go to cash the check. Harris won it by about 42 points in 2024. Pritzker won it by about 50 in 2022. Stratton is a Hyde Park lieutenant governor who just won a Chicago-heavy primary. The city and the county are not the puzzle.

The puzzle is the rest of the Chicago area. DuPage, Lake, Will, Kane, McHenry. Sometimes Kendall. That ring is where Illinois statewide races are actually decided, because downstate can run the table and still lose if the collars stay with Cook. In 2024 Harris still took DuPage by 13, Lake by 21, Kane by 9. Will was almost a coin flip, Harris by about a point and a half. McHenry went to Trump by 5. Every one of those counties also moved toward Republicans from 2020. Will shifted about 7 points. DuPage about 5. Kane about 5. Cook itself shifted about 8 toward Trump and still buried him.

That is the map I am watching. Not Cairo. Not Mt. Sterling, even though Tracy is from there. The Chicago-area suburbs. A nominee who ran to abolish ICE and raise the federal floor to $25 is asking those counties to treat 2024 as an exception. Maybe they will. Lake and DuPage have been doing that for a decade. Will and McHenry have been less polite about it. I am not calling November from a 2024 presidential table. I am saying if there is a race at all, it lives in those five counties, not in the 96 that Tracy can already read on a road map.

Durbin announced his retirement on April 23, 2025, from Springfield. He has held the seat since 1997. When he leaves, Tracy’s line is that every statewide officeholder will live in Chicago or Cook. That is true as a map. Whitfield Harrington Jr. of the American Center Party is also on the November ballot. I am recording that he exists.

I will listen if she starts talking like a senator who needs DuPage. So far she has talked like a lieutenant governor who already has Cook.