The primary election that is expected to determine who will be elected to the Senate post being vacated by Dick Durbin is next week. In the past I’ve mentioned how closely aligned the main Democratic candidates were on the policy front. There were three planks: fight Trump, abolish ICE, Medicare for All. Otherwise the campaign was largely what’s called a valence campaign—the candidates competed on how hard they would fight and how urgent they thought these policies were.
A week or so ago something changed. Although all three continue to campaign against President Trump and the Republicans, they are openly campaigning against each other as well. All three of the leading candidates and the PACs that support them are running strongly negative ads against their Democratic opponents. Candidates are being tarred as being financed by “MAGA donors”. That phrase is used repeatedly. I do not recall a Senate campaign in Illinois in which the candidates attacked each other quite this aggressively.
One of the things that alienates me is the constant use of the word fight. Every candidate promises to fight. I don’t want a senator who fights. I want a senator who thinks, discusses, and legislates. In the present climate “fight” seems to me a particularly poor choice of words. Legislators are supposed to deliberate and persuade, not simply posture for combat.
Julia Stratton is obviously the candidate preferred by party leaders—she’s been endorsed by the governor and other statewide officials. From that I infer that she is considered a reliable party vote. The other two appear to be House backbenchers.
I expect turnout to be low, which means that anything could happen. Watching the ads, I have the strong impression that every message has been carefully focus-grouped to appeal to the mythical “Democratic primary voter”. The difficulty is that although I am a Democrat and I vote in the primaries, I apparently do not resemble that voter very closely.
Let me second the disdain for the word fight. What a load of nonsense. It’s a meaningless term in the context of their kind of work. A good Senator would work hard, would argue their points, would act independently when merited and compromise when needed to achieve better outcomes for his state. They might even work with the opposition to create better laws for the nation. But fight? Bah! I think nearly every lawyer ad on TV has the lawyers using the word also and wonder if it’s a carry over from those ads?
Steve