Hours after winning the toughest race of her decade-long political career, Democratic Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton wasn’t easing up Wednesday morning as she looked ahead to November, when she could become just the sixth Black woman — and the second from Illinois — to be elected to the U.S. Senate.
In heavily Democratic Illinois, Stratton, who hails from Chicago’s South Side, enters the general election race as the prohibitive favorite to replace retiring Sen. Dick Durbin, whose 30-year tenure ends in January. Her Republican opponent is former Illinois GOP Chair Don Tracy of Springfield.
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“I’m going to work hard every single day to make sure that I can earn the support of those that perhaps were not with me in this primary campaign,” Stratton told reporters before greeting commuters in the Great Hall at Chicago Union Station. “And I want to represent all Illinoisans, and I want to take their voices with me.”
Stratton’s victory in Tuesday’s Democratic primary also was a decisive one for billionaire Gov. JB Pritzker, who backed his two-time running mate with at least $5 million given to Illinois Future, an ostensibly independent political action committee staffed by veterans of his political operation. Her win further demonstrated Pritzker’s primacy in Illinois Democratic politics as he pursues a rare third term as governor in November and considers a potential 2028 presidential run.
With 93% of the estimated vote tallied, Stratton defeated five-term U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Schaumburg by nearly 7 percentage points, 40.1% to 33.2%, in the 10-way race, according to unofficial results. Seven-term Rep. Robin Kelly of Lynwood finished a distant third with 18.1%. Stratton was also backed by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who will become Illinois’ senior senator when Durbin retires.
Stratton drew votes from across the state. More than half her total came from Cook County, but she carried at least 46 of Illinois’ other 101 counties, from the Wisconsin border to the Kentucky state line.
The margin was notable given the financial firepower arrayed against her. Krishnamoorthi had stockpiled nearly $30.5 million — the second-largest fundraising haul among federal candidates nationally this election cycle — and spent more than $25 million on television ads that blanketed the state beginning last July. Outside groups aligned with his supporters added to that total.
One of the more aggressive outside spending efforts against her came from Fairshake, a pro-cryptocurrency super PAC funded in part by donors who have also contributed to Krishnamoorthi’s campaign and supported President Donald Trump.
While the Republican Senate primary was a relatively low-cost race with little outside spending, Stratton said she’s prepared for whatever opposition might arise in the coming months.
The outside spending from pro-crypto groups wasn’t really about pushing back on industry regulations, Stratton contended, but rather “because they know that I’m somebody that’s going to stand up for working families, stand up to Donald Trump.”
“They clearly had the intention of trying to silence a voice like mine,” she said Wednesday. “And as I said last night, a voice like mine is not always represented in the United States Senate, but it should be.”
A Stratton victory in November would carry significant historical weight.
More than three decades after former Illinois Democratic Sen. Carol Moseley Braun became the first Black woman elected to the Senate, Stratton would become only the sixth. She would join current Democratic Sens. Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, who last year became the first Black women to serve concurrently. Stratton would help set a new record at three. And she and Duckworth, who is Asian American, would be the first women of color to represent the same state in the Senate at the same time.
“Making sure that our voices, the voices of our communities — and the entire state, of course — would be right at the center of policymaking is a big deal because it’s never happened before, and it’s going to bring a much needed perspective to what we need to do to move our party forward, to move our state forward and to move our country forward,” Stratton said.
Anyone looking for a clear sense of broader Democratic voter sentiment in Illinois primaries up and down Tuesday’s ballot was likely disappointed as the outcome of each major race reflected a unique set of circumstances. But Stratton was confident her progressive platform — which includes abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, immediately raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $25 per hour, establishing universal health care coverage, and aggressively confronting the Trump administration — “resonated all across the state … in ways that many were very surprised” by.
“Democratic voters want to know that somebody is going to fight for them,” Stratton said. “Democratic voters, and voters in general, are looking at Washington, D.C., and don’t see their lives improving, regardless of who’s in office.”
At Stratton’s election night celebration at CineCity Studios Chicago on the Near West Side, Pritzker took the stage to praise his longtime partner and their work together in Springfield. “A lot of people have suggested this was personal to me,” Pritzker said before Stratton gave her victory speech. “They were right. It was.”
Should both win in November, Pritzker, who had a sometimes-tense relationship with Durbin, would have perhaps his strongest ally yet in Washington as he embarks on a third term and contemplates a White House bid.
Stratton, who was a first-term state representative when Pritzker chose her as his running mate in 2018, said she feels no need to distance herself from the governor.
“What would be the reason for separating myself?” she said, pointing to a record that includes raising the Illinois minimum wage to $15 per hour, bringing stability to the state’s chronically shaky finances, and making “Illinois an island for reproductive freedom.”
“That’s what people want to see. They want to know that their leaders are getting things done,” Stratton said. “When we ran, we ran saying we’re going to think big for Illinois, and we’re going to get big things done, and we’ve delivered. That is the blueprint for what we need in Washington.”
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Still, Stratton and Pritzker may have some work ahead to consolidate support among Black voters, both in Illinois and nationally, after some of Kelly’s supporters in the Congressional Black Caucus criticized the governor for heavy-handed involvement on behalf of his former running mate.
A last-minute dispute also shadowed the final days of the campaign, when Stratton claimed a posthumous endorsement from the Rev. Jesse Jackson. After conflicting accounts emerged, Jackson’s son Yusef issued a statement Monday saying the civil rights icon and his Rainbow PUSH Coalition had begun but not completed an endorsement process before Jackson’s death last month.
In their concession speeches Tuesday night, both Krishnamoorthi and Kelly acknowledged Pritzker’s influence on the outcome.
Speaking to supporters in a Westin hotel ballroom on the Near North Side, Krishnamoorthi thanked county Democratic Party chairs across the state who “had the courage to defy the party establishment and endorse the candidate with 29 letters in his name,” along with 14 labor unions and his family. Though he raised roughly 10 times as much money for his campaign as either of the other top rivals, Krishnamoorthi said the “nearly 90,000” individuals who contributed to his campaign committees over the past decade “enabled me to compete against very wealthy interests.”
Kelly, speaking at the historic South Shore Cultural Center, returned to a theme she had sounded throughout the campaign — that the dominance of big money in high-profile races discourages capable people from seeking office.
“It is hard to be, especially in Illinois, unbought and unbossed,” Kelly said.
Also seeking the Democratic nomination were Kevin Ryan, Steve Botsford Jr., Bryan Maxwell, Jonathan Dean, Sean Brown, Awisi Bustos and Christopher Swann. They accounted for 8.6% of the estimated votes counted.
The scale of Tracy’s challenge in November was visible in Tuesday’s turnout figures: Fewer than 600,000 ballots were cast statewide in the Republican Senate primary, compared with nearly 1.2 million on the Democratic side, according to unofficial results.
The last Republican elected to the Senate from Illinois was Mark Kirk in 2010, and the GOP’s last statewide victories came in 2014, when Bruce Rauner was elected governor and Judy Baar Topinka won the race for state comptroller.
Tracy’s own record as state party chair offers little encouragement: He was ousted in 2024 amid factional infighting after failing to rebuild the Illinois GOP during his three-year tenure. His successor as chair, Kathy Salvi, lost the 2022 Senate race to Duckworth by more than 15 points; Durbin defeated his 2020 Republican opponent, Lake County Sheriff Mark Curran, by 16 points.
Tracy drove three hours north from Springfield on Wednesday morning to attend a GOP unity breakfast in Naperville alongside other statewide and local Republican candidates and officials.
Tracy, who lost a state Senate race as a Democrat in 2002 and finished third out of six in the Republican lieutenant governor primary race in 2010, painted himself as a moderate bridge-builder this election.
In his remarks Tuesday night in Springfield, he said Stratton was out of touch with mainstream voters and called her the “most extreme far-left U.S. Senate candidate” in the state’s history.
A lawyer and a member of the family that owns food redistributor Dot Foods, Tracy said he would “self-fund to a reasonable extent” and said he would attract financial support for his candidacy from outside Republican sources by running a great campaign.
“I’ve been raising money for Republican candidates for the last 20 years, including as state chairman, and so I know there’s resources in this state and nationally,” Tracy said. “With their help, we’ll be competitive.”
GOP megadonors who’ve helped bankroll previous campaigns mostly sat out the primaries, and it remains to be seen whether any of them will open their checkbooks for the general election.
baiduhai’s Gregory Royal Pratt and Talia Soglin contributed.