Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton may be best known among voters for the F-bomb-filled ads she ran to show she had the fight to take on President Donald Trump on her way to winning the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate.
“F−−− Trump,” U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth and others say in the February ads, as Stratton contends: “They said it, not me.”
It was a striking message from the favorite to become the next U.S. senator from Illinois, and one that presciently summed up the Democratic base’s desire for a bit more dynamism in its leaders’ opposition to the Trump administration.
But underrated in Stratton’s story, supporters and friends say, are the more diplomatic skills she built over more than 20 years as a mediator, qualities they see in her approach to government and politics.
And the candidate who rose to the top of the March primary with fiery ads and policy proposals that caught the eye of even the state’s staunchest progressives — a $25 federal minimum wage, abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, endorsing “Medicare for All” — has since shifted into a vastly more low-key general election campaign, turning down some opportunities to appear alongside her opponent.
“She’s really already won over the voters that she needs to win the general election,” said Joanna Klonsky, a Democratic communications strategist who was not affiliated with Stratton’s campaign or any of her competitors’. “She has to demonstrate that she’s not taking anything for granted, but at the same time, she can take it for granted.”
As the presumptive successor to Dick Durbin, the state’s senior senator, who is retiring in January, Stratton, 61, has spent time this summer and fall in Washington meeting with Senate Democrats who could become her colleagues, as well as with members of the party base.
Her election would also further consolidate Gov. JB Pritzker’s influence. The billionaire governor, who picked Stratton as his running mate when she had served less than one term in the Illinois General Assembly, spent $10 million supporting her in the primary, mostly through an outside committee. Stratton’s own campaign fund was far outspent by one of her opponents, U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a prodigious fundraiser.
Of course, Stratton says she’s still working to earn the support of general election voters. She noted she took part in multiple debates during the highly competitive primary, in which she defeated Krishnamoorthi, who ran closer to the political center, and longtime U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly, who at the time had the endorsement of groups including the Congressional Black Caucus’ political arm. That group has since endorsed Stratton for November.
“I’m not taking anything for granted,” Stratton said after speaking to canvassers at an event in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. “My positions are my positions. We’ve been out there.”
Because Illinois held its primary early in the year, Stratton largely avoided the national narratives lionizing or demonizing prominent progressives who competed in later primaries, such as Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed and candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America.
Her Republican opponent, Don Tracy, has used the emergence of progressive candidates like El-Sayed to try to paint Stratton as a supporter of socialism. Stratton, though she backs progressive policies, does not identify as a democratic socialist.
“I am not as much into the categorization as I am in — what kind of lives do I want people to live?” Stratton said. “It’s not like having access to healthcare or making a livable wage is a Democrat or Republican issue. It’s not a progressive issue versus a moderate (one).”
Asked specifically whether she disagreed with democratic socialists on any policy issues, Stratton didn’t name any. Instead, she noted her support for abolishing ICE.
“It wasn’t because I was like — because this is a position that fits into a particular label or category. It was because I’m looking outside and I’m seeing my neighbors,” she said. “I don’t even know if I’d be able to say, ‘Here’s all the things that I’m not.’”
Before tackling progressive policy ideas, Democrats need to stop the figurative bleeding from the Trump administration, Stratton said.
“Flipping the House, taking back the Senate is really about being a check on this president and his administration, and the real damage that they’re doing,” Stratton said, citing her opposition to Republicans’ cutoff of Affordable Care Act subsidies as an example.
She has also aligned herself with many of her potential Democratic colleagues in opposing the war in Iran and Republican-led restrictions on food benefits.
And she’s looking ahead to how she could make her mark in the Senate. Stratton said a couple of committees have piqued her interest: Environment and Public Works, because of her interest in environmental justice and protecting the Great Lakes, and Judiciary, where Durbin is the top Democrat.
On Supreme Court reform, an issue that could come before the Judiciary Committee, Stratton said she’d be open to term limits and even expanding the court.
Asked about data centers, a key issue in midterm races across the country, Stratton stopped short of calling for a moratorium on building the energy-hungry facilities, as some candidates elsewhere have. Instead, like Pritzker, she said the centers shouldn’t raise energy costs and that communities should have a say in where they’re built.
Despite Tracy’s efforts to tie her to socialism, Stratton’s campaign has won the fundraising fight so far. Through June, Stratton’s main campaign fund spent more than $4.7 million, compared with Tracy’s less than $950,000, and Stratton’s campaign said it raised $1.53 million across multiple campaign funds this summer, though it had not yet filed all its reports. Tracy, who previously lent his campaign $2 million, said early this month he had lent it another $1 million-plus, without sharing exactly how much he had raised over the same period.
‘Ambitious’ mediator enters politics
Stratton grew up on the South Side, primarily in the Pill Hill neighborhood, and now lives in Bronzeville. She earned a degree in broadcast journalism from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a law degree from DePaul University.
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She briefly worked as an associate at a law firm, then as a mediator, according to her campaign and her resume included in a county personnel file. She facilitated hundreds of discussions over workplace conflicts and elsewhere, and did mediation and hearing work for local, state and federal government agencies.
She often dealt with employment discrimination cases, including some in which one side alleged racial discrimination. What struck Stratton most about the work, she said, was that even people who came in feeling there was no path forward could eventually compromise.
“Politics can be very divisive,” said Felicia Davis Blakley, a longtime friend who met Stratton through work and is now CEO of the nonprofit Primo Center, “but underneath all of that, there’s some portion of every person who wants the same thing, and I think she uses that kind of kernel as a grounding principle in her work.”
In 2011, Stratton became executive director of the Cook County Justice Advisory Council, charged with implementing community-based approaches to criminal justice reform within the office of County Board President Toni Preckwinkle.
“There’s a sincerity to her,” said former Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who worked under Preckwinkle around the same time. “I don’t equate ambition with, necessarily, disregard for the people you serve. I think she’s been ambitious, and wanted to use her position to help others.”
After leaving the county, Stratton became director of the Center for Public Safety and Justice at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she promoted restorative justice principles and cooperation between police and community leaders, according to Michael Pagano, the former dean of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs who worked with her. She continued working there part time even after winning a seat in the General Assembly, he said.
Stratton’s political origin story dates to around the same time, 2015, when she was caring for her mother, who had Alzheimer’s disease, during the last three years of her life. Her mother died in 2016.
As she has told audiences throughout her Senate campaign, Stratton saw her Democratic state representative, Ken Dunkin, on the news siding with then-Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican, on cuts to funding for childcare and senior services.
She said she wasn’t seeing any solutions to the struggles she was having at home with her mother — and increasingly, she felt someone other than Dunkin needed to represent her.
“At some point, I just said, ‘And why wouldn’t it be me?’” she said.
Stratton won a $6 million legislative primary in 2016, buoyed by an unusual local endorsement from then-President Barack Obama, a former Illinois state senator, and a tide of frustration among the House’s Democratic majority and labor groups with Dunkin, a 13-year incumbent, over stances he’d taken against them and for Rauner.
Years before her election as a state representative, Stratton had attended a leadership training program for women interested in political office, thinking she might run for judge. But at that time she didn’t see a path from the state House to lieutenant governor to U.S. Senate nominee, she recalled in a recent interview in her campaign office.
During the first Trump administration, her thoughts about her political life grew. She got the tattoo on her wrist that occasionally flashes into view when she speaks with her hands at campaign stops: the word “persist.”
It invokes then-Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s dig at Democratic U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren nearly a decade ago, which has since become something of a feminist rallying cry: “Nevertheless, she persisted.”
“I just remember thinking this is going to be a time that we’re going to have to push through some really hard moments,” said Stratton, who got Warren’s endorsement in the Senate primary.
The lieutenant governor’s portfolio
Stratton came into the state House willing to “really get into the grind of the policy,” said state Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford, a Democrat from Maywood who worked with her on an initiative — eventually signed into law — to limit expulsions of preschoolers.
But Stratton wasn’t there long: Pritzker announced she was his pick for lieutenant governor just a year and a half after she took office.
The position has a reputation among insiders as a “lite gov” with few statutory responsibilities, but after Pritzker and Stratton won, supporters said, she took the role in stride.
“She was chosen for this time, and she seized it well,” Lightford said.
In a key policy push, Stratton has advocated for women’s health, particularly for Black mothers, citing racial disparities in the state’s maternal mortality rates. One of her top legislative priorities as lieutenant governor was a bill, now law, requiring private insurers to cover some services from doulas and midwives. The law also set a path for competitive Medicaid reimbursement for doulas, lactation consultants and other providers.
Another top item in her portfolio: fulfilling the promises of the Restore, Reinvest and Renew program, known as R3, which aimed to put tax dollars from cannabis sales into the communities most affected by the war on drugs.
Through R3, Illinois has awarded at least $330 million to organizations in those communities, according to the state. In her interview with the Tribune, Stratton cited the program as her most significant accomplishment as lieutenant governor.
At the same time, recent state audits found Stratton’s office failed to fill positions on the R3 board in a timely manner, which Stratton attributed in her interview to the time it took to find people with the qualifications and capacity to serve. Lightford, who served on the board, contended the original timeline was unrealistic given the COVID-19 pandemic, which emerged shortly after the law creating the board was enacted.
Not every item in Stratton’s portfolio has gone according to plan. In July 2020, she and Pritzker announced what was billed as a four-year “transformation” of the Department of Juvenile Justice.
That plan included removing youths from five large juvenile detention centers and repurposing the facilities, according to WTTW reporting at the time.
Today, those five facilities are still open, though one has been rebranded with additional programming and youths were moved out of another after a fire. The department also added a facility, meant to take a more therapeutic approach than the existing ones, but so far the center is a “promise not yet realized,” said Jennifer Vollen-Katz, executive director of the John Howard Association.
The most recent “quarterly update” posted on the department’s landing page is dated two years ago, though a spokesperson provided an internal document reflecting plans to continue renovating multiple youth detention centers and to relocate the one in Chicago.
Asked about the failure to meet the project’s stated goals, Stratton cited additional community investments and new leadership at the department.
“The goal still remains that we want to keep working towards that end,” Stratton said. “Will it be done by the time I’m — by January? I don’t know if I see that as being the final goal, but I do feel like we’ve been making progress.”
In what may reflect a broader shift in progressive Democrats’ style over the last five years, Stratton has stopped introducing herself with her pronouns, she/her, at government news conferences, where she often appears alongside Pritzker.
“I’m an ally, and I am and always have been,” Stratton said when asked about the change, adding that she would continue to protect “everyone, including everyone in our LGBTQ+ community, including trans children.”
“There was just a specific time that it felt like it was just really hard for people that I’m allied with, and none of that has changed,” she said.
Looking forward — and to Washington
Throughout the summer, Stratton held fundraisers and meet-and-greets with local Democratic groups. She also coordinated her campaign with the Democratic Party of Illinois, appearing on the bill or campaigning with candidates in other races.
Still, she hasn’t hosted many of the large rallies associated with more competitive races around the country. And Tracy has complained that she has agreed to only one joint appearance, scheduled for late October on WTTW.
“I look forward to the debate, where I can show the contrast between someone who’s going to fight to raise wages and expand access to healthcare versus someone who said that the rising costs due to the war in Iran are a quote-unquote ‘required sacrifice,’” she said, referring to comments Tracy made in August that were reported in the Peoria Journal Star.
Pritzker said he and Stratton can make their case to independent voters through their work.
“We’re in our jobs every single day, so we’ve been proving ourselves every day,” Pritzker said last month after remarks at the ribbon-cutting for a manufacturing facility in Monee. “I think people kind of know where we stand.”
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Beyond bringing generational change to the Senate seat — she is more than two decades younger than the retiring Durbin — Stratton would carry vastly different life experience as a mother of four and a daughter of the city.
She’s a marathoner who still likes to go out and dance, according to both the candidate and her friends. She has posted social media videos of herself dancing and described herself in one as a “house head,” a term for fans of house music, techno’s warmer-sounding, Chicago-born cousin.
And even if the “F−−− Trump” ads are no longer the centerpiece of her campaign, she’s kept that same zeal with her base of supporters.
A T-shirt ($32) and a set of two campaign buttons ($10) that repeat the profanity about Trump are available in her online campaign store.