Another primary is in the can. On Tuesday, Illinois held its primaries, which included a host of acrimonious races where pro- Israel, crypto and AI money proliferated.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker got his preferred candidate for Senate in Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton in a display of his political heft as he ponders his own 2028 presidential run.
Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss won in the hotly contested Illinois 9th district, where the American Israel Public Affairs Committee poured money to prop up Laura Fine and former journalist and streamer Kat Abughazaleh came in second.
But the actual results of the races aside, another dynamic playing out across the country is coming to the forefront: Democratic primary voters are showing up in historic numbers, which should make the party feel extraordinarily confident about a blue wave in November — and deeply concern Republicans, if history is any indicator.
Take a look at Illinois. In the Senate race, Democrats accounted for about 69 percent of the 1.7 million votes cast. While Illinois is largely regarded as a blue state, that is still a staggering percentage of the turnout.
Even in 2020, when Joe Biden won the state by a wider margin than Kamala Harris did in 2024, he only won 57 percent of the vote. When Chicago’s own Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, he won with 61.8 percent of the vote.
One could make the argument that the contested primary between Stratton and Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi and Robin Kelly made the race more contested raised the stakes while Republicans almost certainly know they have little to no chance of winning in the land of Lincoln.
But let’s take a look at the primary in Texas, where the Democrats and Republicans both had contested Senate races, with incumbent Sen. John Cornyn facing a primary challenge from Attorney General Ken Paxton, and state Rep. James Talarico beating Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Dallas.
Some 2,165,744 Texans voted in the GOP primary, which will go to a runoff, while 2,311,826 Texans voted in the Democratic primary. And it looks like Hispanic voters are turning out in droves.
In Zapata County, located right in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley on the border with Mexico, only 1,877 people voted for Kamala Harris and 2,970 voted for Donald Trump in 2024. This month, 2,689 Texans voted in the Democratic primary for Senate. In Jim Hogg County, which is more than 90 percent Hispanic, 856 people voted for Harris in 2024; this month, 1,008 people voted in the Democratic primary.
Back in 2024, Texas served as ground zero for the historic Hispanic shift to the right. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) who had decisely won re-election, spiked the football.
“The results tonight, this decisive victory, should shake the Democrat establishment to its core,” he said.
But last week, Cruz was frank.
“We should always be worried about earning the votes of every vote,” he told The Independent.
Ok, but Texas is still blood-red and even if Paxton wins the runoff, Talarico faces significant challenges to flip the state. And many of these majority-Hispanic counties had primaries in municipal races where whoever wins the Democratic primary wins the whole thing.
But let’s take a look at North Carolina, where Democrats have the best shot to flip a Senate seat after Republican Sen. Thom Tillis decided to call it quits. Democrats got their dream candidate in former Gov. Roy Cooper, who won the state in 2016 and 2020 despite Trump being at the top of the ticket. They all but cleared the field for him. On the GOP side, former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley had only meager opposition.
But earlier this month, North Carolina saw 827,742 people turn out in the Democratic primary for Senate while 627,400, or about 56 percent of the vote. For a state like North Carolina that always decides its elections by margins that are akin to Tobacco Road basketball scores, this is a stunning margin.
Tillis, one of the most astute politicians who follows voting trends religiously, offered a warning.
“We’ve got to realize that you always have a negative environment,” he told The Independent. “The off year election after the presidential this is probably going to be a little bit more headwinds because of either energy prices or other things, depending upon how the Iran war works. So we got to be ready.”
And just to put it in context, while in 2024, Republicans had 1 million people vote in the semi-competitive presidential primary in the Tar Heel state, only 698,580 voted for Biden in a non-competitive primary.
To get even more granular, let’s take a look the North Carolina’s 4th district, which includes large pockets of Black voters in Durham, liberal college students at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the highly affluent suburbs . That race featured a rematch from 2022 between Rep. Valerie Foushee and the more progressive Nida Allam.
In 2022, 87,827 people cast their vote in the Democratic primary. This month, 125,655 people cast their vote. The district changed slightly to include the affluent Chatham County after Republicans redrew the congressional map. Still, that shows an increase in Democratic voter enthusiasm.
None of this is to say Democrats are guaranteed a win in November. Poll after poll shows Democratic voters do not like their party leadership. The American electorate still doesn’t really care for the party. And around this time in 2022, Republicans looked slated for a red wave, only to see that momentum blunted by the Dobbs v Jackson decision by the Supreme Court that killed Roe v Wade.
But elections are about fundamentals and momentum. And right now, the Democrats have the ball and have a pretty clear lane to the hoop.
