Tag Archives: Marie Newman

Rep. Budd Continues to Lead in NC; Winner Finally Declared in IL-13

By Jim Ellis — July 7, 2022

Senate

US Rep. Ted Budd (R-Advance)

North Carolina: Rep. Budd Continues to Lead — The Trafalgar Group recently tested the North Carolina Senate race (June 29-July 1; 1,068 likely North Carolina general election voters; multiple sampling techniques) and, like all but one pollster since the May 17 primary, finds US Rep. Ted Budd (R-Advance) leading former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley (D) by a slim margin, 48-45 percent, in this case. This is the fifth released post-primary survey, and all show both candidates in the 40s. Rep. Budd leads in four of the five published polls, with an average edge of 4.5 percentage points. Beasley’s only advantage, 44-40 percent, came in the June 8-12 Survey USA poll.

House

IL-6: Ex-Rep. Lipinski Considers — Former Chicago area US Rep. Dan Lipinski (D) said yesterday he is considering entering the 6th District race as a “centrist Independent” either in this election or the next. Rep. Lipinski lost the 2020 Democratic primary to progressive left challenger Marie Newman who was then defeated in this year’s 6th District Democratic primary. Lipinksi would ostensibly challenge the victor from that nomination campaign, Rep. Sean Casten (D-Downers Grove). To qualify as an Independent, Lipinski would have to submit valid petition signatures from 5,000 registered district voters by July 25.

His entry this year is unlikely. Running as an Independent wouldn’t give him much of a chance to win, but he could draw enough support to throw the seat to Republican Keith Pekau, the Orland Park mayor who won the 6th District GOP nomination. The latter outcome would be a real possibility since the FiveThirtyEight data organization rates this district as a D+6, meaning it could potentially flip in a wave Republican year.

IL-13: Republican Winner Declared — It is now official that conservative educator Regan Deering has won the close Republican primary campaign in new District 13. She defeated former federal prosecutor Jesse Reising by a tight 35-33 percent margin. She now advances to the general election to face former Obama Administration official Nikki Budzinski (D).

The 13th is a newly created open seat that stretches in the form of a snake from the Champaign/Urbana area through Decatur and Springfield before ending in East St. Louis. FiveThirtyEight rates the seat D+7. The Dave’s Redistricting App calculates the partisan lean as 53.5 – 41.8 percent in favor of the Democrats, so it is obvious that Budzinski begins the general election campaign as the favorite to win in November. The new 13th is the by-product of Reps. Mary Miller (R-Oakland) and Rodney Davis (R-Taylorville) being paired in the new 15th CD.

NY-19: Democrat Still Trails, but Closer — Special election Democratic candidate Pat Ryan, the Ulster County Executive, just countered an earlier Triton Research poll, which posted Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro (R) to a substantial 52-38 percent lead. The Ryan internal Public Policy Polling survey (June 29-30; 581 NY-19 general election voters) finds Molinaro holding a 43-40 percent edge.

The PPP poll is confusing in that it tests NY-19’s general election voters. The Ryan-Molinaro election, however, is a special election in the current 19th CD to fill the balance of Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado’s (D) final months of the US House term to which he was elected in 2020.

For the general election, regardless of whether he wins or loses the special election, Ryan is running in the new 18th CD. There, he will face Republican state Assemblyman Colin Schmitt (R-New Windsor). The NY-19 special election is scheduled for Aug. 23, concurrent with the regular election primary. Thus, Ryan will be running for two different House seats on the same day.

Biden Wins Easily; Lipinski Loses

By Jim Ellis

Former vice president and 2020 presidential candidate, Joe Biden (D)

March 18, 2020 — In a night that was originally scheduled to have two full state primaries and two stand-alone presidential contests that would determine if a Democratic candidate could reach majority support on the first ballot, last night’s results proved somewhat anticlimactic.

Voters in Arizona, Florida, and Illinois cast their ballots, with only the latter state conducting its full primary. Ohio, which also had its statewide primary scheduled for yesterday, postponed their vote likely to June 2 because of COVID-19 virus precaution.

As expected, former vice president Joe Biden wrapped up three easy victories, beginning with capturing the Florida primary with a whopping 62-23 percent margin over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) from a Democratic electorate that topped 1.72 million voters. The total includes the early votes, even though the outcome of this stand-alone primary election became a foregone conclusion just after Super Tuesday.

The vote totals were somewhat closer in Illinois, but still a landslide victory for Biden. The former vice president captured 59 percent of the Land of Lincoln Democratic vote as compared to 36 percent for Sen. Sanders. The turnout here was just slightly over 1.5 million, but the entire statewide and district office campaigns were also on this ballot, which helps accounts for what appears to be a fairly large turnout.

In Arizona, the race was much closer, as Biden’s victory margin rather surprisingly dropped to 44-31 percent with approximately 12 percent of the ballots outstanding. The turnout is not expected to reach 600,000 when all the ballots are counted. A quarter of the Arizona electorate voted for one of the also-ran candidates, which compares to 15 percent doing so in Florida and just five percent in Illinois.

Delegate wise, Biden looks to have captured about 159 Florida delegate votes with Sen. Sanders only clinching 60 bound first ballot delegates. The Illinois total projects a 95-60 Biden advantage, while in Arizona the total split looks to be approximately 39-28 if the present pattern continues. Without the Ohio primary taking place, the total delegate universe yesterday was 441, with Biden unofficially clinching 293 of them, or 66 percent of the March 17 bound first-ballot votes.

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IL-3: The Primary Re-match

By Jim Ellis

Illinois media consultant Marie Newman in a campaign ad

May 8, 2019 — One of the previous election cycle’s most contested primaries was decided early, in March of 2018, when veteran Illinois Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Western Springs/Oak Lawn) eked out a 51-49 percent victory over media consultant Marie Newman. The challenger, who ran a spirited campaign, did so with the backing of many national left-of-center organizations.

Soon after the primary ended, Newman indicated that she would return for a re-match in 2020 and a group of organization leaders yesterday jointly announced their support for her.

Representatives from EMILY’s List, MoveOn, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Democracy for America are pledging to independently spend in order to help Newman unseat Rep. Lipinski. In the last campaign, these groups and others combined to provide over $1.6 million in outside expenditures to supplement Newman’s own campaign spending, which exceeded $1.475 million.

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More on the Illinois Primary Results

By Jim Ellis

March 22, 2018 — Tuesday night’s big stories in the Illinois primary were Gov. Bruce Rauner (R) having a difficult time in winning a close Republican primary, and Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Western Springs) just barely surviving his Democratic primary challenge. Venture capitalist J.B. Pritzker successfully captured the Democratic gubernatorial nomination with a margin greater than polling had predicted.

Gov. Bruce Rauner (R) | RGA

Gov. Bruce Rauner (R) | RGA

Gov. Rauner scored only a 51.5 – 48.5 percent win over state Rep. Jeanne Ives (R-Wheaton) in a primary result that finds the state chief executive’s GOP political base eroding. While spending over $60 million in the primary campaign against just $3 million-plus for Ives, the 20:1 resource advantage only proved good for a three percentage point win with still 294 precincts not fully reporting as of this writing. The 351,086 to 330,227 vote totals represent 97 percent of the recorded voting universe. Mathematically, however, there are not enough uncounted votes remaining in Ives’ areas of strength for her to overcome the current statewide deficit.

In the 3rd District House race, seven-term Rep. Lipinski appears to have scored a narrow victory with almost all Cook County precincts reporting. Lipinski carried Cook County with 51.7 percent, a total that will likely rise a bit once all the votes are counted. His opponent, media consultant Marie Newman, won Will County with 58.6 percent of the vote and took the district’s sliver of DuPage County with a mere 55 to 34 vote margin. But, her 1,256 vote lead coming into Cook County was not substantial enough to defeat Lipinski there, which resulted in her district-wide loss.

Lipinski is one of the few remaining Blue Dog Democrats, while Newman enjoyed support from the Bernie Sanders’ wing of the Democratic Party along with major backing from national liberal organizations. The turnout will exceed 90,000 voters once all of the ballots are recorded. When all totals are official, the voter turnout percentage here will hover somewhere in the 45-50 percent range.

In other key congressional races, the Democratic primary in the state’s 6th District has flip-flopped back and forth in a very close contest between financial advisor Kelly Mazeski and clean energy company executive Sean Casten. Mazeski initially was in the lead but in the end, Casten pulled ahead when all 640 precincts were able to report vote totals. Casten captured about 30 percent of the vote (18,863) to Mazeski’s 26.5 percent (16,686). Five other candidates were on the ballot, and cumulatively they garnered 44.2 percent of the vote. Now Casten will challenge veteran Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Wheaton) who was unopposed in his primary.

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Yesterday’s Illinois Primary

By Jim Ellis

March 21, 2018 — Land of Lincoln voters went to the polls yesterday to vote in the nation’s second primary of the 2018 midterm election season.

2018-elections-open-seats-185The headliner of Election Day was the gubernatorial primary, as Gov. Bruce Rauner (R), sporting poor job approval ratings but having virtually unlimited financial resources, squared off against conservative state Rep. Jeanne Ives (R-Wheaton). Ives received early support in the form of a $2.5 million donation from mega-donor Dick Uihlein, but her standing did not greatly improve in the past weeks, meaning her long-shot campaign remained as such entering Election Day.

Because of significant dissatisfaction with Gov. Rauner within the GOP base constituency, Ives was projected to perform better than a typical candidate challenging a sitting governor in a party primary. Yet, her performance was not strong enough to deny Rauner from advancing into the general election. Rauner scored only a 51.5 – 48.5 percent win over Ives in a primary result that indicates the state chief executive’s GOP political base is eroding.

Yesterday’s most competitive race wasn’t the one most had predicted — on the Democratic side of the gubernatorial primary. Venture capitalist J.B. Pritzker had spent over $65 million of his own money in this campaign, and was fortunate to have drawn two equivalently strong intra-party opponents.

A new poll from Victory Research (March 13-16; 1,204 registered Illinois voters) — the last before the vote — found Pritzker with only a 32-26-22 percent lead over Chicago businessman Chris Kennedy, who had advertised heavily and featured footage in his promotional ads of his late father, US attorney general and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and state Sen. Daniel Biss (D-Chicago). Biss had shown surprising strength for a legislator without statewide name identification. But Pritzker won the party nomination with 45.4 percent of the vote, a much larger total than the polling had predicted.

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Scott Gaining Momentum in Florida;
Illinois Filing Closes

Left: Florida Sen. Bill Nelson (D) | Right: Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R)

Left: Florida Sen. Bill Nelson (D) | Right: Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R)

By Jim Ellis

Dec. 6, 2017 — In what should be a premier Senate race next year, the Florida political contest that likely will develop between Sen. Bill Nelson (D) and Gov. Rick Scott (R) has not yet drawn a great deal of national media coverage, but that will certainly change over time.

A new St. Leo University poll (Nov. 19-24; 500 Florida residents) finds Gov. Scott opening up a sizable lead over the three-term Democratic incumbent, 42-32 percent. The results definitely detect a swing toward the term-limited Republican governor; but previous polling conducted since Sept. 10 has forseen a much closer skirmish.

Two polls from September, St. Leo University (Sept. 10-15; 500 Florida residents) and the Florida Chamber of Commerce (Sept. 17-24; 615 likely Florida voters), both projected Gov. Scott to be holding a two-point lead over Sen. Nelson, 35-33 percent and 47-45 percent, respectively. The University of North Florida (Oct. 11-17; 834 Florida voters), however, gave the incumbent a scant 38-37 percent edge in mid-October, while Mason-Dixon Polling & Research (Oct. 17-19; 625 Florida voters) cast the two prospective candidates as tied at 44 percent each.

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