Two years ago, on the night of the Illinois Democratic primary, the congressional candidate Marie Newman refused to concede to the incumbent, Representative Dan Lipinski, although she found herself more than two thousand votes behind. She admitted defeat the next day and spent the next forty-eight hours studying what had gone wrong, precinct by frustrating precinct, in a district that stretches from Chicago’s South Side into the suburbs. “Not only was I not in enough places, but I didn’t have enough of a field program,” she said later. “I didn’t understand the importance of field. I didn’t invest in it.”
She calculated that another percentage point in the southwest suburbs, and another five hundred votes here and there in the city, would have meant victory. Ten months later, in January, 2019, Newman charged back into the fray, casting herself as a progressive champion against Lipinski, who once voted against the Affordable Care Act, declined to endorse Barack Obama for reëlection in 2012, and remains one of a few congressional Democrats who oppose abortion rights. Newman, a fifty-five-year-old management consultant who announced her support for Medicare for All, drew support from some of the country’s most prominent progressive politicians, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, and also from a coalition of groups determined to pull the Democratic Party to the left. She recruited five paid field staff and around four hundred volunteers, who knocked on more than a hundred and twelve thousand doors in Illinois’ Third District. The strategy paid off. On March 17th, Newman found herself about twenty-four hundred votes ahead of Lipinski. This time, it was Lipinski who waited until the next day to concede, giving up the seat he has held for fifteen years, and that his father held for twenty-two years before that.
It is a sign of the different faces presented by the Democratic Party this year that Newman, Joe Biden, and Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx could emerge as the big winners in Illinois. Biden finished twenty-three points ahead of Sanders, who lost only narrowly to Hillary Clinton four years ago. Foxx, a reformer under pressure for her handling of the criminal case against the actor Jussie Smollett, faced a torrent of negative ads, yet won more than fifty per cent of the vote against three challengers. Newman did not take sides in the Democratic Presidential primary. When I asked her about that this month, she said, “I haven’t had time to reflect and I have a primary coming up, and I’m really focussed on the campaign. And those are all political answers. But the real answer is I don’t know. I don’t know how I feel.”
On a sunny Sunday, March 1st, more than a hundred people gathered at the Polo Inn, in Bridgeport, on Chicago’s South Side, to hold a rally for Newman. Members of National Nurses United were wearing red shirts that said “Bernie 2020.” Someone spooned arroz con leche into paper cups. Onstage, Newman was joined by Jan Schakowsky and Pramila Jayapal, Democratic members of Congress who had endorsed her over their colleague, Lipinski. “He has no plan for health care. He voted against and then doubled down against the Affordable Care Act,” Schakowsky said, as the audience booed on cue. Newman urged her supporters to tell voters that Medicare for All is “a tried and true, practical program.” She asked them to be kind, respectful, and persuasive.
Afterward, I caught up with Jayapal, who is the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and Sanders’s national health-policy chair. She had come from Omaha, where she appeared at an event [for Kara Eastman, a Medicare for All supporter who is competing in the Democratic primary to represent Nebraska’s Second District, on May 12th. Jayapal makes no apologies for fueling intra-party competition. Incumbents, as she sees it, don’t deserve to keep their seats “just by the fact that your father had them, or the fact that you had them for a long time, or the fact that you’re a Democrat. We should be able to have a Democratic-primary system where people fight it out.” Another favorite of Jayapal’s was Jessica Cisneros, a twenty-six-year-old recent law-school graduate who challenged Henry Cuellar, an eight-term, anti-abortion incumbent, in South Texas. Cisneros came closer than expected in the March 3rd primary, losing by about twenty-seven hundred votes, out of the nearly seventy-five thousand that were cast.
Jayapal describes Lipinski’s approach as “murky moderation” and argues that the Democratic Party needs to go bigger in offering solutions on income inequality, health care, education, immigration, and climate change. If the Party does not solve such issues, she said, “We will have another Donald Trump, because people are so angry. They’re so frustrated by the lack of opportunity and the suffering. We have to start paying attention to how we expand our base and our electorate and speak to people who really believe that Republican-lite is not inspiring. Nobody wins big on small ideas.”
Newman’s renewed challenge to Lipinski exposed a divide between the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and some of Newman’s backers. Last year, the D.C.C.C. declared that it would not do business with any campaign consultants or venders working for candidates who waged primary battles against Democratic incumbents. Newman said she lost several consultants after the announcement. Cheri Bustos, a member of Congress from Illinois and the D.C.C.C. chair, enforced the policy, arguing that Democrats need to conserve their resources for fights against Republicans. Yet, she also cancelled an appearance at a Lipinski fundraiser, indicating that his position on abortion was her main concern. (Newman told me that Bustos called to congratulate her on her victory: “We both said, Yeah, that’s behind us—let’s go rock and roll.”)
Arlinda Bajrami, a thirty-year-old who grew up in the Chicago suburbs, left Newman’s rally and made her way to a Bridgeport neighborhood in the shadow of the White Sox stadium. For decades, this was the home turf of the Chicago machine, run from Richard J. Daley’s brick bungalow on South Lowe Avenue. Daley and his son, Richard M. Daley, won a dozen mayoral elections between them. It was the elder Daley who appointed Lipinski’s father to a job as Twenty-Third Ward committeeman, in 1975. In a reminder of roots running deep, the neighborhood was dotted with blue-and-white signs: “11th Ward Notice. Pet Owners: Please clean up after your pets or pay up to $500.” The signs were sponsored by Cook County Commissioner John P. Daley, Richard J. Daley’s son, and Chicago Alderman Patrick Daley Thompson, his grandson.
Just three weeks earlier, Bajrami had returned from Arizona, where she spent almost three years as an environmental organizer for Mi Familia Vota, a nonprofit that seeks to strengthen Latino political power. Determined to continue her work, she contacted a friend in the Newman campaign and signed up as a volunteer. Navigating with the help of a canvassing app, Bajrami knocked on doors in hopes of persuading, and turning out, voters. Daniel Kallio, an attorney in the Illinois attorney general’s office, needed no sales pitch. “Count on two votes,” he told her. “Dan Lipinski is just a dinosaur. That’s it, really.” Well-versed on Lipinski’s record, Kallio said it was not a close call: “He’s about the establishment, and we’re both young voters.” When it comes to the Presidential race, though, Kallio seemed to be leaning toward Biden, whom he described as “the not-upset-the-apple-cart guy.”
Bajrami is a Sanders supporter, although she did ask herself, when Warren was in the race, whether the country needed yet another male President. “I realized my values aligned more with Bernie’s,” she said. “It’s time for a revolution already. I just don’t think capitalism is sustainable, especially if you’re talking about environmental impacts. I just feel like socialism is more holistic. It’s about distributing power back to the people.” She thinks Newman over Lipinski is an easy choice. “I don’t think he aligns well with the Democratic Party. Things are changing. We have to keep up with these progressive values.”
