Illinois Senate Update

I’ve posted about this race, which doesn’t seem to get talked about much despite being a likely pick-up for Democrats, a few times (here and here.) Illinois held its primary last night and the results are in: Barack Obama for the Democrats and Jack Ryan for the Republicans. Obama won with 52%, beating his nearest finisher, Dan Hynes, by 29 points. Ryan beat his nearest rival, Jim Oberweis, 36% to 23.5%.

Finally, if the number voting in each primary predicts the 2004 Senate outcome, then Ryan is in trouble: about 1.3 million voted in the Democratic primary and 650,000 voted in the Republican primary. I wouldn’t read too much into that, however. The Democratic primary was more closely contested than the Republican and the Democratic machine in Chicago probably worked harder to get out the vote than the downstate Republican machine (this will change in the general election.)

AB