lessons from the ’26 democratic primaries
Hello, Neighbors!
Thank you to everyone who voted and, especially to those who volunteered on the freezing cold election day. What we’ve learned from these primaries is that try as they might, the corporate establishment and donor class’ iron grip on our primaries and their efforts to consolidate control over every single seat in the state house, senate, comptroller, to say nothing of the congressional and US senate seats is actually… failing. The progressive coalition of Chicago is making steady gains, which is especially important in anticipation of the next year’s municipal elections, which will most likely be even more saturated with dark money and in-fighting.
Our efforts to increase civic engagement are starting to bear fruit, albeit a stale one, as our 44th Ward Committeeman crept into action, and even resurrected the old website that was down as late as a week before the primaries. As of yesterday, the placeholder URL of 44thwarddems.com is now redirecting to the 44thwarddemocrats.org, which was dead as a doorknob just a week ago.
Good! We are glad to see some kind of action from our Committeeman/Alderman. Although, referring to a political organization as “family” is a bit creepy, but then again, everything about this organization is odd. Next, we push for the regular Ward Nights, and lo and behold, maybe even a participatory budgeting effort. In the meantime, since our Alderman Lawson requested feedback on how he did with the spring elections, we can confidently give him an F for effort. Moving early voting location to the back of a hospital construction site, with temporary signage that looked like something out of disaster zone was bad enough. Misleading voters with a faux 44th dem slate, without disclosing anything about the process or reason as to why any of these candidates ended up on the list was truly an admission of incompetence, laziness, and a complete lack of regard for us as voters and constituents. Even his volunteers, who were handing out the ‘voter guides’ outside on election day, couldn’t explain what they were handing out. The most embarrassing part was learning from the older folks from the high-rise buildings that 44th ward dems like to visit to create an appearance of being accessible, that they weren’t aware that the only place to drop off their main in ballots on the election day was the early voting location. They would show up at their local precinct just to find out that they had to walk their ballots to the inconvenient early voting site located at the back of a hospital on a very cold day.
Back to the primaries. For all the money and institutional power that they have on their side, they barely eked out a temporary reprieve, while showing the ugly side of their so-called family. The attack ads and mailers (so many mailers!!!) that appeared to be specifically targeting older voters, that Sen. Feigenholtz campaign ran against Nick Uniejewski in the IL SD6 race, insinuated that the police is already defunded by the dynamic duo of Nick and Mayor Johnson(/S), even though they couldn’t find a single picture of them together and had to use bad photoshop to distort their appearance. There is so much going on here. We’ll let the unadulterated hate and fear-mongering in these mailers speak for themselves.
As Nick’s campaign was gaining momentum, the Democratic Party of Illinois, put their finger on the scale just as State Board of Elections lifted the cap on contributions after Feigenholtz got more than $100,000 in support from three PACs. It makes you wonder, why would a Democratic party blow through $190,000 in the primaries, with the general elections coming up?
Are they more concerned with keeping a young, progressive LGBTQ activist out, than fighting off the Republicans? And what would our esteemed state senator have to do to repay these favors to Draft Kings and Illinois Realtors Fund?
In spite of all this ugliness, the incumbent came in neck to neck on her home turf in our ward (49.99% and 50.01%), even though Nick’s campaign had $85,302 less than 4% of the total fundraising for this contest, compared to the incumbent Sen. Feigenholtz $2.199,332 according to Illinois Sunshine as of this morning (3/23/26). Nick and his team of volunteers did 12 times the work to overcome the difference in fundraising, not to mention other means of the entrenched institutional power, such as 44th ward democrats “family” endorsements. Similar picture is emerging for most of our progressive candidates who got significant votes % with a tiny fraction of the fundraising and no institutional power:
All results based on https://chicagoelections.gov/elections/resultsas of 3/22/2026
· IL-5 Congressional race, Matt Conroy got 34.42% of our ward’s votes and 28.18% of Chicago. Quigley for all his money and institutional power got only 57.08% of our ward’s votes. On this own home turf! To be fair, Quigley has $1.4 million on hand as he embarks on a mayoral run, so he must have had to economize, as he did no campaigning, which is not surprising as he does nothing in US Congress either, except vote with Republicans to fund endless wars.
· IL State House 12 Litcy Kurisinkal got 29.8% to Paul Kendrick’s 43%, with our ward being the best performing for Litcy and the worst performing for Paul. How embarrassing for Paul. All this groveling and PAC money barely got him over the finish line and now, unfortunately for all of us, they own him. Paul’s notable donors included Making Our Tomorrow PAC, a national super PAC supported by a major tech giant in the AI industry, which prompted this statement from other candidates. Paul’s campaign communications painted the picture of him being an underdog, outspent by his competitors, which Lakhani certainly did, but ultimately Paul was no underdog, but very much an insider with a platform that doesn’t even pretend to match his office, as Girl I Guess aptly noted.
· Karina Villa may have lost the statewide race by a hair, but she won Chicago with 40.7% to Margaret Croke’s 36.05% and in our ward, they came in neck to neck, with 39.76% and 39.56% respectively.
· Hon. Ashonta C Rice got 63.29%, while 44th ward dem’s pick Michael Cabonargi got 36.71% of our ward’s votes in the Circuit Court Judges’s primary.
· On the County side, our D-10 Commissioner candidate, Drake Warren got 56.06% of our ward’s votes and won the race against the incumbent Bridget Gainer who got the job in 2009, when Mike Quigley’s vacated it to replace Rahm Emanuel in US Congress. Major side-eye.
· Assessor Fritz Kaegi, who lost the county-wide race, won Chicago (51.32%) and our ward with 65.01%, and President Preckwinkle won against Brendan Reilly, with 68.07% of our ward’s votes and 71.18% of all of Chicago’s.
44th ward dems didn’t dare put Brendan Reilly on their endorsement list, but his campaign poster was on display in the window of their (alleged) unofficial headquarters, Ann Sather, which is very meta, because just like the 44th Ward Democrats organization, Ann Sather is stale, unappealing, and just a few years away from being bulldozed down, in our humble opinion.
To wrap up, we are extremely proud of our ward, where the overall ward turnout was 36.44%, which puts us in the top five wards in the city and almost 11% above overall turnout, which was sadly only 25.48%.
And we are very proud of all of our fantastic candidates, especially sentimental favorite, Kevin Ryan. Kevin came in fourth in a statewide race against the establishment heavyweights, but he is number one in our hearts! If you are one of the 576 ward residents who voted for Kevin, we’d like to be friends with you. Leaving everyone with this little tidbit from the FEC as of this morning, 3/23/2026. https://www.fec.gov/data/elections/senate/IL/2026/
IL Senate primary results.
What have we learned so far? That we are, indeed a progressive ward, and we will not back down from our course.
With LOVE,
44th Ward Action
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