What Went Down During The June 28 Primary Elections

In 2018, now-Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley shocked the political world by unseating 20-year incumbents in their Democratic primaries. And in 2020 we saw similarly shocking upsets, with now-Reps. Marie Newman, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush also ousting long-serving congressmen in their Democratic primaries.

As we wrote in 2020, thanks to an increasingly powerful progressive campaign apparatus, the left wing of the Democratic Party is now an established player in the party’s primaries, and in 2022 it’s back at it again, already challenging a handful of incumbent Democrats, as well as supporting a number of progressive candidates in competitive open races.

Thus far, though, progressives have had a mixed track record. They’ve had success in places like Oregon where Jamie McLeod-Skinner unseated a seven-term incumbent, Rep. Kurt Schrader (Schrader was even endorsed by Biden). But they’ve also had high-profile losses like in Texas’s 28th District, where Jessica Cisneros was unable to defeat long-term Rep. Henry Cuellar in a runoff.

Tonight, most of the progressive action is in Illinois and one of the most notable challenges is activist Kina Collins challenging 13-term incumbent Rep. Danny Davis in Illinois’s 7th District in what’s been described as a “generational fight.” Both Collins and Davis are Black, but Collins is 31 years old, while Davis is 80. Davis has been endorsed by Biden, but Collins has been endorsed by Justice Democrats, the Sunrise Movement and Indivisible, as well as the Chicago Tribune, which has bought into her generational change pitch, saying “the time has come for new blood.”

This isn’t the only high-profile primary in Illinois, though. Notably, a progressive currently in Congress, Rep. Marie Newman, could lose tonight since redistricting has thrown her into the same district as Rep. Sean Casten, who like Newman, has a very liberal voting record. Unfortunately for Newman, though, it seems as if Casten has more previous constituents as part of this new district, and as Nathaniel wrote in his preview of key Democratic primaries, that might be enough to give him an edge over Newman — although we have no public polling of this race to go off of.

We’ll be watching these races and more to get a better sense of the progressive movement’s influence within the Democratic Party: