What Went Down In The Arizona, Florida And Illinois Primaries

Sanders actually won a number of counties in Illinois in 2016, despite losing the state, though most were by a narrow margin. His biggest victories were in McLean County and Champaign County, which the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is (read: lots of college students). We already know Sanders does better with younger voters, so I’ll be interested to see if these are his best counties again this time around.

Yeah, Sarah, in 2016, Clinton beat Sanders in Illinois just 51 percent to 49 percent. Appropriately, one county that seemed to mirror the statewide result was Peoria County, so we might want to see if Sanders plays in Peoria this year too. But you might be able to see the writing on the wall in other counties, if Sanders fails to win some of the big ones he narrowly carried in 2016: Sangamon and Will, for instance.

So, as Nate mentioned earlier, Illinois doesn’t have the same tradition of early and absentee voting like Florida or Arizona, so turnout could be an issue. What counties should we be paying special attention to as results trickle in? Sanders was pretty competitive in Illinois in 2016, right?