What Went Down In The Arizona, Florida And Illinois Primaries

Sarah, I’ll be watching Cook County, home to Chicago of course. It’s the biggest source of Democratic votes (and votes in general in Illinois), contributing 57 percent of the 2016 Democratic primary total. Boring answer, but if turnout is notably down there, it’ll be notably down overall.

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.