#dylan blaha

Christopher Wiggins at The Advocate:

In the Illinois 13th Congressional District, 32-year-old Army captain and biochemist Dylan Blaha is mounting a progressive primary challenge against Democratic U.S. Rep. Nikki Budzinski, who has represented the district since 2023. At the core of his campaign is a clear commitment to LGBTQ+ rights and a critique of what he sees as his own party’s growing reluctance to defend the community. Blaha told The Advocate he’s running because “an attack on one is an attack on all.” He said he was raised to believe in equality and can’t stay quiet as transgender people, drag performers, and queer Americans become political targets. “What’s happening right now to trans people — to the LGBTQ+ community — is not OK. Somebody needs to stand up.” Describing himself as a lifelong ally, Blaha said his approach stems from both his personal values and his professional experience. The combat medic–turned–medical planner deployed to Afghanistan and later served in Germany supporting NATO operations after Russia invaded Ukraine. “The military taught me that silence and inaction carry consequences,” he said. “When governments stop valuing human life, it starts small, and that’s why you stand up early.”

Candid allyship

Blaha describes himself as a “fighter ally,” committed to centering queer and trans inclusion in his campaign. He told The Advocate that his team includes trans and nonbinary volunteers, and he said they are developing research-driven “white papers” that would guide legislation to strengthen federal nondiscrimination protections and prevent anti-LGBTQ+ laws from resurfacing. “We’re grounding everything in data and expertise,” he said. “No human should be left behind.” That commitment sets him apart in a political climate where some Democrats have grown cautious about how they discuss LGBTQ+ rights. As The Advocate recently reported, party consultants and centrist think tanks have privately advised candidates to avoid using terms like “LGBTQIA+,” “cisgender,” or even “allyship,” arguing that such language can alienate moderate voters. After Vice President Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election, some on the left credited Republican ads targeting Harris for her support of trans rights. Massachusetts U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton agreed with right-wing talking points about kids playing sports with other kids who may be trans, and told The Advocate in November that while he supports trans rights broadly, concerns about the right of trans kids to play with cisgender kids are valid. Blaha rejects that logic entirely. He said Democrats who take such advice “aren’t bad people, but they’re getting bad guidance from consultants who say, ‘Don’t talk about trans rights; it’s not a winning issue.’ That’s disgusting to me. You don’t win by abandoning your values.” [...] Challenging his own party

Blaha’s opponent, Budzinski, flipped the district blue in 2022 and has worked to hold together a coalition of moderates and labor voters across central and southern Illinois. Blaha contends her approach has left too many behind. He points to her votes for the National Defense Authorization Act and the Laken Riley Act, which he says “hurt our trans [and immigrant] community.” “When people in our community asked what they could do, they were told, ‘Vote for me in the next election,’” he said. “That’s not enough. People want action now.”

Kevin Robillard at HuffPost:

WASHINGTON ― Democrats spanning the party’s ideological spectrum and the nation’s geography are launching electoral challenges to the party’s establishment, turning a much-discussed insurgency against a party whose approval ratings are at record lows into a reality. A sitting governor is entering a key Senate race with no guarantee of victory against a candidate who was totally unknown just three months ago. A 30-year-old activist-turned-state legislator is running against a longtime incumbent in a bright blue House district. Three Senate candidates in the same race brought in significant fundraising hauls, showing the establishment’s pick is not guaranteed a free walk to the party’s nomination.

All are evidence of a movement against party leadership’s dominance of key primaries and bets Democratic voters are looking for something new after President Donald Trump’s victory in 2024. “Most of our base finds the current position of the Democratic Party out of touch on class, out of touch on values and moral clarity, out of touch on the desire to fight back and the ability to fight back,” said Tommy McDonald, a Democratic media consultant with Fight Agency, a firm working with many of the party’s insurgent candidates. “A lot of people are feeling like there is a problem and that now is the time to fix it.”

“In everything from red to blues” ― the Democratic Party’s term for House seats they hope to file ― “to safe Democratic seats, you’re seeing high quality candidates step up, put their lives on hold to take the country back and fight back,” he added.

The candidates making up this insurgency are varied but share a set of broad critiques of the Democratic Party: Some, but not all, want to push the party further to the left or in a more populist direction. All believe the party has lost touch with the working class, and some are working class themselves. Many of them are relatively young and hope to paint their opponents as old and out-of-touch. And all believe the party’s communication methods are ill-suited to a world where capturing voters’ attention is more difficult than ever. They also believe the Democratic establishment, their credibility with their own voters battered by former President Joe Biden’s political failures and Trump’s victory, is at its weakest point in recent American political history.

[...] On the House level, Democratic challenges to the status quo are generally not targeting the same seats the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is worried about when it comes to winning back the House. Instead, they are mostly focused on deep blue seats. That doesn’t mean there are absolutely no problems for Jeffries, who could end up facing a primary challenge of his own. There is one GOP-held seat in California where progressives and the DCCC seem set to back different candidates, and a primary challenge to centrist Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine.) launched earlier this month. Some of the other candidates facing stiff challenges are members of the Congressional Black Caucus, a key part of Jeffries’ power base. Republicans are eager to highlight any sign of key candidates moving leftward.

[...] The group’s latest recruit, Tennessee State Rep. Justin Pearson, raised more than $200,000 on the first day of his campaign. An activist-turned-legislator who entered the national spotlight when Tennessee Republicans briefly kicked him out of office following a gun control protest, his challenge to 76-year-old Rep. Steve Cohen is set to touch on nearly every major fault line in the Democratic party, including age, class, race and support for Israel. [...]

But a major driver of the relative primary peace on the House battlefield is an unusual alliance between the moderate-to-conservative Blue Dog Democrats and progressives. Both groups have joined forces to back candidates modeled at least in part after Rebecca Cooke, a waitress who narrowly lost in a rural Wisconsin seat in 2024 and is running again in 2026, boasting endorsements from both Sanders and moderate Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin. These candidates, including firefighter union leader Bob Brooks and Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti in Pennsylvania, are populist on economics and have connections to the working class without taking the cultural stances of most progressives. That formula, for the moment, seems acceptable to moderates, progressives and party leadership.

The insurgency’s first success came earlier this year, when New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo to win the Democratic nomination for New York City Mayor. (Mamdani is again favored to defeat Cuomo, now running in the general election as an independent, on Election Day.) Republicans are eagerly comparing and linking candidates like Cooke and Platner to Mamdani. Those comparisons make Democrats who fear voters will punish the party for moving left understandably nervous. But to many of the insurgents, Mamdani’s other traits ― his focus on affordability and income inequality, his aggressive use of social media, his willingness to directly challenge the party’s establishment ― are more important than his precise ideology. And if incumbent Democrats and party leaders are able to understand that, they believe, the insurgency won’t be much of a threat.

HuffPost has an excellent article on the Democratic Insurgency that is heating up in primaries in this election cycle for the 2026 midterms.

Jeff Singer at The Downballot:

The 2026 primary season continues Tuesday as voters in Illinois pick candidates for state and federal offices, including in several Democratic contests that have drawn attention far outside the Land of Lincoln. Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin announced last April that he would not seek a sixth term representing this reliably blue state, leading to an expensive and unpredictable three-way battle between Rep. Robin Kelly, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, and Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton. The decisions by Kelly and Krishnamoorthi to run statewide in turn set off packed primaries for the House districts they are giving up. There are similarly busy races underway to replace Democratic Reps. Danny Davis and Jan Schakowsky, who are both retiring after close to three decades in Congress. The primaries for these four Democratic-friendly districts, all of which are located in or around Chicago, have been defined by massive outlays from third-party interests. Organizations affiliated with the hawkish pro-Israel group AIPAC, the AI industry, and the crypto sector have been responsible for most of the over $30 million in outside spending that’s been deployed across these four House races. These well-heeled groups aren’t just interested in using their resources to promote their favored candidates and undermine contenders they’re hoping to keep out of Congress. Some candidates who have struggled to gain support have been the involuntary beneficiaries of positive ads that are in fact aimed at diverting votes away from a stronger rival. Many of these PACs have also deployed misleading ads attacking vocal progressives as insufficiently liberal while simultaneously portraying centrists as progressive warriors. Semafor’s Dave Weigel dubbed this approach “bizarro-world branding.”

“What hasn’t changed is that these PACs run on what their strategists believe will play with Democratic primary voters, not what their funders want to achieve,” he wrote. “As a result, watching TV in Chicago makes you feel like a cordyceps fungus has taken over the Democratic Party — imitating its messaging to destroy it, just as the parasite does in the wild.” Below, you’ll find our guide to these five races. We’re also shining a spotlight on the Democratic primary for president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, where four-term incumbent Toni Preckwinkle is fighting to remain the leader of America’s second-most populous county.

Today, we have several big primaries in Illinois. The Downballot (of which I am a paid subscriber of) has excellent coverage of the big-ticket races.