Has the progressive Left finally hit its high-water mark? Even in deep-blue Illinois?
Yesterday, the state that launched Barack Obama’s presidency and created Chicago’s socialist decline went to the primary polls to nominate midterm candidates. As usual, progressives competed heavily for House and Senate seats, as well as in state legislative races. Most unusually, Axios reports, hard-Left candidates appear to have lost every competitive race in which they contended, running campaigns that featured attacks on Israel as well as Hakeem Jeffries:
The left suffered a virtually total collapse in the Illinois Democratic congressional primaries on Tuesday night — even in races where the AIPAC-backed candidate lost.
Why it matters: It’s a bad sign for the dozens of insurgent Democrats running in congressional races across the country, both in open seats and as primary rivals to older or more establishment-oriented incumbents. …
What they’re saying: “Life looks pretty good,” AIPAC said in a post on X, boasting that Illinois voters “rejected … far-left, would-be Squad members who centered their campaigns on attacking Israel.”
Axios calls Jeffries one of the big winners from last night’s electoral wipeout of the hard Left, and with perhaps some justification. Jeffries has attempted to tamp down the most radical elements of the Squad and its allies on Capitol Hill, while still providing every bit of the Trump Derangement Syndrome it demands. (Jeffries has lately begun calling Donald Trump the “so-called president.”) A turn to the center would help Jeffries a bit in countering pressure for maximalism in confronting Trump, but we will have to see what happens with DHS funding to assess whether anyone’s learning a lesson yet.
Jeffries isn’t the only one who needs to learn this lesson. Ro Khanna tried to ride the Squad Train on Monday night, only to get entirely derailed on Tuesday (via Twitchy):
Tuesday is primary day in Illinois! Polls are open from 6am-7pm CT. Get out, vote, and help elect candidates to Congress who will fight for working-class Americans.@KatAbughazaleh @JunaidForUs @drthomasfisher @paulnolley @RobertJPeters @DeliaRamirezIL @CongressJackson pic.twitter.com/9KU063hpri
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) March 17, 2026
The only candidate from this slate who won yesterday was Delia Ramirez, and only because she ran unopposed. And people noticed:
Today in this episode of “Twitter is not real life,” Ro Khanna’s supposedly immense influence resulted in every single one of these socialists losing. https://t.co/vbwap6nGad
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) March 18, 2026
Kat Abughazaleh loses the Illinois 9th.
Junaid Ahmed loses the Illinois 8th.
Kina Collins loses the Illinois 7th.
Joey Ruzevich loses the Illinois 6th.
Robert Peters loses the Illinois 2nd.
Progressivism loses in every race in Illinois.…
— Angela Van Der Pluym (@anjewla90) March 18, 2026
The Squad Left, to use Axios’ term, wasted no time on putting the blame exactly where you’d expect:
Left-wing groups focused on the money spent by AIPAC and AI and crypto affiliated PACs, also noting that many of the ads those groups ran touted the more moderate candidates as progressive fighters while trying to undermine the left-wing bona fides of their leftist rivals.
It’s always the Joooos with this crowd, eh?
As it happens, that may well be one issue, but not in the way that this conspiracy theory posits. The Squad Left has positioned itself firmly on the side of Hamas and Hezbollah, especially since the October 7 massacres that led to the conflicts that followed, including the present war with Iran. While the American public may be more skeptical of Israel since that point, it is not at all sympathetic to terror networks or the maximalist Palestinian cause.
Last month’s Harvard-Harris CAPS poll shows that the US still favors Israel in terms of favorability 41/33, while Iran scores a 13/62 on the same question, and Hamas gets a 12/59. Even among Democrats, support for Israel is nearly double that of Hamas (64/36), and only the youngest cohort of voters flips the other direction – and not by much (42/58). This survey took place before the launch of military operations against Iran, but at that point, support for ramping up sanctions on Tehran’s regime had bipartisan support at 62/38.
The issue set results on this longitudinal poll haven’t changed much either, and all of them point away from the rabid-progressive policy demands of the Squad Left, too:
- Deporting criminal illegals: 75/25
- Closing the border: 67/33
- Blocking males from female sports and spaces: 62/38
- Using biological sex in government programs when gender is at issue: 59/41
- Voter-ID: 58/42
- Deporting all illegal aliens: 57/43
- Reciprocal tariffs: 57/43
- Military targeting of drug smugglers: 56/44
- Ending bans on offshore drilling: 52/48
This may explain why Jasmine Crockett suffered a surprising loss in the Texas Democrat primary for the US Senate race. Even Democrats may have begun to realize the risks of sticking with deeply unpopular positions and running solely on TDS and the Joooooos. James Talarico is not demonstrably more centrist, but at least he’s not a raving lunatic. Perhaps we have seen the Squad Left’s high-water mark in American politics.
Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.
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