Welcome back to Beyond the Polls. This week I take a deep dive into the many interesting Democratic

primaries in Illinois with Greg Bishop. Let's die here.

Well, last week we were in the Lone Star State, which had a lot of primaries on both sides of the aisle,

but in the land of Lincoln, all the action is with

Team Blue. But there's a lot of it. And here to break down with me is Greg Bishop, host of Illinois

in Focus Daily at the Center Square. Greg, welcome. Well, thanks for having me. Absolutely. This is,

this is great to be a part of, especially in such a dynamic election year, it feels like we just

got done with an election, just, you know, not too long ago, but here we are talking about,

not just the November, but, you know, we got to get through this March 17th primary.

Yeah, I mean, that's the thing is by the time you get to November, we've already had 50 different

states and multiple elections. And because

so much of what goes on is in safe seats in the world of gerrymandering, the course of the parties

is often really set in these primaries rather than in the general election. How does it look

on the Democratic side for Senate to

replace Senator Dick Durbin. Well, I mean, first you got to recognize Durbin for who he is,

a longtime politician from Springfield, Illinois. You know, that's south of I-80, right? And you

always hear about Illinois politics really being just all focused on Cook

County and Chicago and anything north of I-80 and everybody downstate sometimes feels pushed

off to the side. But Durbin, he's a downstater. And he was in Congress for decades as a

representative and then as a senator and even being the whip in second command in the Senate.

So him stepping down was somewhat anticipated, but people weren't sure if it was going to be this cycle.

And ultimately with, you know, the term that Durbin had, it was time for him to go ahead and hang it up.

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