Now that campaign staffers are enjoying Presidents Day, it's a good time to reflect on how U.S. Senate candidates fared during the primary election.
Those candidates didn't need to file their year-end reports until Jan. 31, more than 10 days later than the rest of the statewide candidates. Now, we have information from Oct. 1 through mid-January for all of the major candidates.
And no one came out a bigger winner than Republican Senate hopeful Mark Kirk. Read more...
Before, his target was David Hoffman.
Now, Jacob Meister is going after Mark Kirk.
Meister, a former Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, and Trevor Montgomery, an Iraq war veteran, this morning railed against Republican U.S. Senate nominee Mark Kirk for supporting the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. Read more...
President Barack Obama's first annual address, called a "supermarket of a speech" by syndicated columnist Mark Shields, has also drawn a supermarket of responses from politicians across the state.
Pat Brady, chairman of the Illinois Republican Party, was one of the first to respond.
"After his agenda took a stunning defeat in Massachusetts, President Barack Obama claims he finally gets the message and has opted to join the American people in their anger," Brady wrote in a statement. "What he fails to understand is that the frustration stems directly from the leftward agenda he has tried to push through Congress despite the overwhelming protests of voters." Read more...
Their exchange ended with smiles, but Democratic U.S. Senate candidates made clear last night that the fight for Barack Obama's old seat is going to heat up and narrow down in the final primary stretch.
State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, former Chicago Inspector General David Hoffman and Chicago Urban League President Cheryle Jackson answered a rapid-fire set of questions from the Chicago Sun-Times' Carol Marin yesterday evening.
In their second, and milder, widely televised forum, the three leading Democrats broke little new ground in revealing their policy positions. They also rehashed some of the same arguments they have previously made about each others' personal characters and experiences. Read more...
Democratic U.S. Senate candidates cast old arguments to a broad audience last night, airing their squabbles in a televised debate that shed little new light on the candidates or their positions.
Their rehashed, practiced attacks demonstrated that, with less than three weeks to go until the Feb. 2 primary, whoever takes on the Republican nominee will need to fight hard to keep Barack Obama's old seat in Democratic hands.
It was the candidates themselves who identified what Democratic leaders most fear in this race: inexperience, a lack of name recognition and associations with their party's well-publicized involvement in Illinois corruption. Read more...
