Rep. Daniel Lipinski (D-Ill.) won the Democratic primary in Illinois’ 3rd Congressional District on Tuesday night, just as every House incumbent running for reelection in the state did. What made Lipinski’s race different was that he barely won, edging out challenger Marie Newman by just over two percentage points. The next closest race for a House incumbent in the state saw Rep. Mike Quigley (D) win by 39 points.
Why was Lipinski’s race so close? Largely because he’s one of the last three antiabortion Democrats serving in the House. But more broadly because Democratic politics are shifting.
His stand on abortion aside, Lipinski’s political ideology is fairly moderate, though he’s not the most moderate Democrat in the Illinois delegation. We can assess this using analysis done by the Voteview team at the University of California at Los Angeles. Lipinski’s less liberal than most of his Democratic colleagues.
The sample size is small, but generally more moderate incumbents in Illinois’ primaries Tuesday night had closer races. Most incumbents ran unopposed.
Notice that two Democrats who are more moderate than Lipinski (according to Voteview data) didn’t face primary challengers. Those are Reps. Brad Schneider and Bill Foster, in the 10th and 11th districts, respectively.
Primaries generally see more voting from stronger partisans, meaning voters who are less likely to support more moderate candidates. Lipinski probably hung on, thanks to support from the party establishment in the state. But Democratic voters are much more likely to identify as liberals now than they were in 2004, when Lipinski first won his office. Back then, about 3 in 10 Democrats identified as liberal, and nearly half identified as moderate. Now, half identify as liberal.
That puts a moderate like Lipinski in a tricky position in a contested primary.
Lipinski also sits awfully close to a dangerous line for an incumbent: a district that’s leaning toward the other party.
Combining ideology data with Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index — a measure of how a congressional district voted in the preceding two presidential elections — we see Lipinski’s district floating much closer to the middle on both measures than most Democrats’.
If we throw another metric on top of that — race ratings from Cook Political — Lipinski’s position is weaker still. The lighter the dot on this chart, the less safe it is. Lipinski’s district is surrounded by lighter-colored dots.
Most districts are safe, but, in this Democrat-friendly election year, there are more safe Democratic seats (177 of them) than Republican ones (168), according to Cook. Let’s fade them out.
(You can see the trouble for the Republicans clearly here.)
Lipinski’s seat is safe, according to Cook’s analysis. But there are a lot of seats and House members that look like his and like him that are not.
After the Texas primaries, we looked at how important it was for middle-of-the-road candidates to represent swing districts. The determination we made is that it really isn’t that important. Look at this graph again:
You can see a line formed by the blue dots — a correlation between the ideology of the Democratic representative and the politics of the district. On the Republican side, that doesn’t exist. There are conservative Republicans in swing districts and more moderate Republicans in safe ones. The correlation between the two is nonexistent. If people are going to vote for a Republican, it doesn’t seem to matter in this polarized moment if that Republican is moderate or conservative.
There’s no indication that the same doesn’t apply for Democrats. If Democrats in Illinois think they need a moderate to win in Lipinski’s swing district, it’s not clear why.
Representatives in swing districts are viewed as being in less safe seats by Cook regardless of their political ideology.
Lipinski almost lost to a more liberal candidate, and, had she won, there’s little reason to think she was any less likely to win in November (barring the inherent benefit of incumbency). That’s not what moderate Democratic incumbents want to hear.
