Illinois held its primaries on March 20. As has been well-reported, Arthur Jones, a Neo-Nazi, won the Republican nomination for U.S. House, 3rd district. Unofficial tallies show he received 16,458 votes. No one was on the ballot against him, and no one filed as a write-in.
By contrast, the last time any Republican ran for U.S. House in the 3rd district, in 2014, there were 28,883 votes cast in the Republican primary for that seat. No Republican ran in 2016.
Republican Party leaders had asked voters to leave their primary ballot blank in that race.
Though it’s been tried for decades, with very few
Marginal wins. It’s the old right wing thinking that
To water down the ideology and agenda to placate the
Brain dead white masses to resist the system through
Ballots is misguided and well reckless. The capitalist
Bourgeois class is never going to allow the far right
To gain any political headway by any means necessary!
Buckle up kids,a revolution is coming!
No primaries.
PR and AppV
My guess is that most of those voters had no idea who this guy was. They were just Republican voters and they saw the Republican label next to his name and voted for him.
@Andy,
This was the Republican primary. You had a choice of skipping over the race or marking an X.
There were other congressional races in Cook County (excluding Chicago) that had unopposed Republican candidates for Congress. Jones got 71% of the votes. In three other districts, the sole Republican got 77%, 78%, and 80%. All these candidates will lose in November. There was one district with an actual Republican incumbent, Peter Roskam. He got 86% of the vote.
So it appears that 14% of Republicans will skip a race with a well known incumbent. Another 8% will skip it if they’ve never heard of the guy, and another 8% will skip it if they have heard that the guy in a Neo-Nazi.
This is only based on Cook County (excluding Chicago). It was the only board of elections that provided ballots cast in addition to received by candidates. Illinois has really horrible vote reporting, with no statewide results.
There was a hotly contested Democratic primary in the same congressional district (IL-3). 3.5% of voters skipped that race.
Overall, 82% of votes were cast in the Democratic primary.
This is why it would be better for Illinois to adopt Top 2, so that all voters can participate in the election of their representative.
The numbers in the original article are messed up.
The 16,458 for Jones includes only Chicago and Cook County (excluding Chicago). Jones also receive 4,093 in Will County, and 65 in DuPage County, for a total 20,616.
28,883 is the number of votes received by an unopposed Dan Lipinski in the Democratic primary in 2014. By contrast, 94,873 votes were cast in the 2018 Democratic primary where Lipinski was challenge by a left-wing insurgent. There were 29,295 votes cast in the 2014 Republican primary, which had two candidates.
The 2014 election really did not have any contested races at any level other than the Republican primary for governor. There might have been cross-over Democrats, sort of weighing in like members of the Cattlemen’s Association voting in a contested race for best Tofu, since Rib-Eye was unopposed.
Statewide there were about 3 times as many Democratic voters as in 2014.