The Illinois Senate seat that Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas contested in 1858 will go to a descendant of an enslaved man. Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton won it Tuesday, and she knows what that means.
“Those debates boiled down to one issue: slavery,” Stratton said, recalling what outgoing Sen. Dick Durbin told her about the seat. “And now, the seat where the future of slavery was once debated will be held by a descendant of someone who was enslaved.” Her great-great-grandfather, William Stephens, was freed when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed.
Her win also changes who sits in the chamber. Stratton will be the sixth Black woman ever to serve in the Senate, and with Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, it will be the first time three serve together. No Black woman held a Senate seat until Carol Moseley Braun, of Illinois, won hers in 1992. Illinois will also be the first state with two women of color in the Senate at once, alongside Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who is Asian American.
The margin was wide. With 41% of the vote counted, NPR Illinois reported Stratton at 63% to 35% for Republican Don Tracy, a former state party chair who called her the “most extreme far-left” Senate candidate in Illinois history.
She ran on exactly those commitments. Stratton wants a $25 federal minimum wage, Medicare for All and protected reproductive care, and she has made Black maternal mortality a campaign issue. She has pledged not to vote for Trump’s cabinet or Supreme Court nominees.
Those are the right fights for the readers this paper serves. Black women die in childbirth at about three times the rate of white women, and a wage floor of $7.25 has not moved in years. A senator who arrives promising to take on both has a record to be measured against, and we will measure it.
Stratton takes the seat when the new Congress is sworn in in January.
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