With incumbent U.S. Senator Dick Durbin retiring at the end of his term, several candidates in Illinois have launched bids to run for the open Senate seat.
Illinois Public Media’s The 21st Show is interviewing the candidates and asking them about their views. Recently, Lt. Governor Juliana Stratton spoke with Brian Mackey about her policy priorities.
Stratton is the daughter of a physician and a teacher- born and raised on the south side of Chicago. She has a degree in broadcast journalism from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a law degree from DePaul University.
Stratton had a full career as a lawyer, mediator and administrative law judge before her first and only solo campaign — when she ran for state representative in 2016. Then, in her first and only term as a legislator, JB Pritzker selected her as his running mate when he was running for Illinois governor.
Interview Highlights
On Universal healthcare:
“I want to see universal health care coverage. That’s something that I’m going to fight for in Washington, DC as the next United States senator from Illinois. I want to see Medicare for all, because I think health care is a right, not a privilege, and we need to be at a place where people are threatening to take away health care that we guarantee universal health care coverage so any and every American, when you are sick, you can get the care you need, and that includes for the children of our state.”
On immigration policy:
“We do need to have a real path to citizenship for so many people, including continuing the great work that Senator Durbin started to have a pathway to citizenship for dreamers. We need to make sure that we have a secure border. We need to make sure that people who are asylum seekers have a real path to due process and can go through the process, so people aren’t lingering in the system.”
On war in Gaza:
“And I’ve made it very clear that right now we should all be very focused on getting humanitarian aid, food and whatever is needed. Israel should be doing that. The United States should be working on that. And it needs to happen immediately. And it needs to happen right now. We have to make sure that we continue to work and not get, you know, do anything that would jeopardize we need to make sure that we get the hostages returned, the hostages which are still being held by Hamas. We need a cease fire to bring peace and end the violence in that region.”
On Texas Republicans’ recent attempts at congressional redistricting:
“What I heard from them, the Texas Democrats that I met with and had some time to be with them on this Sunday at church service is that they are concerned especially about the racialized nature of this gerrymandering and how it is seeking specifically to exclude Black and Latino representation and Voices. And so we need to right now, fight with everything that we have, and we need to recognize that this is not an issue that’s limited to Texas. This is an issue where people are going to be pushing they’ve thrown out the rule book, and they are trying to do whatever they can to grab this power, and we need to fight back against it.”
Stratton is one of three leading Democratic candidates in the race for Illinois’ open Senate seat. The other two are Congresswoman Robin Kelly and Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi.