CHICAGO (WGEM) – Vice President Kamala Harris will officially accept her party’s presidential nomination Thursday evening as the Democratic National Convention (DNC) concludes in Chicago.
“We’ve had fun, now we have to roll up our sleeves and get to work,” Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) told a room full of Illinois Democrats Thursday morning.
They met on the last day of the DNC, before Harris officially kicked off the general election season with her acceptance speech.
“Go home and rest for 24 hours, but no longer, and when you’ve regained your strength, go out and do something,” Durbin said.
While the 2024 presidential election is the only statewide race in the Land of Lincoln, Illinois has plenty of lower-ballot races. Harris is expected to win Illinois, but Springfield Democrat Nikki Budzinski, the 13th Congressional District Representative, reminded the room that the party still has a lot of work to do in rural areas, including some of the places it represents. Although President Joe Biden won the state by more than 17 percentage points in 2020, he only carried 14 of Illinois’ 102 counties.
“There are districts in southern Illinois that were blue when I started my career and are now ruby red, and there’s a lot of talk about how Democrats lost in rural America, with working-class voters,” Budzinski said. “And I’ll be the first to tell you that we still have a lot of work to do, but we need to tell our story.”
She said the message is that Democrats are delivering, not Republicans.
“It’s those of us who fight every day for the communities in the southern part of the state and who want to make a difference from the bottom to the top of our state, and we have a very powerful story to tell,” she said.
But with the 2024 elections in mind, the Democrats have one main goal.
“Beat Donald Trump. That’s the priority,” Durbin said.
Illinois Republican Party Chair Kathy Salvi released a statement Thursday before Harris’ acceptance speech:
“Illinois families are feeling rising prices and inflation at the gas pump, at the grocery store, and in their dwindling savings accounts. It’s time to get our state back on track and fight for the families that (Illinois Gov.) JB Pritzker, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris have failed for far too long. Illinois families are fleeing the Land of Lincoln while Pritzker hammers our state with tax increases. These problems will only grow as Kamala Harris seeks to transform our communities in San Francisco. The Illinois Republican Party will continue to educate Illinois families on our common-sense solutions to get our state back on track.”
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