Jeanne Ives, the Republican former state legislator who is challenging first-term Democrat incumbent Rep. Sean Casten in the 6th congressional district of Illinois, is citing a new poll showing her 9% ahead among likely voters.
Ives, who nearly defeated incumbent Republican then-governor Bruce Rauner in the primary last year — after Rauner reneged on promises to pro-life voters — is mounting a strong challenge to the “smash-mouth” Casten.
According to the Ives campaign, the poll, conducted Dec. 17 among 575 respondents by Ogden & Fry, shows that “Ives leads Casten by 9 points (47-38 Ives) and that Casten’s re-elect number is under 40 (38.3%).”
More striking yet is the fact that the poll shows a generic preference in the district for Democrats (48.6%) over Republicans (43.3%). What may be hurting Casten — who unseated veteran Republican Rep. Peter Roskam by more than 7% in 2018 — is his support for the impeachment of President Donald Trump, which is unpopular in many swing districts that Democrats are relying on to protect their congressional majority in the 2020 election.
Politico visited the 6th district in October and found that voters were indifferent to impeachment, at beast. Even left-wing voters seemed impatient with impeachment because they perceived it as an impediment to the progress of their liberal political goals, Politico reported.
In a statement defending his vote for impeachment, Casten claimed that the president had committed impeachable “high crimes and misdemeanors” when he “withheld military aid to an ally to pressure a foreign government to investigate a political rival, and then systematically obstructed Congress’ ability to learn the truth of his actions.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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