How Many Votes Do We Need: Why Using the Reach App Will Work.....
TL;DR: We are not fighting for very many voters in this race. If you only can contact one person in the 9th, IT IS IMPORTANT! REACH out to someone, Do It.
In America, people don't really vote. Even during presidential elections, the percentage of registered voters rarely reaches 70%, and that's a high point.
What does that mean for a congressional race in a midterm? Even fewer people vote.
So how many people will vote in Illinois' 9th district? Yep, fewer than you think. In 2024, there were 338,828 people who voted. In 2020 there were 369,170. In 2008, one of the most historic elections for Illinois in history, there were 243,681.
In a midterm, there will be fewer. No matter who the president is, people just care less. Most people don't even know we vote every two years for our federal reps, not just four.
In 2022, there were 250,530 total people who cast votes. In 2018, there were 290,351.
This is all to say, we can safely estimate that even if this is a historic midterm, about 300,000 people will show up.
The primary will be even smaller.
Taking a look at competitive IL primaries: in 2024, Sean Casten had to fight off a few primary challengers to hold onto his IL-06 and the race had 72,931 voters. In 2022, he had to fight off a few more and there were 67,465 voters.
So let's be conservative. This is a wide open primary with 14-17 candidates. How about we say 96,069 will turn out.
So how many do we need to win?
Right now Daniel Biss is polling at 18% (with us also at 18% mind you) and 31% undecided. Again, let's be conservative: the field consolidates and the winner will need at least 40%. Combining with our previous conservative estimate, 38,420 will win this race.
That number is low. It is very low. I know more people who live in Park Ridge.
There is a bar in Chicago (outside the district mind you) called 6 Degrees. Everyone in the world can be reached through a six-degree connection. We just need to reach everyone in the 9th district, not the world. How many degrees does that take?
Every Second Counts. 34 days to go.
POST-PRIMARY UPDATE:
The model held up. The baseline turnout assumption proved remarkably sticky, and the total vote share required to clear a fragmented plurality landed right in our projected 38,000-vote median outcome. You can see the precinct-level autopsy over at 38069votes.com.
Looking at the crosstabs, Katherine Abughazaleh's path to victory evaporated in the geographic splits. A campaign engineered for the nationalized, high-engagement discourse of Washington D.C. struggled to gain traction against entrenched ward operations. Nationalized progressive messaging consistently underperforms in high-density urban primaries unless paired with deep neighborhood roots and ground-game fundamentals. The heuristic for this race—and likely for future cycles in the 9th District—is stubbornly geographic: if you want to win Chicago wards, you need a Chicago address.