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Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois announced on Wednesday he will not be seeking reelection next year. Durbin, who is 80, has spent more than half of his life serving first in the House and then the Senate, where he was elevated to Democratic Whip, party leadership’s second-highest role. “I truly love the job of being a United States senator, but in my heart, I know it’s time to pass the torch,” Durbin said in a video message.
Meredith Shiner, a communications professional, was in a Zoom training for work when news of Durbin’s retirement broke. Her phone exploded with texts. A former Senate reporter, Shiner has promoted the idea of “primarying every Democrat” — and particularly Durbin, who represents her home state of Illinois.
She is part of an increasingly vocal subset of Democrats furious at the lack of initiative their own elected leaders have shown in the face of America’s rapid descent into autocracy. Others include DNC vice chair David Hogg, whose PAC, Leaders We Deserve, announced it would put $20 million toward primarying “ineffective, out-of-touch Democrats,” and TikTok-famous political commentator Kat Abughazaleh who declared her intention to run for the seat currently occupied by liberal stalwart Jan Schakowsky. Abughazaleh told me shortly before she entered the race last month that she didn’t take issue with Schakowsky’s positions so much as the fact she had been in office for the entirety of Abughazaleh’s life. Schakowsky, also 80, is now reportedly planning to retire.
Saikat Chakrabarti, the 39-year-old former chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, announced his intention to primary former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is 85, citing Pelosi’s backing of Rep. Gerry Connolly, the cancer-stricken 75-year old congressman, over Ocasio-Cortez to lead Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. “I respect what Nancy Pelosi has accomplished in her career, but we are living in a totally different America than the one she knew when she entered politics 45 years ago,” Chakrabarti wrote on X.
Shiner articulated her complaints — with the Democratic Party broadly, and Durbin specifically — in a piece for the New Republic in February, in which she “announced” she was forming an exploratory committee to oust Durbin from office. She didn’t want to be a senator, she wrote, but railed that two weeks into the Trump administration, “it is clear that Democrats on Capitol Hill are failing so spectacularly to confront a constitutional crisis (which their own political incompetence helped create) that I am willing to channel the anger coursing through my body and finally put my country before my own personal well-being.”
The threat was only half tongue-in-cheek, Shiner told me by phone hours after Durbin’s announcement. “As someone who had covered the United States Senate for almost a decade, I think one of the things that I was able to see clearly is that so many of the stakeholders in Congress care more about the norms and the pageantry of Congress and less about the responsibility of actually representing the people who sent them there,” she says.
Durbin in particular, she adds, “has been in Congress longer than the average Illinois resident has been alive.” He took over the role leading the Senate Judiciary committee after 90-year-old Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein died in office. “When we think about some of the most devastating impacts of the past 10 years, many spring from the fact the judiciary has been wholesale hijacked. Senate Democrats went from Dianne Feinstein leading the Judiciary Committee to Dick Durbin, and there was no clear articulation of why these [issues that committee worked and voted on] mattered. There was no effort to make clear to the average person why things that were happening in Washington really impacted them.”
Durbin is the fifth sitting senator to announce they are retiring before 2026 — all five are over the age of 65. In the House, meanwhile, two Democrats — Reps. Raúl Grijalva and Sylvester Turner —both died while serving this session, votes that could make a difference with this House’s razor-thin Republican majority. Shiner recalls covering the Obama-era fight to pass the Affordable Care Act, when Ted Kennedy’s death derailed the legislation’s passage. “One of the things that’s really scary to think about is that we’ve built a ‘democratic system’ where any one person dying could throw the whole thing out of balance,” Shiner says. The arguments that seniority is its own kind of currency are increasingly out of date, she adds: Who cares if you have a senior role on the Appropriations Committee “in a world where the executive is acting extra-constitutionally and saying that it doesn’t matter what Congress has appropriated”?
Shiner’s argument for primarying Durbin “started as a rhetorical device,” but she says she’s contemplating it more seriously. “It’s not enough for some of these people who have been in office too long to retire —the people who come after them have to believe in the right things and talk about things in a way that really makes sense for this moment. And I worry that some of the candidates who have been groomed by this party culture aren’t really willing to stake out a territory that actually helps recapture people’s imaginations —especially as we might have already run out of time to do that right. We might have already missed the opportunity to win an election when they were free and fair.”
Among the names that have already tossed around to fill Durbin’s seat are former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. “I think it would be catastrophic at every level if he were to become a United States senator,” Shiner says. In every role he’s held, she says, Emanuel “has consistently shown that he’s been willing to compromise core values if he thinks that it’s politically expedient. At the end of the day, our country and the people of Illinois are not well served by someone who thinks that political expedience is a priority —and who has also completely misread what is politically expedient. He was quoted in Politico saying that Democrats just could concede USAID as a little treat to Donald Trump, because maybe he’ll be satisfied, and USAID might not be popular. We’re going to put millions of lives across the world at risk. Why isn’t that something worth fighting for?”
