While many Illinois Democrats wait anxiously to hear whether U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin will run for reelection in 2026 or step down after five terms in the Senate, at least one incumbent officeholder appears to be ruling himself out as a potential successor.
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul said Tuesday he is not interested in running for that job, or any other elected position in the foreseeable future.
“I do not want to go to Washington. I want to stay here,” Raoul told a luncheon audience at the City Club of Chicago. “And this is no knock on Sen. Durbin or Sen. (Tammy) Duckworth. I truly believe what I do on a day-to-day basis (as attorney general) has more impact than what I could do as U.S. senator.”
Durbin, who turned 80 in November, currently serves as the Democratic whip in the Senate, the second-highest ranking position in the caucus, behind Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, of New York. But he is widely expected to announce in the coming weeks whether he will run for another term, and there has been rampant speculation in political circles about who might succeed him.
Raoul, 60, has become the target of much of that speculation in recent months by joining numerous multistate lawsuits that seek to block many of President Donald Trump’s executive orders and other policy initiatives.
Those include Trump’s efforts to halt the recognition of birthright citizenship that is recognized under the 14th amendment; to freeze the distribution of federal funds previously appropriated by Congress; to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, and to terminate the employment of tens of thousands of federal employees.
“I do not want to go to Washington. I want to stay here” –Kwame Raoul
But Raoul, who served 15 years in the Illinois Senate before being elected attorney general in 2018, said emphatically Tuesday he does not want to be considered for Durbin’s seat, insisting he can do more to counteract the Trump administration from the attorney general’s office than from anywhere else.
“I know that the attorney general’s office, and it’s in every state, produces more than a single U.S. senator can for its constituency,” he said. “So why would I leave doing something more important to doing something — I’m not saying unimportant — but less impactful?”
Durbin himself has come under criticism from fellow Democrats, including Gov. JB Pritzker, for voting last month in favor of a Republican-backed spending plan that averted a partial government shutdown but also provides for implementing massive spending cuts over the next 10 years.
Pritzker called that vote “a huge mistake,” but Durbin defended it by telling reporters at a March 18 event in Taylorville, “I have never voted for a shutdown and I didn’t last week.”
In his comments Tuesday, Raoul said the budget vote caused a rift within Democratic circles nationally, but he said he would not second-guess Durbin or any of the other Democrats who voted to let the spending package go through.
“I don’t know how I would have voted on the continuing resolution,” he said. “But I’m not going to drag anybody over the coals without a very healthy, well-informed debate about everything that they were facing in that moment.”
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
