By Illinois Review
On Tuesday, the National Republican Congressional Committee announced that Republican candidate for Congress Judge Joe McGraw (IL-17) has been added to the 2024 Young Guns Program as his campaign surges in what’s shaping up as one of the most closely watched races in the country.
NRCC spokesman Mike Marinella, in a press release, stated, “Extreme House Democrat Eric Sorensen has fueled the border, crime and cost of living crises that are wreaking havoc on Illinoisans’ safety and security. Judge Joe McGraw is in a prime position to flip Illinois’ Seventeenth District red and help grow our House majority in November.”
As the NRCC highlighted in their press release, the Young Gun program mentors and supports candidates in races across the country and provides them with the necessary tools to run successful, winning campaigns. The program requires candidates to work towards specific goals and meet benchmarks throughout the election cycle to ensure their campaigns remain competitive and well-funded.
In February, a Rockford car salesman was found dead in Chicago after taking customers out on a test drive – and less than two months later, a suspect was finally arrested and charged with his murder. But records reveal that the killer was out on pretrial release for two other cases, proving the point made by public safety advocates and Republicans across the state that cashless bail puts dangerous criminals where they don’t belong: back out on the streets to commit even more crimes.
McGraw’s opponent, U.S. Rep. Eric Sorensen, a Democrat who represents the 17th congressional district that includes Rockford, has been silent on the murder of his constituent – fearful he might offend his political supporters who passionately advocated and supported cashless bail and pretrial release for dangerous criminals.
In 2022, Sorensen campaigned alongside Democrat Illinois State Rep. Jehan Gordon-Booth, who defended the controversial policy, arguing that the “right wing extremist MAGA propaganda” was creating false narratives about cashless bail and she found the rhetoric offensive. Gordon-Booth, who spoke at a fundraiser for Sorensen alongside Democrat Illinois State Sen. Dave Koehler, joined forces to attack Republicans for “peddling fear” about the controversial policy.
“All of the sudden, the right wing is peddling fear. Fear is a very big motivator. You scare everybody into thinking we’re letting out criminals willy-nilly. That’s not true,” said Koehler.
Sorensen is also supported by Equality Illinois, who proclaimed last year that “The end of cash bail in IL will begin to advance meaningful public safety, not wealth.” Just after the November election in 2022, Equality Illinois issued a statement congratulating the Congressman-elect on his victory, saying, “We look forward to advancing justice with U.S. Rep. Sorensen.”
Sorensen has also made the case that closing the southern border would shut down the economy in a matter of days. In an interview with Fox18 in the Quad Cities, Sorensen said, “The economy of the United States would end in 3 days. We have 3 days of what we need in the United States, so if we just shut down the entire southern border, it would be to the detriment of our country.”
The crisis on the southern border – a crisis that was created under the Biden administration, is raising legitimate national security concerns as the U.S. Customs and Border Protection are reporting that an estimated 151 individuals on the FBI’s terror watch list have been caught trying to cross into the United States illegally in 2023 – representing an all time high along the southern border as Democratic politicians scramble to address the migrant crisis now plaguing the city of Chicago and the western suburbs, including in the 17th congressional district.
Democrats, including Sorensen are also facing questions about what they knew about Biden’s cognitive decline, and why they hid this information from the public for so long. On July 11th, Sorensen called for Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, but his decline was known to many, including Sorensen, for years. Despite Democrats engaging in the greatest health coverup in presidential history, Sorensen and his colleagues in Washington continued to defend Biden with lies to the American people about the true state of his health.
Sorensen remains vulnerable in the district, which includes Rockford, Bloomington-Normal and the Quad Cities as McGraw’s campaign surges.
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