Whoever Said Democracy Runs Smoothly?

Illinois held its various primaries yesterday, and Jim Oberweis did better than most anyone expected in the Republican gubernatorial race. As predicted, Judy Barr Topinka won the nomination, but she just had about six points on Oberweis. If only those pesky opponents of his would've dropped out of the race like he asked them to, he might've won! His strong showing has gone to his head, though, because at this morning's "Republican unity breakfast," intended to paper over the cracks in the facade broken open by the hard-fought primary, Oberwies resisted endorsing the nominee. November might be a tougher fight than anyone's predicted, as current Governor Rod Blagojevich only got about 70 percent of the vote against an underfunded Democratic primary opponent.

All these results are approximate for the time being, though. New voting technology in Cook County has resulted in exceedingly slow ballot counting. They're hoping to get every vote counted by sometime Thursday.

In some other races around the area, Tammy Duckworth barely won against Christine Cegelis for the Democratic nomination to run to replace Henry Hyde, who's retiring from Congress this year. There were hard feelings as national Dem party leaders stepped into the race to encourage Duckworth to run against Cegelis, who took on Hyde last time and snagged 44 percent of the votes from him with virtually no support from the national party. Duckworth will face down Repub Peter Roskam in November. A bit south and farther west, John Laesch became the first of Air America and Kos's Fighting Dems to win his primary. He took two-thirds of the vote over Ruben Zamora, and he won the dubious honor of taking on Speaker of the House Denny Hastert. Take a look at this diary he put up earlier this evening at Daily Kos.