When Dick Durbin announced he was stepping down from his U.S. Senate seat, Juliana Stratton didn’t wait to see what the political landscape looked like. She was the first major Democrat to file. That kind of decisiveness tells you everything you need to know about how she moves.
Stratton has spent six years as Illinois’ Lieutenant Governor, and before that she was a state legislator, a criminal justice reform leader, a mediator, a lawyer, and a girl from Pill Hill on Chicago’s South Side who grew up watching her father save lives as a radiologist and her mother shape minds as a CPS teacher. Now she wants to take all of that to Washington.
Who Is Juliana Stratton?
Stratton grew up in Pill Hill, a South Side neighborhood known for its Black middle-class families and strong community roots. She attended Kenwood Academy, then headed to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she earned a degree in broadcast journalism in 1987. She later got her J.D. from DePaul University College of Law in 1992.
Her career path tells the story of someone who kept circling back to justice. After a brief stint at a Chicago law firm specializing in disability and healthcare rights, Stratton left to start her own mediation firm, JDS Mediation Services, focused on restorative justice. The idea was simple but radical: instead of locking people up and calling it accountability, invest in the conditions that prevent harm in the first place.
That philosophy led her to become Executive Director of Cook County’s Justice for Children program, then the Cook County Justice Advisory Council, and eventually Director of the Center for Public Safety and Justice at UIC. She also taught conflict management and negotiation at Loyola University Chicago. By the time she ran for the Illinois House in 2016, she had spent decades building the intellectual and practical foundation for reform.
The Record
In Springfield, Stratton didn’t waste time. As a state legislator, she led the fight for HB 40, a bill ensuring Illinois women had access to abortion care regardless of their insurance coverage. That was before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. She saw it coming and got ahead of it.
As Lieutenant Governor, she worked with lawmakers to pass the Reproductive Health Act, which enshrined abortion access into state law. She also became the administration’s point person on criminal justice reform, helping push Illinois toward restorative practices and away from the punitive approach that has defined American policy for decades.
In 2019, she became the first Black woman to serve as Lieutenant Governor of Illinois. That distinction isn’t just symbolic. It meant that for six years, the second-highest office in the state was held by someone who understood what criminal justice reform, healthcare access, and economic opportunity actually look like from the community level.
What She’s Running On
Stratton’s Senate platform focuses on healthcare access for every American, economic policies that build generational wealth for working families, reproductive rights, and immigration reform. She supports tax cuts for the middle class, paid for by asking those making over $1 million annually to contribute more. She backs small business support through tax incentives and grant programs while calling for the ultra-wealthy and corporations to pay their fair share.
On immigration, she’s taken a bold stance, advocating for the abolition of ICE and a complete restructuring of how the country handles immigration enforcement. Whether you agree with every position or not, there’s no ambiguity about where she stands. And in a political era defined by hedging and poll-testing, that clarity is refreshing.
The Culture Connection
Stratton is a South Side product, and that means something. Pill Hill produced someone who could have stayed in corporate law and lived comfortably, but instead she built a career around making the system less harmful to the people it was designed to punish. That’s a deeply community-centered path.
Her work in restorative justice alone connects her to a tradition that hip-hop culture has long championed: the idea that people are more than their worst moments, and that communities should have the resources to heal rather than just the infrastructure to incarcerate.
She’s not flashy about it. Stratton’s style is more boardroom than block party. But the values are rooted in the same soil that produces the music, the art, and the activism that define Chicago’s cultural identity.
How to Follow the Campaign
- Website: julianastratton.com
- Primary Election: March 17, 2026
