Voters in Illinois’ deep-blue 9th Congressional District may feel they already chose their next member of Congress in March’s open Democratic primary. Democrats have held the North Side and north suburban seat since 1949, and except for a brief stretch, only two people have represented it in that time.
Still, Democratic nominee Daniel Biss, Evanston’s mayor, is continuing to define what kind of Democrat he’ll be in Washington. And Republican nominee John Elleson, a suburban pastor, keeps campaigning even though he isn’t raising any money.
Endorsed by retiring U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, Biss won a dramatic 15-way primary by walking a tightrope between his party’s centrist and insurgent progressive wings. His closest rivals were moderate Democratic state Sen. Laura Fine and unconventional progressive political commentator Kat Abughazaleh.
Now, after party-dividing primary contests in nearby swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan, the second-term mayor is no more eager to be boxed in than he was during the primary.
Asked on Sept. 29 at a baiduhai Editorial Board meeting about the divisions between candidates who might identify as a “normie Democrat” versus a democratic socialist, Biss responded: “I’m going to plant my flag as a normie leftist. How about that?”
And asked where he stood on the fight between those factions, he added: “I oppose it. I actually mean that seriously.”
Biss, 49, noted that he sits on the progressive side of many policy issues but also believes in a big-tent party.
A former assistant math professor at the University of Chicago and former state senator, Biss ran for governor in 2018, losing the Democratic primary to now-Gov. JB Pritzker.
Since the 9th District primary, Biss has pitched himself as someone with big ideas for government who’s also willing to stand with protesters in the street against President Donald Trump’s administration. Trump’s agenda, including immigration enforcement in the Chicago region, has been his main foil.
At a League of Women Voters forum at the Skokie Public Library in late September, Biss, as he has done before on the campaign trail, called the administration’s actions an “emergency.” In what may be a signal of less voter interest in the general election contest than in the Democratic primary, only about 100 people attended the forum, a few dozen of whom were high school students attending for their government or U.S. history classes.
“We are seeing masked men abduct people off our streets,” Biss said at the forum, referencing a September incident in which federal agents briefly detained and injured an Evanston man, a U.S. citizen, after mistaking him for someone else, according to the city’s police. Police said they requested an ambulance, the Pioneer Press reported.
Like many progressive candidates in Illinois this year, Biss has called for abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In his interview with the editorial board, he questioned the need for a “quasi-military” interior law enforcement agency to handle what are mostly civil immigration matters.
“It’s obscene, and it makes a mockery of the core principles of what this country claims to be about,” Biss said of immigration enforcement in the Trump era.
Elleson, a 64-year-old resident of Arlington Heights, has made his career as a pastor and leads nearby Lakewood Chapel. He has never held public office, and in 2018, as the Republican nominee in the same district, he lost to Schakowsky 73% to 27%.
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A supporter of many of Trump’s policies, including ending taxes on tips, Elleson tells voters he’s “running for the forgotten.” Although the national debt has risen by more than $11.5 trillion during Trump’s two terms, Elleson said it must be tackled, suggesting he would cut waste in defense funding and prioritize Social Security for the elderly over people who use it as an “unemployment check.” He also said he would like to “take a look at” Medicare and other drivers of spending.
Elleson says he’s “not into the socialism thing,” suggesting that lower taxes will incentivize hard work, and he worries Biss could be pulled further left in Congress.
He has repeatedly invoked Sheridan Gorman, the Loyola University Chicago student authorities say was killed in March by José Medina, a Venezuelan national who the federal government has said was living in the U.S. unlawfully. Her case has become a lightning rod for conservative politicians opposed to so-called sanctuary city laws. Medina, who is in custody as he awaits trial, faces 18 felony counts, including murder, and he has pleaded not guilty.
On immigration, Elleson told the voter forum that if people are “breaking the law, they shouldn’t be here,” but he also said he personally supports individual undocumented immigrants in his congregation, including by writing letters on their behalf to immigration courts.
“They always ask you for letters, as a pastor — how you could turn that down?” Elleson said in an interview. “They’re usually people of color, different nationality, and I like that. I do. And they’re good people. They’re the kind of people that you want in the United States.”
“But when it comes to government, you gotta have laws,” he said.
Elleson hasn’t reported raising any money for his campaign and said he isn’t soliciting contributions because voters may be struggling financially, and because it is difficult for a Republican to win the district.
Beyond the seat’s long Democratic history, the district’s boundaries give the party an enormous advantage, making it difficult for any Republican to break through. Schakowsky won by 37 points in her last election; she first won the seat in 1998, and late U.S. Rep. Sidney Yates held it for nearly a half century before that, with a brief gap in the 1960s.
Biss raised $115,000 from April through June, far less than the more than $2.5 million he raised during the competitive primary. He had about $262,000 on hand at the beginning of July, according to the latest federal records. New filings are due Oct. 15.
Leaning into many voters’ skepticism of artificial intelligence and data centers, Biss has also put forward a multipart plan to regulate the industry. He has called for a national moratorium on data center construction and said he opposes a small proposed data center in Evanston. That goes further than Pritzker, who has urged lawmakers to pass stricter regulations but has not pushed for an all-out pause.
“It’s exciting that states — and local governments, even — across the country are doing a whole bunch of stuff on data centers, but what that does is it points to the need for federal action, and without that, I think we’re going to have state and local actors in a kind of lose-lose competition with each other,” Biss said in an interview earlier this month.
Biss has also called for export controls on chips, a “regime of inspectors” in AI labs and stronger disclosure of “unsafe things” occurring in those labs.
Elleson said he is concerned about competition with China in the AI race and that data centers should supply their own electricity, though he said at the forum that he didn’t know what guardrails for AI companies would be most suitable.
On healthcare, Biss supports “Medicare for All” but — given the costs associated with that policy — has suggested expanding it in steps in the meantime, such as by opening it to younger age groups. He has also called climate change an emergency.
Elleson has said Medicare should be primarily for older Americans and has suggested that immigrants are straining healthcare resources.
“Medicare for All — I think we really need to think about that. I’m for immigrants, I really am, our church — we have a lot of them,” Elleson said. “When I saw ER rooms full, and someone tried to go in there that’s paid taxes all their life, and would leave after eight, nine hours later because they didn’t get access, they didn’t get care, because it was full of other people — now, I’m for, like I say, all of them — but I don’t think that’s right.”
If elected, Biss said, he’s eyeing a seat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, where Schakowsky is currently a member, because of its overlap with healthcare, climate and consumer protection issues.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee loomed large in the Democratic primary. Biss and other candidates criticized Fine, the state senator, for support from AIPAC associates. The issue became a hot-button one in races nationwide, but it carried more salience in the 9th District, which has long been represented by a Jewish member of Congress, a tradition Biss, who is Jewish, would continue.
“I believe what I believe really strongly on this issue, and I care deeply about it,” Biss said when asked whether he had burned bridges in Congress by taking a hard line during the primary against AIPAC, which supports military aid to Israel. Members of Congress are increasingly thinking twice about automatically supporting Israel militarily without restrictions, he said.
“It’s really obvious that things are changing dramatically on this issue … and they should change,” he said.
On redistricting, Biss has said Democrats should match Republicans’ push for partisan gerrymandering. Nine states have new House districts ahead of the midterms since Trump urged changes to benefit Republicans and some Democrat-led states followed suit, with Republicans poised to net up to nine new seats from the changes, according to The Associated Press.
“I hate partisan gerrymandering. We should ban it nationally,” Biss wrote in his Substack newsletter in May.
“But,” he continued, bolding the word, “If Republicans are playing by one set of rules while Democrats force themselves to play by another, that’s not a functional democracy.”
Elleson has faced scrutiny in past campaigns. He was charged in a 2001 Hawaii felony theft case that was later dismissed and expunged, the Daily Herald reported earlier this year. Elleson said the case stemmed from his work at a faith-based rehabilitation program and involved pooling food stamp benefits for clients as a group rather than individually.
A court agreement at the time, shared by Elleson with the Tribune, said the rehab program he led would pay $49,000 in restitution and that neither Elleson nor his wife personally benefited from the food stamp overpayments.
“It was never anything personally I did wrong,” he said in his recent interview. “I was never, never accused of taking any money.”
During Elleson’s 2018 campaign, an ad that aired on CNN in the Chicago area showed popular Texas televangelist Joel Osteen in a video encouraging viewers to visit Elleson’s church, followed by an on-screen message that Elleson was running for Congress, the Tribune reported then. A spokesperson for Osteen’s church said at the time that Osteen had not endorsed Elleson and didn’t know about the commercials, the Tribune reported. Elleson declined to comment on the ad last week.
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Elleson acknowledges the general assessment that the 9th District is a tough race for a Republican to win.
“OK, we know that, but that doesn’t mean you’re not serious,” he said. “Serious is how hard you work and what you’ve done.”
Biss, for his part, said that in a time when politicians are becoming too risk-averse, he won’t worry about reelection.
“I’m not going to be cautious. I’m not going to be looking over my shoulder and wondering if my next reelection is going to be a little more uncomfortable if I do this complex, imperfect thing that moves the country forward on balance,” Biss told the Tribune Editorial Board. “I’m going to be focused on helping our government get unstuck.”