Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss won the Democratic nomination to succeed retiring U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky in the 9th Congressional District, delivering a loss to both the big-money interests that spent millions to elect one of his opponents and an insurgent, unconventional campaign from another.
“AIPAC found out the hard way,” Biss said in his speech declaring victory, referring to the pro-Israel lobbying group that supported another candidate. “The 9th District is not for sale.”
With 90% of the estimated vote tallied in the district stretching from the North Side to Wilmette to Crystal Lake, Biss had 29.6%, progressive commentator Kat Abughazaleh had 25.6% and state Sen. Laura Fine of Glenview had 20.4%, leading the 15-candidate field, according to The Associated Press.
Biss held his campaign’s election night watch party at Double Clutch Brewing in Evanston, where St. Patrick’s Day revelers gathered on one side on Tuesday night while Biss supporters and campaign workers gathered in a private event space.
The brewery is in a part of Evanston with a more industrial vibe, and sits in a converted warehouse space. It’s about a mile away from Lorraine H. Morton City Hall, where Biss is in his second term as Evanston’s mayor.
Abughazaleh’s campaign HQ was at a crowded LGBTQ+ arcade bar in Andersonville where neon lights flickered over vintage game cabinets. Supporters refreshed their vote totals between rounds of Ms. Pac-Man and $14 cocktails as Doja Cat blasted from the overhead speakers. Clusters of them flashed silver campaign stickers and embraced while they watched screens of results flash before them.
Addressing a packed room of supporters who continued to cheer “We love you, Kat,” Abughazaleh said: “The work isn’t over.”
“There are progressives all over the country who are taking a chance just like we did, and we have to help them win, no matter how hard it is,” she said. “We have to send a message to this administration, anyone who enables it, and I’m talking directly to them right now. You and your jobs are not safe.”
Fine was set to have her election night event at the Glen Club, a Glenview club and golf course branded on its website as “old school luxury.”
The March 17 primary is all but certain to determine the district’s next member of Congress. The question for voters on Tuesday was not whether to send a Democrat to Washington, D.C., but what kind.
Schakowsky, a stalwart progressive, became a national voice on abortion rights, consumer protection and opposition to the Iraq War. The slate to replace her is diverse, reflecting the broader region, as both longtime politicians and a handful of outsiders have proved competitive.
Schakowsky, who endorsed Biss, mingled with his supporters just before 9 p.m. on Tuesday.
While the results were still incoming, Schakowsky spoke of Biss as if he’d already won.
“I feel so optimistic about the direction that he’s going to take things in,” she said. “And many of the issues that I care about, I’m going to see going forward through Daniel.”
For the past 14 congressional elections, nights like this one had come with a certain kind of pressure, even if her victory was largely assured. Now, for once, she was experiencing an election as something of a bystander for the first time in a long time.
“I’m ready for this,” she said. “You know, I’ve been in Congress for a long time, and I think it is time for me to turn it over to someone as ready for this job as Daniel. I’m a happy person.”
Narrowly, the race between the three leaders was a fight over who had the most solid grounding among a pair of established local officials in core suburban parts of the district and a young, newly established Chicagoan looking to push the conversation to the left.
Several others kept up with the pack in terms of fundraising or on forum stages, including former FBI agent Phil Andrew, who survived a 1988 school shooting and later built a career in crisis negotiation; Gen Z school board member Bushra Amiwala, first elected to her Skokie board at 21; progressive state Sen. Mike Simmons of Chicago, who has highlighted his roots in the district as Illinois’ only openly LGBTQ state senator; and state Rep. Hoan Huynh of Chicago, who has tried to carve a path based on a tax-the-rich legislative proposal.
President Donald Trump’s agenda, including his aggressive immigration enforcement in the Chicago region, has loomed over the race. While candidates’ visions for how to best resist ICE differed, the leading candidates have said the agency can’t continue in its current form.
But throughout the race, the most heated exchanges have centered not on policy differences but on money — most prominently, the role of donors aligned with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and PACs that appear to be aligned with the group, both of which have primarily benefited Fine’s campaign.
It was an especially prominent question in a district that has had Jewish representation for nearly the past eight decades.
While Fine led the field in terms of outside spending in her favor, Biss received the backing of groups aligned with pro-science candidates and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Abughazaleh, a 26-year-old newcomer to the district who became arguably the strongest fundraiser this cycle in the entire Chicago region, was hit with ads against her by a group that she has also accused of having ties to AIPAC.
Electing Abughazaleh would have represented not only a progressive vote in Congress but an insurgency in the district.
“This is the start and not the end,” she said to supporters late Tuesday. “We will continue to come back and every single loss like this one just makes the path easier for the next person who takes the same chance. We are not done and I am not going anywhere.”
Shortly after moving to Chicago from out of state, Abughazaleh initially launched her campaign as a primary challenger to Schakowsky, only for the congresswoman to announce her retirement weeks later.
Having never held public office, she has embraced an unconventional political approach, combining dropping expletives and fundraising on livestreams with hosting mutual aid events as she has sought to channel the energy of younger voters impatient with incrementalism.
Abughazaleh has also been dealing with a different kind of political challenge: Trump’s Department of Justice indicted her, accusing her of conspiring to impede immigration agents during protest activity at the federal immigration processing center in west suburban Broadview. A jury trial in the case is scheduled to start in late May.
Abughazaleh cast the charges as political retaliation and an attack on free speech by the Trump administration.
Biss, who also protested at Broadview but was not indicted, made the case in interviews and across the campaign trail that he’s a progressive who can work both inside and outside government.
“I think having those together really set me apart,” Biss said Tuesday.
He’s a former assistant math professor at the University of Chicago and previously ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018 against JB Pritzker.
“When this campaign started, I didn’t know what tear gas smelled like. When this campaign started, I had never seen my neighbors abducted, dissenters beaten up on the street. Never seen kids scared of their own federal government. Never seen a whole community paralyzed because they heard their government was going to be in town that day with their masks and their guns and their helicopters and their SUVs and their thuggery,” Biss said in his speech Tuesday. “But we’ve all lived through that trauma now, and I think it’s changed all of us. I know it’s changed me.”
The response to Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts, he said, “paints a picture for what kind of movement we need to build on every issue going forward.”
Biss’ declaration of victory Tuesday came after an eleventh hour development that played out on social media: a series of posts from a woman who said late Monday that she had a relationship with him shortly after she was his student at the University of Chicago. Biss would have been in his 20s at the time. The campaign did not comment on the posts Tuesday.
Pressed about the outside spending in her favor, Fine called for overturning the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and on the debate stage described herself as a “punching bag” for rivals unable to assail her legislative work.
“There are many candidates out there that are attacking me, but they can’t attack my record,” she said in an interview.
Supporters of Biss around 8 p.m. on Tuesday turned their attention toward the large screen with the running election results while they engaged in quiet conversation, or helped themselves to what was labeled the “Biss Buffet,” with a menu that included popcorn shrimp, pretzel bites and smoked BBQ buffalo wings.
It was not a rowdy or loud atmosphere, but a hopeful one. Abigail Aziza Stone came in perhaps the most colorful outfit of any at the party, with a hat made of flowers and a bedazzled jean jacket with “Biss for Congress” written on the back. She also wore a whistle around her neck — the kind that many wore throughout Chicago last fall to warn of the presence of federal agents throughout Operation Midway Blitz.
In Evanston, Biss confronted ICE and border patrol agents in the streets, and those moments resonated with Aziza Stone, who said she identifies as Black and Native American. As a former Evanston resident, she said she supported Biss before he took a stand during the immigration raids throughout Evanston and beyond. But that he spoke out and stood up cemented her support, she said.
“I’m going to stand with Daniel to the end,” Aziza Stone said, “because I saw him risk himself for people that don’t look like him. We need more of that.”
