First open race for the Congressional seat in nearly 30 years
By Bob Seidenberg
Voters head to the polls Tuesday to put their stamp on a wide range of state and federal races, including an intensely-fought 9th Congressional District Democratic primary.
The race has drawn a field of 15 candidates vying to succeed longtime party stalwart Jan Schakowsky who has represented the district — which stretches from the Chicago lakefront to nearly McHenry County — since 1999.
Candidates have traded strong charges in mailings and TV ads as the race entered its final stages, with Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss battering fellow legislator State Sen. Laura Fine, over her acceptance of support from AIPAC.
Fine, meanwhile, responded, in ads of her own, accused Biss of a “wherever the wind blows” approach, charging that he had sought support from the longtime bipartisan lobbying group too.
She has pointed to her record fighting special interests, after her husband Michael lost an arm in a car accident in 2010.
”I’m the only candidate in this race with the experience needed to pass major legislation like Medicare for All, and I’m on a mission to make sure no family goes through what my family went through,” she said on her website.
Biss, a two-term state legislator before his run as mayor, has maintained that ‘we need Democrats who won’t flinch, won’t fold, won’t forget what we’re fighting for,” and points to his record as a coalition-builder for problems that have gone long unaddressed.
Another candidate, 26-year-old Kat Abughazaleh, a former researcher and video producer, “covering the far right,” has entered the picture, according to some late polling results, which used text-to-web messages and automated landline calls to garner results.
Abughazaleh, a Palestinian-American, who moved into the district to run, won attention early in the campaign, when she was arrested in a protest last September at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview. A video of the incident, which she has featured in her campaign, has gone viral.
In her literature, she has stressed that she is running “a new type of Democratic campaign,” warning, “if you’re a right-wing billionaire or a member of the Democratic consultant class, this campaign isn’t for you.”
Other members of the deep field include State Sen. Mike Simmons (D-7th), who in 2021 became the first openly LGBTQ+ person and first Ethiopian-American to serve as an Illinois State Senator; Phil Andrew, who went on to become an FBI hostage negotiator, after he himself was taken hostage and shot in the 1988 mass Hubbard Woods mass shooting incident shooting; Bushra Amiwala, a member of the Skokie School District 73.5 Board of Education; Jeff Cohen, an economist (“If you want to fix the economy, send an economist”); State Rep. Hoan Huynh, who represents the Illinois’s 13th House District; Patricia A. Brown, a lifelong Evanston resident whose mother, Iris, early on was one of Schakowky’s top assistants.
Several polls have been released of the race, including two by the nonprofit Evanston RoundTable within the election’s final weeks. A number of voters, roughly one in six, were still undecided, according to the RoundTable’s last survey.
With such a large field, and ranked voting not in place, “it forces voters to have to do their own triage,” said Jeff Smith, the president of the Central Street Neighbors Association, which hosted one of the key forums for the Ninth District candidates in January.