When Jan Schakowsky announced she would not run for reelection, we expected to see a lot of interest in succeeding her.
But 15 Democrats? That’s some pent-up demand.
Schakowsky, 81, has represented the 9th Congressional District for 27 years. The district snakes its way from as far south as Lakeview through Chicago’s North Side to all or parts of suburbs including Evanston, Wilmette, Glencoe, Glenview, Skokie, Morton Grove, Niles, Northfield, Buffalo Grove, Prospect Heights, Hawthorn Woods and to points farther north and west all the way to Crystal Lake. It’s solidly blue, which explains the large number of Democrats vying for the seat. Four Republicans also are on the primary ballot.
Our choice among this crowded Democratic field, which includes many impressive people including political newcomers with diverse and fascinating resumes, is Laura Fine, 59, a state senator from Glenview. Fine has served in Springfield since 2013, first as a representative and then as a senator. She told us she got into politics after her husband lost his arm 15 years ago in a car accident, and the family’s health insurance provider canceled the policy, leaving them with $600,000 in medical debt.
“I’m the type of person that when I get angry, I have to do something,” she said.
Fine led the charge in Springfield to give the state Department of Insurance far more authority to regulate health insurers, a law enacted in 2024. She strikes us as a measured, reasonable and principled lawmaker who understands how to work with fellow legislators and should appeal to those in the district who admire Schakowsky for her record as a fighter for women’s rights and a powerful female member of Congress. Fine is extremely well regarded in Springfield, a major factor in our endorsement of her.
Our choice wasn’t easy. We think highly as well of Phil Andrew, 58 — a 21-year FBI agent, with experience as a hostage negotiator and public corruption investigator — who endured a traumatic experience of his own as a young man. In 1988, while home from college, his home was invaded by Laurie Dann, who’d shot young children at nearby Hubbard Woods Elementary School, killing one of them, before taking Andrew’s parents hostage. Andrew convinced Dann to release his parents before she shot him while he attempted to disarm her. He nearly died but recovered and then lobbied Congress to pass the Brady Bill, which mandated background checks for gun purchases.
Andrew, who has owned crisis and conflict consultancy PAX Group for eight years after leaving the FBI, is running on a platform of protecting American democracy from the excesses of the Trump administration, which he describes as a full-blown crisis. “Holding this administration accountable for the next two years is going to be critical,” he tells us.
If there’s a front-runner in the race, it’s Evanston Mayor Dan Biss, 48, who also has served in Springfield (Fine succeeded him in both the state House and state Senate) and ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018, when JB Pritzker won his first term. Endorsed by Schakowsky, Biss is familiar to many in the district; we’ve admired him for taking some policy positions that put himself at some risk with his constituents, notably his support of the new Northwestern University football stadium, which this page backed but many Evanstonians abhorred.
Biss won a second term as Evanston mayor just last year amid warnings from his opponent that he likely would seek greener pastures before his term ended, so those familiar with his career may have rolled their eyes when he announced his bid for Schakowsky’s seat a little over a year later.
He says members of Congress in the current moment need to show an ability to work within the system to get things done and to galvanize the political energy arising from the protest movement against Trump’s heavy-handed immigration-enforcement actions.
We think Biss is doing well as Evanston’s mayor, a job for which he got our endorsement. We weren’t comfortable with Biss’ aggressive, on-the-street confrontations with federal immigration agents when they patrolled parts of Evanston last year. We’ve repeatedly condemned the excesses of Operation Midway Blitz, but we also believe that elected leaders ought to be doing as much de-escalating as possible when it comes to street clashes with law enforcement in order to keep people safe.
Additionally, opponents’ criticism that Biss is all too frequently seeking to move up the political ladder is justified in our view. We like him better as Evanston’s mayor.
That Biss confronted federal immigration agents in Evanston’s streets is owed — at least in part, we’re sure — to the presence in the race of activist Kat Abughazaleh, 26, who moved to Chicago in 2024. She has been a frequent presence at protests and in general has behaved more like a performance artist than a congressional candidate. As part of that effort, she made a show of declining (sending a spokesman, for goodness sake) to be part of the editorial board’s endorsement interviews after first informing us she would attend.
That’s her prerogative, of course, but we hope that even those philosophically aligned with her progressive views will agree that sort of behavior won’t produce much of anything positive in Congress. Other than TikTok videos. The good news for voters otherwise predisposed to Abughazaleh is that there’s a youthful progressive candidate in the race with similar views but who comes with a record of service and without the ego.
Bushra Amiwala, 28, has been a school board member in Skokie for seven years. A staunch progressive who supports Medicare for All and liberalization of immigration policies to make it easier for international students to stay here and work after they graduate, Amiwala impressed us with her knowledge, communication skills and enthusiasm. Her views are to the left of ours, but easily within the bounds of those who are interested in Abughazaleh’s candidacy. We wouldn’t be surprised to see Amiwala in Springfield soon.
We met, too, with non-politicians running to succeed Schakowsky, who made us feel more optimistic about our country’s future. Evanston residents Nick Pyati, who left his job in corporate strategy for Microsoft to run for office, and Jeff Cohen, who works for international economics consultancy Analysis Group, struck us as dedicated, intelligent individuals who simply care deeply for the future of our country and believe they have good ideas that go beyond Democratic Party platitudes.
Pyati struck a chord with us when he said that after Donald Trump’s 2024 victory, “I got terrified that if we are all focused on winning in these safe seats having platforms that win in a solid blue district but lose in the rest of the country, then we are on track to losing again in 2028.”
Cohen’s ideas to help more Americans who are struggling economically include making mortgage interest deductible even for those who take the standard deduction. Pyati, in his answers to our questionnaire, was a pragmatist, showing himself open, for example, to raising the eligibility age for Social Security for high earners.
We met as well with second-term state Rep. Hoan Hyunh, 35, who is giving up his seat in Springfield to run for Congress. Representing Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood in the state Capitol, Vietnam-born Hyunh’s immigrant story is as stirring as his intelligence and eloquence. However, his proposal in Springfield to tax trades at Chicago’s commodities exchanges is a non-starter for us given the likelihood it would cause our critical exchanges to move out of state.
We didn’t get a chance to meet with state Sen. Mike Simmons, who represents a North Side district in Springfield and is running for the 9th District. But his responses to our questionnaire revealed a politician well to the left of where we stand.
Also running as Democrats are Evanston homemaker Bethany Johnson; Skokie civil rights attorney Howard Rosenblum (who is deaf himself and has advocated for deaf people’s rights); Andersonville environmental engineer Justin Ford; Mark Arnold Fredrickson, who’s run for Congress before; longtime Evanston resident Patricia Brown; and former U.S. Army Capt. Sam Polan, who served multiple tours of duty in the Middle East.
On the Republican ballot, four are running: John Elleson, 63, pastor of Lakewood Chapel in Arlington Heights; Mark Su, a Rogers Park software engineer; Chicagoan Paul Friedman (who pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct in Michigan in 1998); and Rocío Cleveland, who bizarrely gave Abughazaleh a “care package” containing holy water, among other things, at a November campaign event.
We think Elleson, who won the GOP nomination for the seat in 2018 and went on to lose convincingly to Schakowsky, is by far the best of these four choices for those selecting a Republican ballot.
Laura Fine is all-in on this race. Unlike Biss, she is giving up her state Senate seat to run, and given the likelihood that a Democratic primary win will mean a November victory in this solidly blue district, we believe she would be an effective lawmaker in what’s looking now like it will be a Democrat-run House of Representatives in 2027. She told us that she had left the progressive caucus in Springfield after she was made to feel uncomfortable for her belief in Israel’s right to defend itself or even to exist. A principled position for a principled Democrat, to our minds.
We endorse Laura Fine in the Democratic primary and John Elleson in the GOP primary.
