How Fast the Future Ages: Lessons from Illinois-09
Laura Fine, Kat Abughazaleh, and Daniel Biss. Credit: Evanston Round Table
Just under 18 months out from the 2026 midterms, political commentators are already deciding what narrative themes they’ll be pushing in the interminable run-up to the next major U.S. election, regardless of their veracity. Youth vs. experience, establishment vs. new guard, left vs. right vs. center– these are all questions about the future of party and policy that pundits on every side claim will be answered on November 3, 2026 (and then will be answered by those same pundits again in 2027, and in 2028, and so on...)
Perhaps no race has established itself as the sort of knock-down, drag-out fight where political commentators can cut their teeth more than the ever-growing primary in Illinois’s 9th Congressional District. The district, which stretches from the northwest Chicagoland suburbs through Evanston’s affluent North Shore, down to the rapidly gentrifying communities of Uptown and Edgewater on the North Side of Chicago-proper, has been represented by Jan Schakowsky since 1999– and the last time it was represented by a Republican, Harry S. Truman was in the White House.
Even before Schakowsky confirmed suspicions that she would not run for another term earlier this year, she became part of the national conversation around 2026 when journalist and leftist social media influencer Kat Abughazaleh announced her intent to primary the long-time Congresswoman. Since then, Schakowsky has officially taken herself out of the race and the current slate of candidates has ballooned to twelve, including IL State Senators Mike Simmons and Laura Fine, IL State Representative Hoan Huynh, and former State Senator and current Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, alongside a host of other elected officials, community organizers, and business people.
This wide primary field allows a space for every type of Democrat and a lane for any narrative about the midterms to be pushed by interested parties– ripe fruit for opportunistic political writers looking to get a head start on 2026 scuttlebutt. Abughazaleh is only 26 years old and has made a name for herself as a leftist voice online and in the media, amassing half a million followers on social media even before launching her campaign and announcing major fundraising numbers in the opening weeks of her campaign. She’s been a common subject of criticism from the right and from the more centrist wings of the Democratic party, both for the (unforgiveable, in the eyes of conservative news) crime of being young and a woman in public, but also for more legitimate reasons echoed even by her progressive allies.
Abughazaleh only moved to Illinois in 2025 and doesn’t live in IL-09 currently, although she has said she plans to move into the district this summer. Remember when carpetbagging was just a quaint vocab term you learned in U.S. History class? In the 2045 AP US History DBQ response, Abughazaleh’s X profile may be one of the primary source documents used to explain the term. However, although polling data is slim for the full field as it currently stands, she has run behind only Biss in early results.
What’s ironic is that Biss may be feeling a glimmer of deja vu when he reads the criticism Abughazaleh is facing. Not for the crime of wearing fishnets or dating the founder of the Onion (main GOP critiques of a candidate who, again, has fair political issues to critique that aren’t predicated on committing the crime of being a young woman existing in public). During his 2017 campaign for Illinois Governor, Biss was only 39 and was considered the more progressive and leftist candidate in the primary eventually won by now-Governor JB Pritzker. Like Abughazeleh, his campaign was dogged by controversies surrounding the Israel/Palestine conflict (Abughazaleh would be the second Palestinian woman elected to Congress, following only Rashid Talib, and his been outspoken on the conflict) and conversation surrounding lack of experience. Now, just eight years later, Biss is considered the mainstream candidate that many young leftists reject as an example of the kind of party leader they no longer believe can lead Democrats. Biss is a sterling example of how quickly political narratives can change in just a few cycles.
In less than a decade, Biss went from left-wing upstart to establishment Democrat, without changing any of his major policy platforms. Instead, the shape of the country and the political landscape changed around him– and the prodigy became the median. Biss exemplifies how candidates have to change as rapidly as the landscape around them to adapt. For any of Abughazaleh’s flaws, her time in new media uniquely positions her to meet that moment. But it’s a fallacy to suggest that voters will be charmed so easily by policy slogans and a 1999 birthday, especially in a district like IL-09.
Other candidates in this race shouldn’t be discounted, as fellow challengers for the youth angle or for progressive support. Huynh and Simmons are 35 and 42, respectively, and Simmons has also made a name for himself in Illinois progressive movements as the first LGBTQ+ member of the IL Senate and for his work in community-based antiviolence initiatives. Huynh represents the Asian American community that has long called IL-09 home and makes up its second-largest demographic bloc. Fine has collected impressive endorsements and has higher name recognition than most others in the race. But the specific contrast between Biss and Abughazaleh is a fascinating glimpse into what we considered radical in a pre/early Trump era and what we consider radical today.
When I lived in Daniel Biss’s Evanston in 2017 and read the literature passionate young organizers passed out at Northwestern’s Student Center, I couldn’t have known that eight years later I would live in an IL-09 he was now considered the mainstream choice to represent (or that I would go on to spend three years working for the man who eventually would bring his campaign to an end, JB Pritzker). But there’s thousands of political moments that few could have predicted over the last eight years that have now become part of our lexicon and shared history– J6, a global pandemic, and the return of Trump to the White House.
I’d caution anyone trying to pre-write the story of 2026 and what it means for candidates to look at the parable of Biss and Abughazaleh as a cautionary tale. What we once knew as fact can become quaint and out of touch faster than we once thought possible. Nothing is certain but death, taxes, and young political upstarts aging into middle-aged politicians, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin (the oldest person to sign the Declaration of Independence yet one of the most well-known to this day, and, with his penchant for witty statements and love of a bawdy joke, undoubtedly someone who would have been a great Twitter follow).
