US Midterms 2026
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Daniel Biss, a Democrat who has served as mayor of Evanston since 2021, is his party's nominee for Illinois's open 9th congressional district seat in 2026 against Republican John Elleson, a pastor.
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The page appears to discuss who is running for the U.S. House in the Chicago area for the 2026 midterms, including information on candidates and elections in various districts.
The Evanston mayoral race to replace outgoing Mayor Daniel Biss has attracted notable fundraising, with candidates reporting tens of thousands of dollars raised over the prior three months.
Daniel Biss is Evanston’s mayor who is running to succeed Rep. Jan Schakowsky in Illinois’s 9th Congressional District. If elected on Nov. 3, he would become the U.S.
Biss, Evanston Mayor, is described as a progressive Democrat aligned with the district’s liberal tradition.
No story this week names this candidate.
Daniel Biss was born on August 27, 1977, in Akron into a Jewish Israeli family of musicians; his parents are the violinists Paul Biss and Miriam Fried, and his brother is the pianist Jonathan Biss.
He attended Bloomington North High School in Bloomington, Indiana, and was a finalist in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search in 1995. Biss graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1998 and earned an MA and a PhD at MIT in 2002, all in mathematics.
He won the 1999 Morgan Prize and was a Clay Research Fellow from 2002 to 2007.
Daniel Biss was an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago from 2002 to 2008. At least four of his published mathematics papers were later found to contain major errors, and one was retracted in 2017.
After losing a 2008 race for the 17th district seat in the Illinois House of Representatives, he worked as a policy adviser to Governor Pat Quinn, then won the seat in 2010 and served from 2011 to 2013.
Biss was elected to the Illinois Senate in 2012 with over 66% of the vote and represented the 9th district from 2013 to 2019. In 2018 he finished second to JB Pritzker in the Democratic primary for governor, with 26.70% of the vote.
After leaving the Senate, Biss became executive director of the nonprofit Rust Belt Rising and worked as a clean energy consultant. He won the Evanston mayoral election outright in the consolidated primary on February 23, 2021, and took office on May 10, 2021. He was re-elected on April 1, 2025, with 62.7% of the vote against Jeff Boarini.
Illinois's 9th congressional district, based in northern Chicago and the North Shore, including Evanston and Skokie, is open because Democrat Jan Schakowsky, first elected in 1998 and re-elected with 68.4% of the vote in 2024, is retiring.
Daniel Biss announced his candidacy in 2025 and won a 15-candidate Democratic primary in March 2026 with 38,804 votes, ahead of journalist Kat Abughazaleh with 34,707 and state senator Laura Fine with 26,384.
In the general election on November 3, 2026, he faces Republican John Elleson, a pastor who was the party's nominee for the district in 2018 and won the 2026 Republican primary with 48.9%.
