District: IL-09
Cook Political Ranking: Solid D
Performance Voter Index: D+19
Daniel Biss is a former Illinois state legislator and Mayor who is running for Illinois’s 9th congressional district. In 2010, Biss ran for the Illinois House of Representatives’s 17th district. He represented the 17th district from 2011 to 2013. In 2012, Biss was elected to the Illinois Senate and represented the 9th district from 2013 through 2019. Biss was a candidate in the Democratic primary for the 2018 Illinois Gubernatorial election. He finished second to now-Governor JB Pritzker. In 2021, he won election for Mayor of the city of Evanston; he will be stepping down from this role in October. Before public service, Biss was an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago from 2002 to 2008. He is now running for Congress because his community is “facing unprecedented threats” and he knows he has “a proven record of not just fighting the important fights, but winning them”

Illinois’s 9th Congressional District is based in Chicago’s northern suburbs, and includes the cities of Evanston and Glenview. Ahead of the 2022 race, this district barely changed under the redistricting process. President Biden won this district in 2024 by nearly 40 points. The district is currently represented by long-serving Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who announced her retirement earlier this year. In 2024, the race for IL-09 barely saw any outside spending, with Democratic incumbent Rep. Schakowsky running essentially unopposed. In 2026, Daniel Biss is running for this open seat. Biss won a competitive primary in March, securing the Democratic nomination for this race. He defeated 14 other candidates to win by earning 29% of the vote (38,804 votes). V4P PAC has not yet endorsed in this race.