In Illinois’s Eighth Congressional District, a former investment banker is attempting a political comeback after a stretch as perhaps the most conservative Democrat in Washington. Against a field of grassroots challengers, big money is pouring in to assist the return of “Wall Street’s Favorite Democrat” to Congress.

There are eight candidates in the race, but with less than a week to go until the March 17 primary, the two main contenders are Melissa Bean, the aforementioned former Blue Dog member of Congress, and Junaid Ahmed, a progressive backed by Justice Democrats (the group behind the “Squad” in Congress).

The Eighth District is largely middle-class and suburban, stretching west from O’Hare International Airport into suburbs like Palatine, Schaumburg, and Rolling Meadows.

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Bean, who represented the Eighth District from 2005 to 2011, is hoping to regain her seat now that incumbent Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi is stepping aside to run for Senate. She’s backed by a staggering amount of super PAC money, including from an AIPAC shadow PAC and a pro-AI group. Pro-crypto PACs have also pledged to spend $1 million in the race.

Elect Chicago Women, the innocuously named AIPAC shadow PAC, has spent nearly $4 million in support of Bean’s campaign already. The pro-AI PAC Think Big, which is also backing Jesse Jackson Jr.’s campaign in Illinois’s Second District, has spent over $1 million. Bean is also backed by the New Democrat Majority PAC, which supports centrist Democratic candidates; she was a member of the New Dems and the Blue Dog Coalition in her first stint in Congress.

Bean was one of only two Democrats to flip a Republican seat in the House in 2004. In her first term, Bean voted to extend then-President Bush’s tax cuts, which lowered the capital gains tax. A joint study by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution found that taxpayers who made more than $1 million saw tax cuts of $42,000 under the extension, whereas taxpayers with incomes of $50,000 saw a meager $46 cut.

First AIPAC, Now AI PACs

Perhaps the most notable moment of Bean’s congressional tenure came after the financial crisis. She was co-chair of the New Democrats’ financial services task force, and objections to financial reform from bank lobbyists would inevitably show up in her talking points. When then-Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren proposed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to protect people swindled by crooked mortgages, payday loans, and scammy debt collection tactics, Bean issued an amendment to what would become the Dodd-Frank Act that would have allowed pro-bank federal regulatory agencies like the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency much wider authority to preempt state consumer protection laws, which would have also undermined the purpose of the CFPB by splitting authority for federal consumer protection. Ultimately, she got compromise language into the bill that critics say made it materially worse.

When the Affordable Care Act came up for a vote, Bean was still waffling on where she stood, arguing that she “wanted more cost-containment measures” before eventually supporting the bill. As with many conservative Democrats, every effort at a vote for that bill was a struggle.

The district Bean has come back to is more liberal than it was when she left in 2011. So now, mailers sent out by Bean’s campaign say that she “worked with President Obama to pass the Affordable Care Act,” was an “architect of Obamacare,” and “passed the strongest Wall Street reforms in 50 years.” A television ad says she was “instrumental” in passing the Affordable Care Act.

Bean has also portrayed herself as a candidate who will fight back against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but her voting record tells a different story. Between 2005 and 2009, Bean voted to give ICE $26.19 billion. She opposed any form of amnesty for undocumented immigrants and said that she wanted harsher penalties for employers who hired undocumented workers. In a recent mailer sent to voters, Bean’s campaign said that she will “[kick] ICE out of our communities and [end] mass raids.”

“This is not a candidate that can be elected and popular on her own,” said Usamah Andrabi, the communications director of Justice Democrats. “So the only way to get her elected is for AIPAC and AI and crypto to all come together and spend millions of dollars to prop her up and whitewash her legacy.”

Ahmed and a coalition of progressive supporters are working to gain the attention of voters, but the $57,000 he’s raised from PACs pales in comparison to Bean’s multimillion-dollar cash streams.

Ahmed, who is running against Bean from the left, doesn’t buy Bean’s rhetoric and doesn’t think voters will, either.

Born in India, Ahmed and his parents immigrated to the U.S. when he was a child. He grew up in Chicagoland, went to community college, transferred to DePaul University, and earned an MBA from the University of Chicago.

On a Tuesday night livestream hosted by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Ahmed said it was Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign that helped galvanize him into politics. He and his family had to pay $10,000 after his son spent just one night in the hospital, and the family was paying off high-interest student loans. In Sanders’s policy proposals, Ahmed realized there could be another way.

In an interview, Ahmed said his campaign has knocked on 50,000 doors so far, and he’s learned that affordability is top of mind for many of the residents in the Eighth District, too. Ahmed hopes to get more federal funding for child care and, eventually, move toward universal child care.

Junaid Ahmed
Democrat Junaid Ahmed. Credit: Courtesy Junaid for Congress

In the final handful of days before the March 17 primary, Ahmed’s campaign plans to knock on tens of thousands more doors to inform voters about Bean’s voting record and the corporate PAC money in the race.

“People hate seeing this money coming into our races,” Ahmed said. But, he noted, “there are people who are just staying home and may not necessarily be paying attention to what’s going on.”

This is particularly true in the Eighth District, which has received less media attention than the Ninth District, where progressives Daniel Biss and Kat Abughazaleh are running against AIPAC-backed Laura Fine.

“Evanston [a city in the Ninth District] has like, three different papers on its own. Schaumburg doesn’t have all those sorts of papers,” Andrabi said. AIPAC, Think Big, and other special interests “want to take advantage of the fact that there isn’t a lot of local media here to expose who is funding these super PACs.”

“At this point, the question is: Are we going to be able to have enough conversations?” Ahmed said.

He’s hopeful these talks with voters will be enough to open voters’ eyes to Bean’s priorities and shifting policy positions. When I asked about Bean’s record on ICE and immigration, Ahmed was clearly upset. He described watching Bean show up to an anti-ICE rally, take photos, and leave.

“This fight is the top vs. the bottom,” Ahmed said. “This is against an entire political system that has failed us, that is beholden to the billionaires, and that is a fight people have to come together and take on.”

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Emma Janssen is a writing fellow at The American Prospect, where she reports on anti-poverty policy, health, and political power. Before joining the Prospect, she was at UChicago studying political philosophy, editing for The Chicago Maroon, and freelancing for the Hyde Park Herald.