In Illinois's Eighth District, AIPAC and AI Try to Buy a Seat

Pro-corporate Melissa Bean is massively outraising Junaid Ahmed, her main progressive challenger.

https://prospect.org/2026/03/12/illinois-eighth-congressional-district-aipac-ai-bean-ahmed/


Democrat Melissa Bean is running in Illinois’s Eighth Congressional District. Credit: Courtesy Melissa Bean for Congress

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. 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.

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.

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