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2026 Primary Election Voter Guide

U.S. House & Senate Elections

Congress is divided into 2 parts…

  1. House of Representatives
  2. Senate

U.S. Senate

Senators represent their respective states in the U.S. Senate. They write and vote on federal laws, approve treaties, confirm presidential appointments (like Supreme Court justices), and help set the federal budget. Their work has an impact on our daily life because it influences national laws on healthcare, taxes, civil rights, immigration, and federal funding for our city. Both the U.S. Senate and Congressional seats vote on ICE funding and they play a key role in shaping federal policies that impact Illinois. They also represent the U.S. and Chicago in Washington D.C.

U.S. Senate Candidates

Democratic:

Kelly has represented the 2nd Congressional District in Illinois since 2013. The district includes much of Chicago’s southern lakefront neighborhoods; several south suburbs, including Dolton, South Holland, Chicago Heights, and Park Forest; and parts of east central Illinois, including Kankakee, Pontiac, Rantoul, and Danville. A vocal critic of the Trump administration, Kelly introduced articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem over her handling of federal immigration enforcement policies. In the resolution, Kelly alleges that Noem obstructed congressional oversight of immigration operations, directed unconstitutional actions, and used her office for personal benefit by steering federal funds to associates. Kelly is also a supporter of stronger gun control legislation, increasing taxes on billionaires, raising the federal minimum wage to $17 per hour by 2030, and providing Medicare for all.

Campaign Website

Raja Krishnamoorthi has represented Illinois’ 8th Congressional District since 2017, covering the Far Northwest Side of Chicago and several western and northwestern suburbs. In Congress, he has focused on economic competitiveness, national security, consumer protection, prescription drug pricing, childcare access, and ethics reforms, including restrictions on stock trading by members of Congress. He supported bipartisan legislation signed during the Trump administration, including the USMCA trade agreement and the First Step Act. Campaign finance reports show that while his fundraising comes primarily from Democratic donors, he has also received contributions from some individuals associated with Trump-aligned political and business circles.

Campaign Website

Botsford is a former staffer for former California Congressman Tony Cárdenas. He moved back to Chicago to attend business school at Northwestern University, worked in the financial industry, and ran for the Chicago City Council in 2023.

His priorities include lowering credit card interest rates, breaking up corporate monopolies, capping prescription drug prices, expanding free school meals, and protecting Social Security and Medicare. He has also called for banning stock trading in Congress, using independent nonpartisan commissions to draw congressional maps, and limiting presidential emergency powers.

Campaign Website

Brown is an attorney and community advocate from the South Side of Chicago.

His priorities include universal healthcare, comprehensive immigration reform, free tuition at all public colleges and universities, and creating a national firearm registry.

Campaign Website

Bustos is a former CEO of the Illinois Alliance of Boys & Girls Clubs, and a former senior policy advisor for the Illinois Department of Human Services.

Her priorities include expanded funding for public colleges, trade schools and apprenticeships; tougher ethics laws and anti-corruption measures; universal broadband internet access for every household; expanded STEM programs at schools; improved family leave; and lowering prescription drug prices.

Campaign Website

Dean is a solar energy entrepreneur, attorney, and advocate for survivors of childhood sexual abuse.

His priorities include raising the minimum wage to $20 per hour, increasing availability of affordable housing, offering more financial assistance for first-time home buyers, increasing taxes on billionaires, allowing for Medicare coverage for all, and expanding use of renewable energy.

Campaign Website

Maxwell is an agricultural engineer, writer, and musician.

His priorities include ending U.S. support for Israel, providing Medicare for all, increasing taxes on billionaires, addressing climate change, and increasing investment in rural communities.

Campaign Website

Ryan is a Chicago Public Schools teacher and  Marine Corps veteran who served in Afghanistan.

His priorities include amending the Constitution to impose campaign spending limits, eliminating “Super PAC” spending on political campaigns, independent redistricting, establishing age limits and term limits for Congress, banning Congressional stock trading, allowing Medicare coverage for all, abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and abolishing the death penalty.

Campaign Website

Stratton is the first African American woman to serve as Lieutenant Governor of Illinois. She was elected in 2019, following one term as a member of the Illinois House of Representatives. she leads the Justice, Equity, and Opportunity (JEO) Initiative. Priorities include allowing Medicare coverage for all, increasing the federal minimum wage to $25 per hour, and abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She’s also seeking tax cuts for the middle class by increasing taxes on millionaires, and is a supporter of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which seeks to restore provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that have been struck down by the Supreme Court. Stratton also backs stronger gun control laws and restoring abortion protections struck down by the Supreme Court when it overturned Roe v. Wade.

Campaign Website

Swann is a deacon and senior program manager at Feeding America, a nonprofit hunger relief organization.

His priorities include support for Palenstinian independence, increased humanitarian aid in Gaza, providing guaranteed income for families living below the poverty line, raising the minimum wage to more than $17 an hour, providing Medicare for all, and abolishing ICE.

Campaign Website

Republican:

Capparelli is a professor and head of a global management and marketing company.

His priorities include maintaining a strong military, supporting veterans, securing the nation’s borders, making healthcare more accessible and affordable, and addressing the mental health crisis.

Campaign Website

Chlebek, a Polish immigrant who has lived in the U.S. since the 1960s, is a longtime IT professional.

His priorities include investing in robotics, AI, and quantum computing; cutting income taxes; overhauling the immigration system; reducing the national debt; and expanding vocational training.

Campaign Website

Evans is an attorney who has focused on antitrust enforcement, taking on corporate monopolies.

Her priorities include providing more support for small businesses; cutting taxes; increasing science, technology, and workforce training; expanding agricultural exports; protecting privacy; and decreasing the national debt.

Campaign Website

Long is an occupational therapist and political commentator.

Her priorities include completing construction of President Trump’s border wall, restricting financial support to Ukraine, eliminating the federal income tax and replacing it with a consumption tax, limiting abortion access, and ending birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants.

Campaign Website

Tillman is an author, historian, and founder of the Martin Luther King Republicans, a group of Black Republicans in Illinois.

His priorities include securing the border, banning transgender women and girls from participating in women’s and girls’ sports, and cutting government spending.

Campaign Website

Tracy is an attorney, former chairman of the Illinois Republican Party, and former chairman of the Illinois Gaming Board.

His priorities include affordable energy policies, lowering drug and insurance prices, reducing government spending, and securing the border.

Campaign Website
Learn More About U.S. Senate Candidates

U.S. House of Representatives

For the U.S. House of Representatives, voters in Illinois will elect 17 candidates to serve from each of the 17 U.S. congressional districts in Illinois.

Its main responsibilities are to suggest and vote on laws, represent the people in their districts, and reflect their different views. The U.S. House also helps decide how the federal budget is used. It can impeach federal officials, including the President, by bringing charges against them. If there’s enough evidence, the House writes articles of impeachment that outline the charges.

Congressional districts 2 and 7 cover most of the South and West sides of Chicago. This is the first time these districts have been open since 2013 and 1997. Now is the time to elect someone who is more aligned with the current generation of voters.

Find Your Congressional District

Congressional District Candidates

District 2

Democratic:

Brown has filed nominating petitions to appear on the Democratic ballot, but has no publicly available campaign website or social media pages.

Brown is a commissioner on the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District and the village clerk in south suburban Matteson. Her priorities include affordable healthcare, strong public schools, clean water, and safe streets..

Campaign Website

France runs a management consulting firm, and has been involved in the development of affordable housing for several organizations. His priorities include affordable healthcare, expanding public transportation, improving access to mental healthcare, expanding affordable housing, protecting clean air and clean water, and investing in new business startups.

Campaign Website

Keating is an attorney and adjunct law professor, but his campaign site does not list any policy priorities or agenda.

Campaign Website

Jackson represented Illinois’ 2nd Congressional District from 1995 until November 2012, when he resigned citing health reasons after publicly disclosing a bipolar disorder diagnosis. At the time, he was under federal investigation. In February 2013, he pleaded guilty to misusing approximately $750,000 in campaign funds for personal expenses and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison.

In seeking to return to Congress, his priorities include increasing teacher salaries, addressing gun violence, reversing cuts to Medicaid and food stamps made during the Trump administration, and expanding access to mental health care. He also supports building a third full-service Northern Illinois airport in Peotone in Will County, a project for which the state began acquiring land in 2002 but has not yet advanced construction plans.

Campaign Website

Miller is a Cook County Commissioner representing the 6th District, which spans several south and southwest suburbs, including South Holland, Homewood, Matteson, Tinley Park, Oak Forest, Alsip, and Chicago Ridge. She has been in office since 2018. Her priorities include fighting to lower prescription drug costs, supporting a Medicare for All framework, protecting reproductive healthcare access, opposing the Trump administration’s tariffs, supporting a faster path to citizenship for immigrants, and expanding funding for services for veterans.

Campaign Website

Moore is a business owner who ran for Illinois Secretary of State in 2022, finishing in 4th place. His priorities include expanding access to affordable healthcare coverage, increasing investment in local businesses, expanding job training programs, improving support for veterans and seniors, and providing more affordable housing.

Peters, a previous community organizer, has been an Illinois state senator since 2019, representing the 13th Senate District, which stretches along the lakefront from Streeterville to Hyde Park to the Indiana state line.

His priorities include rolling back the Trump administration’s cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, passing Medicare for All, creating more affordable housing, expanding Social Security benefits, lowering prescription drug prices, restoring abortion access rights nationwide and led the charge to ban ice from building private immigrant prisons in Illinois and has called for the abolition of ICE.

Campaign Website

Preston, who owns a construction firm, has been an Illinois state senator since 2023, representing the 16th Senate District, which spans several Southwest Side neighborhoods in Chicago, and several southwestern suburbs.

He touts accomplishments such as banning toxic food additives, expanding union apprenticeships, and providing recently released prisoners with state IDs to help ensure they can rebuild their lives.

Campaign Website

Regis is a former aide to Kelly and a current strategy director for Elevate, a Chicago-based clean energy nonprofit. His priorities include advocating for affordable housing, trustworthy policing, a healthier environment, and targeted economic development.

Campaign Website

Republican:

The only Republican on the ballot in the March 17 primary is Mike Noack, who wants to cut federal government spending, invest in clean renewable energy, and providing a path to citizenship for immigrants who have been in the U.S. for more than five years while focusing immigration enforcement on violent criminals.

The 2nd District has not elected a Republican to Congress since the 1950s.

Campaign Website

District 7

Democratic:

Boykin is a former Cook County Commissioner who led the effort to successfully repeal a controversial soda tax in 2017, before he later lost re-election to Brandon Johnson, who would go on to be elected mayor of Chicago in 2023. Since leaving the county board in 2018, he has been an attorney in private practice.

His priorities include increasing access to fresh food and produce to eliminate food deserts, expanding affordable housing, lowering prescription drug and health insurance costs, providing tax credits to lure manufacturing jobs to the West Side, renewing the federal assault weapons ban, increasing investments in violence prevention programs, and helping to remove lead pipes.

Campaign Website

Collins is the executive director of One Aim Illinois, a gun violence prevention group. Collins has twice run for the 7th District seat before, running against Davis in the Democratic primary in 2022 and 2024. She got 45.7% of the vote in her first run in 2022.

In addition to her fight against gun violence, her priorities include passing Medicare for All, protecting and expanding Social Security and Medicare benefits, lowering prescription drug prices, providing more federal grants and tax credits for small businesses, investing in clean energy, increasing taxes on the ultra-wealthy, banning assault weapons, and passing legislation to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Campaign Website

Conyears-Ervin has been the Chicago City Treasurer since 2019, and is responsible for managing the city’s funds and investments, including employee pension funds. She previously served one term as a member of the Illinois House from 2017 until she was elected treasurer.

Her priorities include expanding pathways to homeownership, providing federal investments in manufacturing, strengthening the Affordable Care Act, increasing taxes on the wealthy, passing stronger gun control laws, and codifying Roe v. Wade into law.

Campaign Website

Driver is a current commissioner and former president of the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, Chicago’s civilian police oversight agency, which plays a role in setting CPD policy, reviewing the police budget, and selecting the police superintendent, COPA chief administrator, and Chicago Police Board members.

His priorities include expanding federal funding for affordable housing, protecting tenants from unfair evictions and rent increases, passing Medicare for All, capping prescription drug prices, passing universal background checks for gun buyers, increasing federal funding for schools, providing federal student debt forgiveness, expanding child tax credits, increasing oversight of federal immigration agencies, and codifying Roe v. Wade into law.

Campaign Website

Ehrlich is an adjunct lecturer in public affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Indiana University. He has not set up a campaign website or social media account outlining his agenda or priorities.

Fisher is an emergency medicine physician at the University of Chicago Medicine. His priorities include passing Medicare for All; investing in housing, transit, and small businesses; banning assault weapons; requiring universal background checks for gun purchases; expanding federal rental assistance and eviction protections; increasing federal funding for schools; providing federal student debt forgiveness, passing comprehensive immigration reform, and investing more in clean renewable energy.

Campaign Website

Ford has been an Illinois state representative since 2007 in the 8th District, which spans from the Austin neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago to multiple western suburbs, including Oak Park, Berwyn, Westchester, La Grange, Countryside, and Hodgkins.

His priorities include preserving and expanding access to Medicaid and food stamps, providing universal childcare services, developing more affordable housing, making colleges and trade schools more affordabe, promoting small businesses, and making the protections under the 1965 Voting Rights Act permanent.

Campaign Website

Friedman is a business owner, a former Chicago Public Schools teacher, and a former domestic policy aide to President Clinton.

His priorities include restoring funding cut from food stamps, Medicaid, and Medicare; opposing President Trump’s tariffs; making higher education more affordable; increasing access to trade programs; pushing for an assault weapons ban and universal background checks for gun purchases; restoring the EPA to its full capacity; and investing in clean energy.

Campaign Website

Hoskins is the first Black mayor of Forest Park, and a former Forest Park village commissioner. His priorities include securing more federal funding for public transportation, increasing federal funding for clean energy, expanding job training and apprenticeships, promoting universal preschool for working parents, investing in broadband in schools, supporting loan forgiveness and other incentives for teachers, expanding the Affordable Care Act, pushing for universal childcare, reforming ICE, and expanding pathways to citizenship.

Campaign Website

Mendoza works at a youth-led immigrant rights nonprofit, United We Dream.

Her priorities include increasing the federal minimum wage, passing Medicare for All, providing relief from medical debt, supporting municipally owned grocery stores, regulating the construction of data centers to prevent electric bill increases, expanding Section 8 vouchers, erasing student loan debt, making public colleges tuition-free, increasing funding for FEMA, protecting access to abortion, banning assault weapons, strengthening LGBTQ+ rights, abolishing ICE, and providing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Campaign Website

Robinson is a human resources professional focused on protecting workers’ rights. Her priorities include providing universal healthcare, tuition-free public colleges and trade schools, ending the Electoral College, expanding tax credits for small businesses, providing universal childcare, making the first $30,000 of income tax-free, and increasing taxes on the ultra-wealthy and large corporations.

Showalter is a former policy advisor to the National Economic Council and former Justice Department attorney in the Biden administration.

His priorities include fighting against AI data centers; banning landlords from using algorithms to increase rent; passing Medicare for All; capping copays, deductibles, and other out-of-pocket costs for health insurance; codifying abortion rights in federal law; creating publicly owned grocery stores; establishing term limits for Congress; impeaching President Trump, protecting voting rights; increasing taxes on millionaires and billionaires; making the first $50,000 of income tax-free; prohibiting the U.S. sale of weapons to Israel; recognizing Palestine as an independent state; and abolishing ICE.

Campaign Website

Tello is a mathematician and executive engineer. His campaign website does not list any specific legislative priorities or agenda.

Campaign Website

Republican:

Easley, also known as P Rae Easley, is hostess of “Black Excellence Hour” on WVON 1690am Chicago.

Her priorities include ensuring every unit of public housing demolished in Chicago is rebuilt, providing access to credit for community safety-net hospitals, backing community-based safety partnerships to empower local safety firms to help improve police response times, opposing sanctuary policies protecting undocumented immigrants, and targeted Justice Department task force intervention against crime.

Campaign Website

Koppie is a farmer and retired Delta Airlines pilot who has run multiple times for the U.S. House and Senate since 2014. He’s also a member of the Kane County Regional Board of School Trustees.

His priorities include cutting all government spending by 3% a year for 10 years, supporting the 2nd Amendment, eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, ending all foreign aid, protecting “traditional marriage,” repealing the Affordable Care Act, opposing sanctuary policies protecting undocumented immigrants, and abolishing the Federal Reserve and the IRS.

Campaign Website
Download PDF Voter Guide

Index

  • About this Guide
  • Voting 101
  • House & Senate Elections
  • Reintegration & Civic Empowerment Act
  • Know Your Rights
  • Cook County
  • Courts Elections
  • Artist Statement

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Chicago board of elections contact information

69 West Washington Street
Suites 600/800
Chicago, IL 60602
(312) 269-7900
cboe@chicagoelections.gov

Election day is Tuesday, March 17th!

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Illinois State Offices

Illinois General Assembly

The Illinois General Assembly is the state’s legislative branch, responsible for making state laws. It has two chambers: the Illinois House of Representatives and the Illinois Senate. Illinois has 118 State Representatives and 59 State Senators, meaning each Senate district includes two House districts.

Illinois State Senate

The Illinois Senate is the upper chamber of the General Assembly. State Senators represent larger districts, vote on state laws, serve on committees that review and amend legislation, and confirm certain appointments made by the Governor. Senators typically serve four-year terms, with some two-year terms following redistricting.

Illinois House of Representatives

Illinois State Representatives represent smaller districts and focus more closely on local concerns. They draft and vote on legislation, serve on committees, and work with constituents. Representatives serve two-year terms.

Find Your State Senator & District
View State Senate Candidates

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Keep in mind, this guide is for informational purposes only, designed to help voters understand where each candidate stands on issues important to young people. As a 501(c)(3) organization, we do not endorse or oppose any candidates or political parties.

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