CHICAGO—Hard right members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) are pouring cash into the campaign coffers of Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller, their choice for an open seat in the U.S. House delegation from Illinois. The district covers Chicago’s South Side, its southern suburbs and stretches all the way down to Kankakee.
It is the second open House seat in the Land of Lincoln, among five seats overall, where AIPAC dollars could either boost a candidate–or boomerang.
Strongly progressive and strongly pro-worker State Sen. Robert Peters (D), chair of the Labor Committee, is one of three top-tier candidates in the race for the 2nd Congressional District post. Miller and former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. are the other two top candidates. Incumbent Robin Kelly (D) seeks an open U.S. Senate seat.
And though Peters is Black and Jewish, he’s no AIPAC favorite because he’s been critical of the hard-right Israeli government. AIPAC is that government’s “mouthpiece” in the U.S. Jewish community and in politics.
The district and the state are so strongly Democratic that the winner of the March 17 party primary among Peters, Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller, former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., and seven other hopefuls is virtually guaranteed to enter the U.S. House next year. Heavily gerrymandered Illinois has a 14-3 Democratic House delegation.
“This is a fight for a progressive vision rooted in the needs of the working class, not a reactive vision,” Peters told the Progressive Democrats of America, in what sounded like an implicit criticism of passive Democratic congressional leaders.
PDA, founded by Bernie Sanders supporters, gave Peters its first congressional endorsement in this election cycle. Sen. Sanders, the Vermont Independent and labor’s longest backer in Congress, endorses Peters. So do progressive U.S. Reps. Delia Ramirez, D-Chicago, and Ro Khanna, D-Calif., the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Sunrise Coalition and other progressive groups.
So do many Chicago-area unions: The Amalgamated Transit Union, National Nurses United and its Illinois Nurses Association affiliate, UFCW Local 881, the state’s Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers, the Machinists, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen/Teamsters, the Heat and Frost Insulators Local 17, Unite HERE Local 1 and the Iron Workers District Council.
Peters, the sole Jewish candidate in the field, is openly critical of Israel’s military operations in Gaza and has participated in actions with anti-war groups. He repeatedly called for a ceasefire and condemned what he has described as the “forced famine of millions of people in Gaza.”
That irks AIPAC, which unquestioningly supports the hard-right Israeli government, its war on Gaza and Gazans and U.S. military aid—planes, bombs and heavy weapons—to Israel.
So 258 of AIPAC’s individual donors pumped $472,000 combined into Miller’s campaign in the last quarter of 2024. That’s more than half of the $897,000 she raised from outside Illinois then.
Peters’s vision includes pro-worker legislation, and measures such as bills he pushed as a state senator:
An end to cash bail, a ban on deployment of “excessive tear gas” by Donld Trump’s ICE agents, and an income tax credit for low-income homebuyers.
And, for workers, a ban on forcing them to attend captive audience meetings where bosses can lie, harangue and threaten pro-union workers—and get away with it.
His vision also includes planks advocated by People’s Action—where he used to work—and more cash, not more cuts, for Medicare and Medicaid.
The 2nd District, Peters says, “has one of the highest proportions of food stamp and Medicaid recipients in Illinois. We need to restore Medicare and Medicaid and Obamacare subsidies and bring back the things we lost” to right-wing Republican President Donald Trump and Trump’s congressional toadies.
Those losses are not Trump’s sole impact on the 2nd District.
It includes the South Shore apartment building where Trump’s ICE agents landed on the roof with a helicopter at midnight, routed out the residents by throwing in tear gas and breaking down doors, and then arrested anyone with a brown skin. The raid was part of ICE’s “Operation Midway Blitz.”
And, says Peters, in another incident, “they tear-gassed my chief of staff, too.”
The third heavyweight in the race trails in dollars but not in name recognition: Former Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., who represented the 2nd District until he was convicted, in 2013, of illegally diverting $750,000 in campaign contributions for his own use.
Jackson, who served 17 months in prison and was on supervised release for the next three years, says he’s reformed and learned from that. He was found guilty of pocketing $50,000 in campaign cash for his own use. His brother, Rep. Jonathan Jackson, D-Ill., represents an adjoining district. Both are sons of the late civil rights icon the Rev. Jesse Jackson, founder of Operation PUSH.
The race on the South Side has been overshadowed i Illinois politics this year. Three heavyweight candidates, including progressive Lieut. Gov. Juliana Stratton—who refuses to take corporate campaign contributions—are vying for an open U.S. Senate seat.
Incumbent 2nd District Rep. Kelly is one of the two others, and she takes 61% of her cash from pharmaceutical and medical campaign finance committees.
There are four other open U.S. House seats in Illinois. All six contests—including the 2nd District and the hotly contested 9th District on Chicago’s North Side and adjacent suburbs—are safely Democratic. The 9th is the other AIPAC-influenced race. All the Democratic primary winners are heavily favored to win this fall. So is incumbent Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D), a fierce and unrelenting Trump critic.
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