U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi is running for Senate, so the House seat for Illinois’ 8th Congressional District is open for the first time in a decade. There’s a lot of interest in succeeding him.

On the Democratic side, eight candidates are running; on the Republican side, there are four.

The 8th is mainly a northwest suburban district, covering parts of Cook, DuPage and Kane counties and including all or parts of Hoffman Estates, Elk Grove Village, Palatine, Rolling Meadows, Schaumburg, Elgin, South Elgin, Bloomingdale, Barrington, Roselle, South Barrington, Des Plaines, Barrington Hills, East Dundee, Carpentersville and Carol Stream. The district has voted Democratic since Republican Joe Walsh lost after a single term to Tammy Duckworth, who now is one of Illinois’ two U.S. senators.

But the Democrats’ margin of victory in the 8th has narrowed in recent years. Democrat Kamala Harris won the district over Donald Trump by just seven points in 2024 after Joe Biden had topped Trump by more than 15 points in 2020. Still, Democrats are heavily favored to retain Krishnamoorthi’s seat, so it’s not surprising to see the crowded field of contenders.

The best-known Democratic candidate is Melissa Bean, who represented the 8th for three terms beginning in 2005 until she was defeated by Walsh in the 2010 election that returned Republicans to power in the House.

The seven others are an impressive array of politicians and nonpoliticians alike, all articulate and accomplished in various ways.

On the Republican side, the two top contenders are Mark Rice, who lost to Krishnamoorthi in 2024, and businesswoman Jennifer Davis.

We think returning Bean, 64, to the seat is Democrats’ best option. We’ve endorsed her several times before and we admire her solid record while she was in office, coupled with her sensible but principled views on today’s stark challenges.

Davis is our choice for the GOP nomination. We think she has a better chance than Rice of appealing to voters in what remains a blue district, albeit more moderate than many others in the Chicago area.

In our discussions with the Democratic candidates, we were struck by how much agreement there was and also the civility with which the candidates conducted themselves, compared with our experience of some other Chicago-area districts also seeing large numbers of candidates vying for open seats. That’s a reflection, we think, of the district’s makeup. Unlike parts of Chicago and some of the closer-in suburbs, this isn’t an area where strident arguments about the emotional issues that have divided Democrats — support for Israel, for example — play as well with voters.

Still, Bean is perceived as the front-runner — rightly, given her name-recognition advantage over the others — and she’s catching criticism from some of her more progressive opponents for her post-congressional jobs with JBMorgan Chase and Mesirow Financial. We certainly don’t have an issue with former members of Congress going to work in corporate America, and we doubt many voters will hold that against her.

The bigger question is how she would handle the job some 16 years after leaving Washington. That time frame feels like ancient history now, at least in political terms. We were satisfied she understands today’s challenges.

We asked about the longest government shutdown in history last fall, in which Democrats were able to extract a deal to hold a Senate floor vote on extending Affordable Care Act subsidies whose expiration is resulting in substantially higher health insurance costs for many Americans. For many on the left, the decision to reopen the government in return for a vote that ultimately was unsuccessful was a failure — an example of a Democratic Senate leadership unwilling to confront Trump and the Republicans strongly enough.

Bean’s take was that Senate leaders should have held out a bit longer for a better deal, but she said she understood their situation given the pain federal workers were experiencing as they went without paychecks. “There was a win,” she said. “Democrats aren’t really good at taking the win, taking credit for the win. And the win was we got the vote. We got to bring it back up and see if we could do it.”

We agree. Given the track record of past government shutdowns, most if not all of them launched by Republicans, this one achieved far more than any of those did. GOP senators now are on the record for standing in the way of health care subsidy extensions that easily passed the Republican-led House. Whether or not you support that policy, by the standards of government shutdowns, that is a clear victory. But it takes someone who’s been around the political block a few times to see it. Duckworth has endorsed Bean.

As for the rest of the Democratic field, we liked what we heard from Des Plaines businesswoman Sanjyot Dunung, who immigrated to the U.S. from India at age 6 and has practical ideas for reforming our immigration process entailing both enforcement and investment in improving the adjudication of our legal immigration process. She is a highly intelligent centrist voice in a field that generally skews more progressive.

On the progressive side of the ledger, we were most impressed by Yasmeen Bankole, 32, a five-year trustee for the village of Hanover Park and a former aide to Sen. Dick Durbin, who has endorsed her candidacy. A supporter of universal health care and a critic of the Democratic leaders who opted to reopen the government last autumn without securing GOP support for ACA subsidies, Bankole is one of several young candidates for Congress around the area who have been elected to lower office, and she’s garnered valuable tangible experience that will serve her well as a public servant going forward. We expect to hear more from her in the future regardless of the outcome of this election.

Dan Tully, a military veteran who served in Iraq and a lawyer who’s worked in federal and private-sector positions, is very bright and offers detailed policy positions, but is focused most on holding Trump administration officials accountable for their actions and reasserting congressional oversight of the executive branch.

Junaid Ahmed garnered 30% of the vote in his 2022 primary campaign against Krishnamoorthi, so he’s well known to 8th District voters. The 50-year-old technology consultant from South Barrington challenged Krishnamoorthi, whom this page endorsed in past elections, from the left. He supports banning all U.S. military support to Israel, a position that we believe wouldn’t serve U.S. national security interests.

Rounding out the Democratic field are Kevin Morrison, Cook County’s first openly gay commissioner; Neil Khot, CEO of Schaumburg-based back-office service provider Rely Services; and attorney Ryan Vetticad, who will turn 25 (the minimum constitutional age for serving in the House).

Republicans will have an uphill battle flipping this seat in November, but we believe Jennifer Davis will give the party the best chance to do so. Her leading opponent, Mark Rice, is a full-throated supporter of President Trump and believes Republicans need to emphasize their conservative bona fides to succeed politically in the Chicago suburbs. Also running are retired Chicago police Officer Herbert Hebein and Kevin Ake, an accountant and evangelical Christian who was convicted of a felony hate crime in 2002.

Davis, 55, a mother of 10 from Huntley who started and ran what became a very successful business software firm, Davisware, with her husband, which the couple sold in 2022, certainly supports many Trump priorities, such as his tariff policies. But the first-time candidate’s rhetoric strikes us as more accepting of alternative viewpoints than Rice’s — a critical attribute to attracting support from independents and Democrats necessary to win in this district. “My loyalty is to the constituents who elected me, not a party label,” she told us.

A Bean-Davis matchup in the fall would give 8th District voters a true choice. Melissa Bean is endorsed for the Democratic nomination, and we like Jennifer Davis for the GOP nod.

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