The moment Bushra Amiwala stepped outside of her Skokie campaign office Monday, a person driving by yelled out to her to say “hi.” Quickly, Amiwala waved back, before echocing an important message on the first day of early voting in the suburbs – “Don’t forget to vote.”

The countdown is on for the Democratic primary in Illinois’ 9th Congressional District, a seat that has been held by just two people over the course of nearly three generations, and while Amiwala, the 27-year-old Skokie School Board member and community activist doesn’t register as a “top three” candidate in polling, she still sees a path to victory, angling for an upset on March 17.

If you believe the polls, Amiwala sits in fifth or sixth place. She trails a list of candidates, including frontrunners Daniel Biss, Laura Fine, Kat Abughazaleh, while hovering around the same spot as Mike Simmons and Phil Andrew in the single digits.

But Amiwala has quietly built up a significant fundraising haul, raising over $1 million since launching last June. If you remove candidates’ self-funding (of which Amiwala has virtually none), she’s raised the fourth most of any candidate, trailing only Abughazaleh, Fine and Biss.

The polls, she said, are missing key voting blocs, including many voters she thinks could turn out for the first time, or first time in many years, to cast a vote in such an important election.

Amiwala first gained political attention in her late teens, launching a campaign against Cook County Commissioner Larry Suffredin in 2018. While she was unsuccessful in that bid, she feels she’s gained significant name recognition and a base of support in the community in which she was born and raised, plus experience, that could carry over to her run for Congress.

Sitting on a sofa in her campaign office on a sunny afternoon this week, Amiwala said she thinks voters will see through the high spending, mudslinging attack ads and, as she described it, media constructed notion of the “top three” candidates that have bombarded voters for months.

“It matters a lot to people what is on their resume and a part of their resume should include their lived experience, organizing experience, volunteering experience, and that street-cred only comes from trust being entrenched in the community,” Amiwala said of what she thinks voters want in a candidate. “I think there’s intentional dis- and misinformation out there to conceal that fact at times, too.”

Over the past few weeks, Amiwala said she’s become increasingly aware of an online pressure campaign to push her out of the race in an effort to open an easier path for another candidate who has a “better shot” at winning the primary. Some have called her a potential spoiler for candidates like Abughazaleh, another Gen-Z progressive who’s also seeking to become the youngest woman elected to the House of Representatives.

But Amiwala likened the push and declaration that only three candidates remain viable to “bullying,” saying it’s “intentionally being done to box me out of the mainstream media conversation.”

A similar push has been made againt State Sen. Mike Simmons, another progressive candidate trailing in the polls, who told Evanston Now last month that saying there’s only three viable candidates is “erasure.”

“It erases me, I’m a Black LGBTQ state senator who represents nearly a quarter million people who has built an amazing campaign with endorsements from all three counties in the 9th District,” Simmons said. “I’ve got a scrappy campaign operation with over 100 volunteers, if that’s not a viable campaign, then I don’t know what is.”

“There are people that are intentionally benefiting from my erasure in this race and when it comes to the bullying, it’s probably because they think the shy, timid Muslim woman can get bullied into dropping out and endorsing a different person, and I think I have to call it for what it is,” Amiwala said, though she didn’t name a specific candidate. “It lives online to fuel into this negative perception intentionally … it’s one way to assimilate into the community.”

Amiwala also described a series of events, including text messages from other campaigns sent to her volunteers, volunteers and staff being “rude and dismissive to our volunteers at forums,” saying others have pushed her volunteers out of the way to hand out campaign literature and supporters of other candidates infiltrating her campaign’s text-based reach platform.

“This type of behavior, I can’t help but think, is top down,” Amiwala said. “True leadership is ensuring that the people who believe in you, follow you and support you, uphold the same integrity that you do.”

The text messages Amiwala was referring to were ones from a volunteer from Abughazaleh’s campaign who messaged a volunteer of Amiwala’s, writing, “when [Bushra] drops out in a few weeks, can I mark you for us?”

In response to the post, Amiwala called it “old Chicago-style rumor politics” and said the rumor she would drop out was “flatly false.”

Abughazaleh, in a response on social media, wrote that the volunteer was acting on their own and was banned from volunteering and from the campaign’s online messaging platform, noting that her campaign staff would “never instruct our staff, volunteers or supporters to lie or put down another candidate like this.”

When it comes to the political issues, Amiwala acknowledged that she and her fellow candidates are “pretty much the same” on healthcare, cost of living, and democracy, often considered the top issues in the race, urging voters to consider their dealbreaker issues when it comes to who voters should support on election day.

“People are so overwhelmed and inundated by so much information that people have a hard time putting in the effort and intention to read beyond headlines,” Amiwala said. “And it’s hard to make it to a headline without intentionally trying to deliberately be in a headline.”

A final pitch to voters?

“Don’t let campaigns fear monger you into thinking that your vote will go to waste this election cycle,” Amiwala said, dismissing the suggestion that candidates should consolidate.

“Think about the people who are here and will be here March 18 … we need to make sure we vote for the people who actually are people we want to be representing us. Your vote is not going to go to waste.”