As group forms to oppose Biss, mayor nets donation windfall

Although Evanston’s 2025 city elections are 14 months and a national election away, early movements in fundraising and opposition organizing suggest the race for mayor may be more competitive than in past cycles.

Incumbent Mayor Daniel Biss, who won his first term in 2021, received 29 donations totaling around $66,500 to his campaign committee between late November and early January, according to public data from the Illinois State Board of Elections and political contributions tracker Illinois Sunshine.

The 29 itemized donations included in this wave came from a mix of past and first-time supporters who gave anywhere from a couple of hundred dollars to the state’s individual contribution limit of $6,900.

Despite this, in a phone interview Biss told the RoundTable “I don’t have any announcements” about 2025 plans, and said he’s focused on the “important work” on the city’s docket in the year ahead.

“I know there’s some people in the community who are already kind of gearing up to run in 2025,” Biss said. “But I’m hoping we can not politicize our work too much and really focus on what the city needs to get done.”

Some of those gearing up are doing so under the “Better Than Biss” campaign committee, which was formed in November following the mayor’s tie-breaking vote to advance Northwestern University’s proposal to host concerts at a rebuilt Ryan Field. The committee aims to recruit and support a candidate to oppose a presumed reelection bid by Biss.

Committee founder Parielle Davis, an attorney, said in a phone interview with the RoundTable that the committee is seeking a candidate who can “fill the void” left by a “lack of leadership” for the city from both Biss and the City Council as a whole.

“We have been talking to people; we definitely have people who are interested in the position,” Davis said. “We’re making sure that we learn more about what’s happening [and] what other people feel like are large priorities, because obviously it’s not just the stadium.”

An early start

All told, the recent donations to Biss’ campaign committee doubled its cash on hand, moving the total from around $64,000 to around $129,000.

Neither City Clerk Stephanie Mendoza nor any of the nine City Council members have received comparable donations since their most recent elections. Most have designated their campaign committees as inactive.

Evanston is no stranger to more expensive mayoral elections: Adjusted for inflation, historical data from Illinois Sunshine shows Biss raised just under $150,000 in his 2021 campaign, and former Mayor Steve Hagerty raised around $289,000 in the 2017 cycle, around two-thirds of which was self-funded, according to the data.

What’s more notable about the donations are their timing, coming more than a year before the election on April 1, 2025. Biss’ and Hagerty’s previous campaigns began fundraising in September and August, respectively, in the year before their elections. Former Mayor Elizabeth Tisdahl opened fundraising in November 2008 for her 2009 campaign and did not officially raise or spend any funds in her 2013 reelection bid.

In both the phone interview and a later text message with the RoundTable, Biss did not directly answer whether he’s started making fundraising calls. Instead, he said he thinks there are community members who are “pleased with the job I’ve done as mayor” who are expressing that sentiment through their donations.

“I’m constantly in touch with people across the community, and people who support me electorally and people who don’t,” Biss said. “The further we get into the election cycle, and the more people begin to think about the upcoming races, the more inclined they are to start acting on their support and their views.”

Alisa Kaplan, executive director of the nonpartisan policy organization Reform for Illinois, told the RoundTable that while the group hasn’t comprehensively surveyed suburban elections, some races outside Evanston suggest the early donations aren’t unique. Reform for Illinois is the creator of Illinois Sunshine and updates it daily with new data from the Illinois State Board of Elections.

In particular, she highlighted the reelection of Schaumburg Mayor Tom Dailly to a second term in April 2023. Dailly’s campaign committee began receiving regular donations again in October 2021, and he ultimately raised around $150,000, adjusted for inflation, despite running uncontested.

“It’s far from a scientific sample, but it seemed like, with very little scratching of the surface, we managed to find somebody with a similar fundraising pattern,” Kaplan said.

Fundraising paused

The Better Than Biss committee began fundraising in November as well, but Davis said this was soon paused because it was too challenging to complete and file the committee’s financial paperwork while being so far along in her pregnancy. She said the committee has been talking to potential candidates, but added none are ready to commit this far from the election.

“Right now, our biggest difficulty currently is that it’s very early for anyone to announce,” Davis said. “No one wants to announce this soon.”

Biss said in the 2008 election cycle, when he was making his first bid for state representative, he began campaign efforts by April 2007. He said he was only able to start that early since he wasn’t in office, and thus didn’t have to split “spending my time on governing versus campaigning.”

“The community expects and deserves a government that’s focused on running the city, not elections,” Biss said. “And so my goal here is to devote as much of my time and attention as possible, all the way up through next April, to the job of governing.”

Taking names

While Biss is reticent about his plans and whether he’s started fundraising, the donations suggest some are paying attention to the landscape he’d face running for reelection – particularly given the city’s recent (and ongoing) political conflict around the Rebuild Ryan Field project.

Most donations came from people who either donated to Biss in a previous cycle or live with someone else who has, according to publicly available data. The first few donations are dated a week after the Nov. 20 City Council meeting, at which Biss cast a tie-breaking yes vote to approve Northwestern’s proposal to rezone Ryan Field to allow public concerts.

One donor is former mayor Hagerty, who previously donated to Biss’ 2018 campaign for governor and supported the Rebuild Ryan Field proposals as part of Field of Opportunities. In a phone call with the RoundTable, Hagerty said he decided to donate to Biss as a show of support after reading about the Better Than Biss committee at the end of 2023.

“When I see something like that [the committee] come up, I want to show that I actually think Biss is doing a good job for our city,” Hagerty said. “I think we’re very fortunate to have Daniel Biss as our mayor, and I certainly would like his continued leadership in Evanston, to the extent that he chooses to run again for a second term.”

Hagerty’s donation happened to be one of 12 dated Dec. 24, but he said he didn’t plan or decide on his donation with anyone else, and suggested the clustering could be due to the donations being processed in a batch around the holidays. Kaplan, of Reform for Illinois, agreed that batching could be the cause, and said people generally donate more frequently around the end of the year, though, she stressed this was speculative.

Some donors are also connected to the university and trustee Pat Ryan, who donated a large but undisclosed amount to the university to help fund the stadium rebuild. One donor is a Northwestern life trustee who hadn’t previously donated to Biss, and two others are partners at a law firm that represents Ryan Specialty; though neither appears to have represented the insurance company.

Building an opposition

While Ryan Field will no doubt cast a shadow on the city’s next elections (even after its real shadow is removed), Davis said Biss’ handling of the stadium proposals speaks to a larger flaw in his approach as mayor. She said committee organizers feel there was “a very stark lack of executive leadership” from Biss during the negotiations, particularly in how some council members were allegedly left out of the process.

“It’s very obvious that there’s fragmentation among the wards, there is not the degree of collaboration that you would expect, but who do you expect to facilitate that? It’s the mayor,” Davis said. “You can’t expect every ward member to be the ones who have to, of their own volition, do the tradeoffs and make sure that people are coming to the table and everyone’s heard — that is literally the mayor’s job.”

Davis said this has shown Biss “is not an executive leader,” and that this resulted in the stadium deal failing to be as “impactful for the community” as it could have been. Instead, she said the committee is seeking a candidate with history as a community organizer and is in invested in helping “sections of people” across Evanston.

“We feel like Mayor Biss is a little too in the numbers, and you can’t be all about the numbers, because humans aren’t just numbers,” Davis said. “I think that’s really it, someone who is community [and] people oriented, and then also has a background in dealing with difficult situations.”

Biss declined to comment on the committee’s specific criticisms of him but welcomed the opposition as part of the democratic process.

“If people don’t think I’m doing a good job, it’s great for them to organize and to run,” Biss said. “Should we find ourselves in a situation where I’m up and running for reelection and there’s opposition, I think it will be important and healthy for me to make the case, and for others to make their case.”

On the issues

As far as what the election will be about, Biss said that while the presidential election in November will likely determine much of the local political mood, he expects the city’s elections will focus on the usual issues of municipal government.

He said this includes basic things like the city’s budget and delivery of services, as well as the “ambitious issues that make Evanston what we are,” from specific cases like Ryan Field and the Margarita Inn to the broader goals set by the community.

“I think anybody running for reelection, myself included, is going to make a case, how well did we do on climate action, how well did we do on affordable housing?” Biss said. “The beauty of running for local office in Evanston is that our community is ambitious, our electorate is passionate, and they want to see progress on these kind of big, important bullet issues.”

Davis named many of the same issues, as well as more recent criticisms of the city government around the Black Employee Action Group report and what she called a “lack of leadership” from the city around the proposed Gaza cease-fire resolution.

More broadly, she named Evanston’s unaffordability as a major problem for residents, and said affordable housing policy and the planned rewrite of the zoning code and comprehensive plan will be major factors in this.

In this area and others, Davis said the city’s relationship with Northwestern will play a significant role, and that a stronger stance on town-gown relations is needed.

“It’s obvious that taming Northwestern, and making sure that they understand that their place is actually as a member of our community as opposed to the home of our community, is important,” Davis said. “We have to make sure that we’re on the same page and that our government is leading Northwestern instead of being led by Northwestern.”

Candidate filing dates have not yet been set for the spring 2025 election cycle, according to the Illinois State Board of Elections. Under the new ranked-choice voting system approved by voters in November 2022, all of Evanston’s municipal elections will be held in the Consolidated General Election on April 1, 2025, skipping the February primary election.