Fighting Royalty: The Daniel Biss Campaign for Governor
This article was originally written by: Jacob Toner Gosselin
It’s early April, the first warm day since October, but Robert Peters is pissed off. He’s speaking at an event at the University of Chicago, and responding to a student question. It’s not really important what the question is (something to do with the NRA), but what is important is it reminds Peters of a conversation he had with a friend, one in which “I lost my shit.” He was talking to his friend about cigarettes, his guilty pleasure, and how it related to his other addiction, progressive politics. “When a fucking cigarette company is given a tax, they all come together, and they fight back. But when we on the left are getting in some turfy fight, we all divide each other up, get broken up, get beat, and keep losing.” He pauses after this last line, just long enough to make it ambiguous whether his follow up is directed at his friend or at the crowd.
“Do you like losing? Because I hate losing. I’m tired of losing.”
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Peters’ frustration that night was understandable. He had spent the past year on the wrong end of one of the most lopsided races in Illinois primary history: the Daniel Biss campaign for governor.
Daniel Biss, the state senator from Skokie, isn’t a likely politician. For one thing, the primary focus of the first half of his adult life was math. And man, he was good at it: graduated from Harvard with honors in three years, got his PhD from MIT, professor at the University of Chicago by 25. Mathematicians, even (and perhaps especially) good ones, don’t usually have much success in politics. Yet after realizing in 2003 that “politics wasn’t something I wanted to observe and discuss, but participate in,” Biss was able to buck that trend, earning himself a state representative seat in 2010, and a state senate seat in 2012.
Skokie, Illinois, represented in the General Assembly by Daniel Biss. Photo courtesy of Ken Lund, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0.
Even so, Biss stands out in Illinois’ machine dominated landscape. He’s tall for one thing, lanky, with a narrow face and a poof of graying hair. He doesn’t have many “establishment” connections; his most influential friend is John Green, the young adult author and online personality who’s one of the best-selling novelists of the past decade. He still speaks hesitantly, like he’s thinking too much about what he’s saying; he’s still got a nerdy charisma that seems perfectly suited for the college classroom. In Peters’ words, “Daniel is awkward. Like me.”