ROCKFORD — U.S. Rep. Eric Sorensen sat in the back seat of a car to swap brown dress shoes for a pair of boots before touring a dairy farm in rural Winnebago County on a warm early October afternoon just weeks before the Nov. 5 election.
It was a busy day of campaigning, and the first-term Democrat from Moline wanted to be sure not to track anything on his shoes from the farm to the Unitarian church where he was addressing an abortion rights group later that evening.
Running to retain a seat Democrats have held for all but two years over the past four decades, Sorensen is facing a challenge from Republican Joe McGraw, a recently retired Winnebago County judge, in the sole Illinois congressional race that could have an impact on the balance of power in the U.S. House.
While national prognosticators say Sorensen has a lead in a district Democrats in Springfield carved to their advantage, Republicans still see an opportunity in the state’s 17th Congressional District because Sorensen two years ago underperformed Joe Biden’s 2020 margin of victory over Donald Trump here. Spanning 14 counties, the district melds Democratic-leaning areas such as Rockford, the Illinois half of the Quad Cities, Peoria and Bloomington-Normal by running through vast expanses of farmland and ruby-red rural communities.
“I wouldn’t even call this district a bipartisan district,” Sorensen said after finishing his farm tour. “It’s a nonpartisan district. You have people here that will vote any different way.”
As the two candidates campaign across the expansive district, they both are focusing on selling themselves more as individuals than as representatives of their respective parties.
Sorensen has begun telling voters that despite his personal support for Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, it doesn’t matter who they’re backing for president. Rather, he wants to know, “What are you going to do on the second line?”
“Are you going to vote for me, the person that’s going to show you all of the work that I’ve done, or somebody new?” he said he asks voters. “Because whenever there’s a challenger, that challenger has to prove that there’s a reason that the incumbent should be fired.”
McGraw, of Rockford, has asked voters “to take a look at me, who I am, what I represent and make a decision on the basis of character rather than party affiliation,” he said in an interview at his Rockford campaign office.
Still, echoing Trump and other national Republicans, McGraw said he tries to make the case to voters that Democrats have abandoned working-class values in favor of “keeping the border wide open” and “having additional taxes, additional regulation, additional structures on their lives.”
“We’ve challenged them to question their assumptions that they’ve made about parties and what the parties stand for, and asked them to evaluate whether or not the Democratic Party is the same party as their grandfathers’ Democratic Party,” McGraw said.
Despite their overtures to voters in the middle of the political spectrum, the race often has been characterized by the same hot-button issues at play across the country — the economy, crime, immigration, abortion, health care and LGBTQ rights.
The role religion plays in society also has entered the debate. In a TV commercial, Sorensen criticized past comments from McGraw about how prayer guided his judicial decisions, underscoring the former judge’s affinities with the religious right.
National money has poured into the race, with Sorensen having raised more than $4.7 million during the election cycle and still having nearly $1.4 million in his campaign bank account as of Oct. 16, according to the most recent filings with the Federal Election Commission. McGraw brought in nearly $1.4 million during that time and had more than $331,000 on hand as of Oct. 16.
Sorensen has received $1.5 million through ActBlue, the Democrats’ online fundraising platform for small donors. His largest contributors are two pro-Israel groups, which has drawn criticism from pro-Palestinian supporters on social media. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has given Sorensen nearly $83,000, and JStreetPAC has given him more than $39,000, records show.
Sorensen also has reported receiving $10,000 from the Democrats’ House Majority political action committee, along with $4,000 from the campaign fund of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, of New York.
Although he hasn’t raised as much, McGraw has received sizable contributions from PACs controlled by House Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, reflecting the competitive nature of the race compared with the state’s other 16 congressional elections. Johnson’s Grow the Majority has given more than $159,000, while Scalise’s Eye of the Tiger PAC has contributed $10,000, records show. He’s also received more than $152,000 through WinRed, the GOP’s small-dollar platform.
The national focus on the race was evident on a recent weekend, with Johnson headlining a $250-per-person fundraiser for McGraw in Peoria and California Rep. Pete Aguilar, the No. 3 Democrat in the House, rallying door-knocking volunteers with Sorensen in Peoria Heights.
That attention sets the race apart in Illinois. All 12 races in the Chicago area favor the Democratic incumbent, as does the 13th Congressional District contest between first-term Rep. Nikki Budzinski, of Springfield, and Republican challenger Joshua Loyd, of Virden, to represent the district that cuts across central Illinois from Champaign-Urbana, through Decatur and Springfield to the Metro East suburbs of St. Louis.
On the GOP side, Reps. Mary Miller, of Hindsboro, and Darin LaHood, of Peoria, are running unopposed, while Rep. Mike Bost, of Murphysboro, faces a nominal challenge from Democrat Brian Roberts, of DeSoto, in the 12th District that covers southernmost Illinois.
‘Countless farm visits’
Sorensen’s purpose for visiting John and Aaron Mitchell’s 450-cow dairy farm near Winnebago, just west of Rockford, was to accept an endorsement from the Illinois Farm Bureau’s political arm, which is backing Sorensen for reelection in part because he supports a new farm bill stuck in Congress.
A member of the House Agriculture Committee, Sorensen was one of just four Democrats to vote with Republicans to advance to the full chamber the $1.5 trillion package that includes subsidies for farms and food stamp benefits.
The farm bureau also presented Sorensen with a model of a tractor from Moline-based John Deere. In many ways, the model is an emblem of the district’s dual identity, with its deep agricultural and industrial roots.
The Mitchells are sixth-generation farmers, and they took over after a manure and gas accident in 2008 killed their father and another brother. Today, employees work three shifts to ship 4,500 gallons of milk daily for the Prairie Farms Dairy cooperative.
On the road leading to the Mitchells’ farm, McGraw campaign signs dotted the landscape, an unsurprising sight in the heavily Republican rural area.
But John Mitchell sees himself as a political independent, saying he evaluates candidates based on their individual records and particularly how they’ve supported agriculture.
Mitchell knows from experience that Sorensen is committed to advocating for the farmers in his district, he said. When the Agriculture Committee was reviewing the farm bill, for example, the freshman congressman, who was a TV weatherman in Rockford and the Quad Cities before entering politics, held an online conference call with area farm bureau leaders to get their input.
“He’s attended countless farm visits, everything from corn and soybean to livestock to dairy farms like us to specialty growers,” Mitchell said while presenting the award. “During his first term, he’s also been a big advocate of the waterways here that we have in northwest Illinois, making sure all of our locks and dams are getting the proper funding and care that they need to keep all of our products moving down the rivers and overseas. He’s also been a big supporter of renewable fuels, which is an important market for corn and soybeans in our area.”
Afterward, Mitchell said that while he knows McGraw was a respected judge and has support from the local sheriff and other law enforcement officials, “as far as agriculture and business, I’m not sure what he brings to the table.”
Sorensen’s willingness to listen and engage with constituents was a common theme among supporters, from local elected officials to everyday voters.
Before his visit to the Mitchells’ farm, the congressman attended a meeting on prescription drug prices at a union hall in Rockford.
The focus was mainly on proposed state legislation in Springfield, but it also gave Sorensen an opportunity to tout a bill he’s introduced that aims to prevent big pharmaceutical companies from slowing down the approval process for generic drugs. Like nearly every other bill filed in one of the least productive Congresses in modern history, the measure has gone nowhere.
After the sparsely attended forum, retired nurse practitioner LuAnn Ostrander praised Sorensen for his willingness to engage with people, particularly via social media, even when they don’t agree with him.
“That’s a huge issue when it comes to being a constituent,” Ostrander said, noting she and Sorensen had a private disagreement on Facebook this summer over the congressman’s call for Biden to drop out of the presidential race. “If they don’t answer, why bother? But he does.”
A self-described independent, Ostrander said she already cast her ballot early for Sorensen, as well as some Republican candidates, and identified protecting abortion rights as her top issue this year.
“I’m not a leftist radical, but I am very much for the individual’s rights of personal choice, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else,” she said.
Sorensen also keeps an open line of communication with local leaders in the district. That’s been especially important as more federal funding for public works projects has become available in recent years through Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law, said Rockford Mayor Tom McNamara.
McNamara, a Democrat, said that while he also has a good working relationship with LaHood, the Peoria Republican whose congressional district also includes a portion of Rockford, it’s been beneficial to have a representative in Washington who grew up in the city and lived there for years.
“If I say, ‘Hey, we’re having this issue with the Eighth Avenue bridge,’ he knows the Eighth Avenue bridge and he understands … that it’s hard to get kids to school because buses can’t go over it because it has a load restriction,” McNamara said.
That attentiveness to local needs and concerns isn’t limited to fellow Democrats, McNamara said, noting Sorensen has worked with Republican Winnebago County Sheriff Gary Caruana, who’s endorsed McGraw in the race, to secure nearly $847,000 in federal funding for a new police training facility in the region.
In the Quad Cities, where Sorensen now resides, Moline Mayor Sangeetha Rayapati, also a Democrat, likewise praised the congressman’s efforts to bring infrastructure money to the district, which “provides jobs,” “improves the quality of life that we have,” and “improves the service delivery for all of our residents.”
“We need advocates to meet the needs of our regions,” she said. “And congressman Sorensen has gotten us significant funding for lead pipe replacement. We’re an old industrial city. We’ve got a huge project there, and that money is extremely beneficial to places like us.”
‘No separation of church and state’
On the same night Sorensen addressed Winnebago County Citizens for Choice at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Rockford, McGraw appeared before a decidedly more conservative audience at a private event just outside the district in Rockton, a little more than a mile from the Wisconsin border.
The evening at Williams Tree Farm was hosted by Elevate & Inspire, a group founded in 2020 to support area businesses that ignored Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s shutdown orders in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Over the course of his campaign, McGraw, who was appointed to the bench in January 2002 and first elected that November, has pointed to his two decades as a judge as evidence of his ability to carefully and thoughtfully weigh conflicting sides of an argument and render a decision based on the facts rather than preconceptions.
“It’s those kinds of skills that I’m going to take to D.C. when I’m elected,” McGraw said in the interview at his campaign office. “And as a judge, you’re always required to be independent. You can’t just go by how many people are in the courtroom supporting one position or the other. That’s not how it works.”
Drawing on his experience as a judge and previously as a prosecutor, McGraw, like Trump and many downballot Republicans this year, has focused his campaign heavily on crime and immigration. He often links the two despite falling violent crime rates nationally and numerous studies showing immigrants, regardless of their legal status, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born U.S. citizens.
“Our government doesn’t care enough about you folks, your safety, your families, to secure that southern border, to stop the invasion that’s going on every single day, people coming into our country that bear us ill will,” McGraw, who filmed a campaign ad standing near a section of wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, told the crowd of about 150 people inside the tree farm’s log cabin-style event space.
Among the other speakers during an evening filled with religious overtones were Darren Bailey, the GOP’s unsuccessful 2022 nominee for governor who failed to unseat Bost in this year’s 12th Congressional District Republican primary, and Tom DeVore, the party’s losing candidate for attorney general two years ago.
The night opened with remarks from Steve Cassell, pastor of a small church in rural Lena who sued Pritzker in 2020 over the governor’s restrictions on church gatherings, and ended with Apostle Jonathan Byrd of Kingdom Center Rockford, who likened Democrats to the biblical giant Goliath, the “uncircumcised Philistine” slain by David.
“The other side, called the Democrats, have no covenant with our Constitution,” Byrd said. “They have no covenant, and they’re uncircumcised. And David says, ‘Today, I will kill you and take off your head.’ We’ve got just a few more months — just a few more weeks —to kill him and to take off his head.”
During his remarks, McGraw also focused on his faith, responding to an ad in which Sorensen’s campaign highlighted comments the judge made this summer explaining how prayer influenced his decisions from the bench.
“I would take the file folder, go back in chambers, and I’d lay it on the floor,” McGraw says in the clip. “Then I would lay on top of that file, and I’d pray and pray and pray until God gave me leading what to do. And then I’d come back out and give my ruling.”
McGraw told the audience, “I will not apologize for praying.”
After seeing the ad, McGraw did a Google search for “Founding Fathers praying,” he said, which brought up images of George Washington at Valley Forge and “founders praying when they were trying to come together and draft the Declaration of Independence or draft the Constitution.”
“That’s our heritage. There is no separation of church and state,” McGraw said. “Our heritage is one where we rely on God to give us direction for our self-governance.”
McGraw’s faith-based appeals resonate with members of the Republican base who’ve become more energized and more politically engaged since 2016.
Kathy Easton, a Rockford business owner who had no interest in getting involved in politics until Trump lost the 2020 election, said she’s supporting McGraw because “he aligns with all my family values, everything that I want for my grandkids, for my children:
“Close the border, fix the economy, keep boys out of girls sports. Just all the basic things definitely align with how I believe as a conservative Republican,” said Easton, who is now second vice chair of the Winnebago County Republican Central Committee.
McGraw supporters characterize Sorensen as too liberal for the district.
Rock Island County Republican chair Annette Parchert said farmers in her western Illinois community are “furious” about the farm bureau’s endorsement of Sorensen and many rank-and-file union members are likewise angry with their labor organizations for backing the congressman.
Like McGraw and other supporters of his, Parchert criticized Sorensen, the state’s first openly gay congressman, for “introducing children to drag shows.”
It’s a line of attack based on past social media posts from Sorensen, such as one from 2021 in which he wrote: “I was so honored to help lead a youth drag event in downtown Moline, Illinois today. I love the kids who threw caution to the wind to be themselves. I love my city and the people in it so so much! #Pride2021.” That post was recirculated this spring by the right-wing social media account Libs of TikTok.
In campaign ads, the McGraw campaign has attacked Sorensen’s advocacy for access to gender-affirming health care treatments, saying the congressman “supports exposing minors to life-altering sex changes.”
Sorensen has said voters in the district are more concerned about their own livelihoods and well-being than those issues.
