Collins Has More Going For Her Than Fame And Bucks — But Is It Enough?

CHICAGO — A recent political poll I got a peek at last week showed the son of a civil rights icon and a Chicago alderwoman were in a dead heat to win the Democratic primary in the 17-candidate race to replace retiring U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush.

Rush's 1st District stretches from Chicago's lakefront through a widening swath of city neighborhoods through the south suburbs to the farm fields beyond Frankfort.

Jonathan Jackson — son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson and brother of ex-con and former Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. — has loads of name recognition and local influence, mostly due to decades of heroic and scandalous headlines about his family.

On his own, Jonathan Jackson is a well-spoken businessman with no elected political experience.

And as of Monday, Jackson still hadn't filed financial disclosure statements required for his congressional run after being outed as an election scofflaw by Sun-Times reporter Lynn Sweet.

And Ald. Pat Dowell has held a seat on the City Council since 2007.

She ousted fancy-hat-wearing ward boss Dorothy Tillman with a campaign financed by a powerful public employee union. Dowell's top accomplishment, according to her bio, was her role as the lead sponsor of an ordinance requiring banks to maintain foreclosed properties in 2011.

Dowell's campaign is leading in fundraising, according to federal election records.

It makes sense that the another son-of-a-somebody and a Chicago ward boss backed by the most cash would post a lead in a political poll. Over the last few weeks, I've noticed enough Jackson and Dowell campaign signs decorating corners to win over some voters by osmosis.

If that scenario plays out, it would be a win for the political status quo, and a shame for voters.

Because when folks learned a few things about Illinois Sen. Jacqui Collins, the state senator who is also running for the seat, she became their pick as the congressional race front-runner, according to the poll results.

The polling, by Collins campaign, isn't a clear predictor of how the election will shake out. In real life, lesser known candidates running campaign messaging on a budget struggle to get their message to voters.

The political poll initially showed Collins in a statistical dead heat with Jackson and Dowell. But when prospective voters were told more about the state senator, she became an election front-runner, according to the survey.

That makes sense to me.

I didn't know much about Collins — other than she was a state senator who got her political start in the late Harold Washington's campaign for Chicago mayor in 1983 — until we first talked during the early days of the coronavirus crisis.

At the time, people were dying at an alarming rate in the 60620 ZIP code on Chicago's Southwest Side, which Collins represents. And the governor's office wouldn't respond to her requests to put a coronavirus testing site in Auburn Gresham.

While so many Democratic elected officials kept quiet and did what they were told, Collins kept fighting for folks in the working-class African American enclave with terribly high rates of infections and not a single testing site for miles.

At the height of her frustration, she asked me, "Maybe you could shine a little light directly on the governor about Auburn Gresham."

That's what happened. Within weeks, Collins stirred up so much political pressure against fellow Democrats that two COVID-19 testing sites — one run by the city and another by the state — simultaneously opened in the South Side health care desert.

Collins, the former journalist-turned-state senator running to replace Congressman Rush doesn't have a famous name or an overflowing campaign fund.

Collins refuses to take campaign donations from corporations, unlike Dowell and Jackson.

She has a hefty amount of credit card debt, like many of the people she represents, and admitted as much in financial disclosure documents that her opponent, Jonathan Jackson, didn't bother to file.

"Transparency and ethics are vital components of our democracy. As someone who has served in the General Assembly and fought for ethics reform, I understand how desperately it's needed. If Jonathan Jackson can’t show us a commitment to ethics now, how can voters trust him in Congress?" Collins said.

Over the last couple of years, I've watched Collins consistently advocate for people neglected, forgotten and overlooked.

She's sponsored laws that help pay funeral costs for victims of gun violence, banned predatory lending practices and, most recently, made untraceable "ghost guns" illegal.

Collins, whose senatorial district stretches from Chicago's South Side to the suburban forest preserves, knows she has to find a way to get her message out with limited cash.

On Monday, she challenged the "top tier" candidates running for Congress to a televised debate to give folks a chance to hear directly from her before election day.

Voters deserve as much.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docuseries on CNN and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary "16 Shots.

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