It took some extended vote counting to confirm Joe Walsh’s narrow electoral victory in November, but the Harris School of Public Policy Studies alum is now making plans to join the Republicans’ House majority as the new representative from Illinois’ 8th congressional district.
Walsh, MPP’91, beat incumbent Rep. Melissa Bean by fewer than 300 votes out of less than 200,000 ballots cast. Running without support from the GOP, Walsh was outspent by Bean by more than four to one—her $2 million to his $500,000.
“I just don’t think they thought I could win,” he said.
Bean conceded after absentee ballots trickling in from counties across the district, which covers Chicago’s northwest suburbs, couldn’t close Walsh’s narrow lead. In 2004, Bean unseated Republican Phil Crane, who held the seat for more than three decades.
“I ran for Congress for a very simple reason,” Walsh said. “I was scared to death of the direction the country is at, primarily with the amount of money our government is spending. I was angry, and so I lead with that. What I found was that there were a lot of people who felt the same way.”
A lifelong Republican, Walsh attended the University of Chicago in one of the Harris School’s first graduating classes. At the time, he was working for Jobs for Youth, a nonprofit organization that provides education services to low-income neighborhoods in Chicago.
Walsh ran for public office twice before this year’s election—first in 1996 to represent Illinois’ 9th congressional district, and again for the Illinois State House in 1998. He lost both with less than 40 percent of the vote.
Because of the date of Illinois’ 2010 GOP primary, Walsh was the first Tea Party candidate to officially win a Republican nomination in early February. In a crowded field of six political unknowns, Walsh took the race by more than 10 percent.
“When I started to run in October in 2009, I had no idea what the Tea Party movement was,” he said. “There was a lot of serendipity involved in this. There was a movement that had been churning, I was a candidate that spoke the way they felt, and we all sort of attracted each other.”
By Election Day, his volunteers numbered about 1,300 people per week. “I know where my allegiance is,” he said. “My job [in Congress] in many ways will be very simple: to represent the views of people in this district.”
He plans to do that by devoting his tenure in Washington to spending cuts and repealing the new health care legislation, he says, adding that as soon as Bean cast her ballot in favor of the law, his campaign received a spike in e-mails from people wanting to help him.
Walsh attended freshman orientation for newly elected congressmen in mid-November. He will be sworn into office Jan. 5, 2011.
– Steven Yaccino
—Prof. Jacqueline Stewart
