Daniel Biss, the Democratic frontrunner in Illinois's 9th Congressional District primary, admitted to a relationship with a former student just hours before voters headed to the polls on Tuesday. A campaign spokesperson confirmed the relationship to The Daily Northwestern late Monday, after the former student went public with her account.
The timing could not have been worse for Biss, or more convenient for primary voters who deserved to know.
Megan Wachspress, now a lecturer at Stanford Law School, alleged in posts on Bluesky and Substack on Monday that her relationship with Biss "crossed student-teacher boundaries" while she was a student at the University of Chicago. Biss was a postdoctoral instructor there at the time. According to his LinkedIn profile, he taught as an assistant professor of mathematics at the university from September 2002 to August 2008.
According to the New York Post, Wachspress painted a picture of a gradual boundary erosion that will be familiar to anyone who has watched these stories unfold in academia. She described office hours that "lasted later and later" and emails from her professor that grew increasingly personal, extending "well beyond mathematics."
"My professor's responses to my emails got longer and longer, topics extending well beyond mathematics; office hours lasted later and later. Flattered and insecure, I convinced myself it didn't mean anything – I was a student, after all! – until the quarter ended, and he emailed to ask if I wanted to meet up, socially."
She described Biss bringing her a book with an inscription that read, "On the occasion of an end and a beginning," signed "With bundles of admiration." What followed, by her account, was a brief but intense involvement that Biss eventually pulled back from on the grounds that dating a student was wrong.
"After a few very intense evenings, he had second thoughts. It was wrong to date a student, of course, so we would have to stop making out. Of course, we could still hang out, and so we continued to spend time together in what to any external observer would look like dates, until gradually that stopped, too."
Wachspress said it took becoming a professor herself to understand the power dynamics at play:
"It took becoming a professor myself to realize the implications – what it means to be attracted to someone who categorically has less power than you."
The Biss campaign's statement, delivered late Monday through a spokesperson, acknowledged the relationship while working to minimize it. The spokesperson framed Biss as 26 and Wachspress as 20 at the time, noted it occurred before he met his wife, and described the involvement as "a handful of dates over the course of a few weeks."
"After the course ended, Daniel and Dr. Wachspress went on a handful of dates over the course of a few weeks. Daniel realized then, as he does now, that it was ill-advised, and he ended it."
The word "ill-advised" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statement. What Biss's campaign describes as a few casual dates, Wachspress describes as something considerably more loaded: inscribed books, "very intense evenings," and a dynamic shaped by an inherent power imbalance. The Biss campaign and Wachspress did not immediately respond to The Post's request for comment.
There are two ways to read the timing of this story. Wachspress herself seemed to anticipate the question of motive, writing that she didn't know if the relationship was "disqualifying" but that "there are too many women not getting a platform as a result of behavior like this for me not to say something."
Whether the revelation reshapes the primary is one question. But the more interesting one is why Biss, now 48 and the mayor of Evanston, apparently never anticipated this becoming public during a congressional run. He reportedly crossed paths with Wachspress again a few years ago during a Zoom call related to her "energy work," after which she claimed he "offered an apology, of sorts." An apology of sorts is not a reckoning. It's a man hoping the story stays quiet.
This is the party that built an entire vocabulary around power dynamics, institutional authority, and the obligation of those in positions of influence to never exploit that trust. Democrats have spent years constructing frameworks for exactly this kind of situation: older authority figure, younger person in their charge, a relationship that begins in the shadow of a professional hierarchy.
Biss was not some peer who happened to meet Wachspress at a social event. He was her instructor. She sat in his classroom. He graded her work. The emails grew longer. The office hours ran later. Then the quarter ended, and the line vanished.
When these stories involve figures on the right, Democrats demand accountability with impressive speed. Careers should end. Nominations should be withdrawn. No context, no nuance, no "it was 20 years ago." The standard is absolute, right up until it applies to one of their own congressional frontrunners on the eve of a primary.
Biss entered the race as the favorite in Illinois's 9th District, with his closest competitor, 26-year-old former journalist and influencer Kat Abughazaleh, polling in second according to numbers compiled by the New York Times. Whether voters factored this story into their decisions at the polls on Tuesday remains to be seen.
But a man who spent two decades in public life without publicly reckoning with what happened in that classroom and those subsequent evenings was not caught off guard by the past. He was caught betting it would stay there.
