Sean Casten: Illinois Sixth Congressional District Candidate 2026 IL Democratic Primary

DOWNERS GROVE, IL — U.S. Rep. Sean Casten is running for his fifth term in the Illinois Sixth Congressional District on the Democratic ticket. He faces GOP opponent Niki Conforti.

IL-06 includes all or sections of the suburban Cook County communities of Alsip, Chicago Ridge, Palos Heights, Worth, Crestwood, Oak Forest, Oak Lawn, Tinley Park, Orland Park, Orland Hills, Palos Hills, Palos Heights, Hickory Hills, Justice, and extends into the Chicago neighborhoods of Clearing, Beverly and Mount Greenwood; and in DuPage, Downers Grove, Oak Brook, Oak Brook Terrace, Lisle, Wheaton, Glen Ellyn, Lombard, Elmhurst Darien, Hinsdale and Willow Springs.

You can find Casten's answers to the Patch candidate questionnaire below:

Candidate

Sean Casten

Town of residence:

Downers Grove

Occupation

US House of Representatives for Illinois' 6th Congressional District (2019-Present)

Previous or current elected office

US House of Representatives for Illinois' 6th Congressional District (2019-Present)

Party Affiliation

Democrat

Family

I am married to Kara and have two daughters, Gwen and Audrey.

Education

Middlebury College (BA)

Dartmouth College (MS, MEng)

Website

Castenforcongress.com

The single most pressing issue facing our district or state is ___________, and this is what I intend to do about it.

Last summer, as I was traveling around the district, a woman approached me and asked, "Is our democracy going to survive?" We are approaching our country’s 250th birthday, and the question on her mind was how many more we could look forward to.

That question, in some fashion, has loomed over too many conversations in recent years. The era of Donald Trump has scared people. They saw ICE murder an American citizen in Minneapolis, watched women lose their rights in the Dobbs decision, watched a mob descend on the Capitol on January 6, all while simultaneously seeing a Senate that refused to hold the perpetrators to account and a Supreme Court that chose to bestow immunity on the President rather than uphold the bedrock principle of equal treatment under the law.

It has left many of us wondering if we are better than what we have seen from the White House. I think we are. Not because our courts aren't flawed, and certainly not because any assembly of American elected officials doesn't also assemble their "prejudices, passions, errors of opinion, local interests and their selfish views" - as Benjamin Franklin memorably described the Constitutional Convention in 1789. But we will survive because of our nation's collective decency and willingness to organize ourselves into collective action and fix problems. The response to Donald Trump's excesses in 2016 was not to abandon hope. It was to march for women, for science, for our lives. And to organize and vote.

But the years since 2016 also taught us that just voting wasn’t enough. I have watched too many pieces of legislation that are supported by overwhelming majorities - from protecting women’s rights to choose to campaign finance reform and eliminating gerrymandering to sensible gun safety reforms pass the house and fail to even be brought up for a vote in the Senate. I have watched this Supreme Court amend the Constitution or make other politicized, highly unpopular laws; a partial list would include effectively striking the first 13 words of the 2nd Amendment in Heller, doing the same to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment in Anderson or gutting the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County.

Which doesn’t mean we should lose hope! It is instead a call to do what our predecessors did and change the law to make us more democratic. I have been outspoken not only on the need to reform Senate procedure, but I have also introduced legislation to reform the Supreme Court and expand the House and Senate to ensure it better reflects the will of the people.

There are those on both ends of the political spectrum who have inflamed our more populist impulses by promising to destroy all of our institutions. There are others who insist that our institutions are fine and just need to be allowed to work. I am committed instead to making those institutions work better for us all. Because that’s the only way we have ever made real, durable progress.

What are the critical differences between you and the other candidates seeking this post?

I ran for Congress in 2018 having spent 20 years in the private sector running companies that were dedicated to profitably reducing greenhouse gas emissions. I believe there is no conflict between our wallets and our morals; there is only a conflict between the interests of energy producers (who want to sell as much of their product as possible at as high a price as possible) and the interests of energy consumers (who want access to clean, reliable energy at the lowest possible price.)

Since coming to Congress, I’ve been able to bring that perspective to the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, where I served for two terms and where we wrote the report that became the Inflation Reduction Act - a consumer-focused bill that was the biggest climate bill ever passed by any government anywhere. It makes me sad to say “was” since this bill was substantially repealed by Trump with the acquiescence of the Republican Congress this term. My colleague Mike Levin and I took the lead on crafting Democratic energy permitting reform to remove the barriers to clean energy in the 118th Congress which secured over 80 cosponsors and has become the cornerstone of Democratic clean energy policy and we have now amended that (the Energy Bills Relief Act) to include a restoration of those IRA incentives and hope to be in position to implement in the next term.

Congress is about more than energy and climate policy, of course. But that conceit - that there is a win/win provided we craft regulation to align profit incentives with the public interest, and that no business in any industry ever comes to Washington to ask for a change in the status quo - has informed all of our other legislative efforts as well. Pushing for expansions in the Affordable Care Act as a way to lower healthcare costs for all. Pushing to give women the right to choose and providing equal opportunity to all Americans, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation or the wealth of their parents because a society where all can fulfill their potential is also a society that maximizes wealth for all.

If you support tax cuts, what spending should be eliminated to offset those cuts? Please be specific.

Any serious conversation about a balanced budget has to include discussions of revenues and expenses. And with tax revenue at near-historic lows relative to GDP it is fiscally irresponsible and naive to discuss further tax cuts - at least those that primarily benefit the wealthiest Americans, as was done in the horribly misnamed “Big Beautiful Bill”, which added $4 trillion to our national debt. That entire bill should be repealed as a first step to fiscal responsibility.

But perhaps the most important thing we can do to close long-term deficits is to fund the IRS. The tax gap (that is, the gap between taxes due and taxes collected) is nearly $1 trillion per year and results from historic underfunding and understaffing of the IRS. As the NRA says, let’s be sure to enforce the laws we have before we add more to the books.

Do you believe an inequity exists between funding for wealthy and poor schools? If so, what would you do to address the disparity?

Yes.

But to be clear, the choices made about education funding and how to prioritize between communities is primarily based on state and local policies rather than federal legislation that I can affect. Federal education funding alone cannot directly undo the legacy of redlining, differential local property tax rates or choices by local school boards about how to allocate resources between different schools in a given district. However, we can play a critical role in redressing some of those issues by ensuring all schools have access to necessary funding for special needs children, for healthy meals to ensure all kids are ready to learn and for before- and after-school programs to meet the needs of all different families and communities.

So much of this infrastructure has been broken by the Trump administration and we have much work ahead of us to restore what Trump has broken. As we rebuild though, we cannot be naive about the politics. Because providing a full education to every American regardless of their race, their religion or their geography has always been a radical and political idea. Paraphrasing James Baldwin, the purpose of education is to teach people how to think for themselves; no society progresses without having those types of people around, and no society really wants to have that type of person around. I stand for social progress.

What would you do to help constituents struggling with the ever-increasing cost of living, housing and healthcare?

With respect to utilities, the biggest opportunity is to deploy clean energy - because clean energy is affordable energy. A nation that can provide electricity, heat and transportation without burning fossil fuels is also a nation that doesn’t have to pay for fossil fuels to deliver those services. That has informed my legislative work in the Inflation Reduction Act and my legislation to lower energy bills, and my 20 years in the private sector before coming to Congress when I sold and built over 80 clean energy power plants - always based on the savings they delivered to our customers.

With respect to food and - at least on the cost side - housing, the most important near-term goal is to repeal the economically-illiterate Trump tariffs and his xenophobic immigration policies. There is little to say in praise of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, but notwithstanding his current rhetoric to the contrary, when he wrote in January of 2024 that “tariffs are inflationary”, he was right. The National Alliance of Home Builders noted in April of last year that the “liberation day” day tariffs added $10,000 to the average cost of a new home. This isn’t especially complicated - raise the cost of raw materials and you raise the price of the finished product. Trump’s immigration policies have only made this worse by exacerbating supply constraints. Immigrants - documented and undocumented - are (a) more likely to be employed than native-born Americans and (b) much more likely to work in construction and agricultural sectors. The anti-immigration policies of the Trump administration have staved those sectors for workers and exacerbated an already tight supply of new homes. The nicest way to describe their policies is stupid. The most accurate way is racist. In either case, we have to repeal them.

At the same time, we have to acknowledge the unique challenges of housing. For those looking to buy their first home, housing is an expense. For those who already own homes, housing is an asset. And with housing representing the majority of household wealth, a democratic government, responsive to the will of the majority, is always going to face pressure to keep housing value high. We can - and I have - supported federal help in the form of tax credits for first time buyers, and in the long term, perhaps we can find ways to diversify American wealth into other asset classes, but until that happens the best tool to ensure housing affordability is on the supply- rather than demand-side, which inevitably requires coordination with state and local zoning and permitting officials; it cannot be solved solely with federal policy.

With respect to health care, the Affordable Care Act took a big step toward universal health care in the U.S., providing more than 20 million additional Americans with access to affordable insurance for themselves and their families. We expanded coverage by a similar amount when we expanded the ACA tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, and the failure of the current leadership to extend those subsidies before they expired at the end of last year is going to send approximately 17 million people into less affordable, worse care.

That is not to say that the ACA is perfect, but it does point out that the single best, proven way to lower the cost of healthcare is to provide universal health insurance. If you have health insurance you are more likely to secure low cost preventative care. If you don’t have health insurance, you are more likely to defer that care until you require much more expensive acute care. The key word here is universal. One does not need a single payer to have universal health care, and I am of the view that while there has to be a federal back stop, maintaining a private sector with healthy competition is the best way to ensure the best, lowest cost system - but only so long as the federal government retains an active oversight role to ensure that:

1. No one can opt out of health insurance. Universal has to be universal.

2. Robust anti-trust enforcement and consumer protections ensure that no one can take advantage of the obvious pricing power that exists when you have an urgent need for medical care.

3. Everyone should have choice in their care - and ideally, everyone should have the same menu of choices - to ensure the benefits of competition.

4. Wherever possible, healthcare compensation should be tied to health outcomes delivered, not services provided. (For example, it makes no sense that Medicaid provides a lower reimbursement rate to doctors who provide primary care than to those providing specialty care. Setting prices that discourage low cost interventions serve only to discourage low cost interventions.)

5. Finally, since an effective healthcare system will always have to include socialized benefits to ensure that the poor, the elderly and the incapacitated are never denied care just because of their ability to pay, we need to be especially vigilant about those places in the healthcare system where well intentioned cross subsidies can create unethical - if legal - opportunities for excessive profits

Over the course of my time in Congress, I’ve championed multiple bills to improve the ACA in that direction. Examples include expanding ACA tax subsidies, giving Medicare the right - and the obligation - to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies and making sure that Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates don’t provide incentives to shift the most lucrative services out of hospitals and into private clinics.

Do you support redistricting in a non-census year?

I support federal legislation that would ban gerrymandering nationwide. I have cosponsored and voted to pass the For the People Act, which would, among other things, end partisan gerrymandering, create national automatic voter registration, and improve our election security. However, the only thing worse than partisan gerrymandering for our democracy is unilateral disarmament; true democracy has always been a threat to those with unpopular ideas, and as long as those sorts of people control legislatures in places like Texas, North Carolina and elsewhere we have to be prepared to counter. The best way to stop a bully is to scare him into believing that while you will not start a fight, you are prepared to end it on your own terms. And given the assaults not only by the state of Texas, but also by the Supreme Court to the protections ensured in the Voting Rights Act, we must - sadly - preserve gerrymandering as a tool to counter for the time being.

Do you support the full release of the Epstein files with the victims' names redacted? What should Congress do to pressure the DOJ into following the law with the full release of the Epstein files?

Yes. I was proud to be part of the effort to force a vote in the House that compelled the release of the Epstein Files. Congress must use its oversight powers to get to the bottom of key questions on the release of the files. For example, the New York Times has reported that the Justice Department has failed to release files that relate to accusations against Donald Trump. Congress must pursue the truth as to why that is and what is being hidden from the American people.

Do you support the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement in the Chicago area and beyond? Why or why not? If not, what changes do you think should be made?

I have always been fond of Ronald Reagan’s description of America as a “tall proud city… teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace - a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and heart to get here.”

That is the vision of America that drew most of our ancestors here, and we remain American only so long as we hold onto that vision. Unfortunately, that’s also become a partisan idea, and while there have always been xenophobic voices in our society, it is rare to have federal policy being set by one from the White House.

The recent abuses by ICE in Illinois, Minnesota, and beyond are sickening. But for the federal supremacy clause, there would be legitimate grounds for prosecution of any number of ICE agents who have broken and entered into people’s homes without probable cause, who have been arrested and detained without due process, and who have committed unspeakable acts of violence, up to and including murder. The rule of law cannot survive if those tasked with enforcing the law refuse to hold themselves to account, which is a part of why I have called for Kristi Noem’s impeachment. She has created this culture of lawlessness, and it will not end without new leadership.

And once that’s done, I would hope we can get back to an immigration policy based on facts. Of course, we want secure borders. But we also have to acknowledge the objective truths that legal immigrants are less likely to commit crime than native born citizens, and that undocumented immigrants still commit crimes at lower rates. That visa overstays, DREAMers, farm workers, and refugees/asylum seekers make up the overwhelming majority of undocumented immigrants in the United States. Current rhetoric notwithstanding, a tiny minority of US immigrants are MS-13 gangsters sneaking across the southern border. An immigration policy based on facts has no conflict with people’s Constitutional rights.

Where do you agree and disagree with President Donald Trump on policy?

Donald Trump signed the law that compels the release of the Epstein Files. I agree with him on that. He also signed several of my bills into law, including one to accelerate the deployment of energy storage technologies to help our grid better accommodate the deployment of intermittent renewable resources and another to fund the deployment of technologies to help so-called “hard to abate” industries like steel and cement production decarbonize.

Beyond that, Donald Trump is a narcissistic, convicted felon and adjudicated rapist who has abused his position to grift billions of dollars for his family while diminishing the US’ standing in the world, dramatically slowing down job creation and investment in the US economy and is, in all cases, a daily embarrassment to every patriotic American. Out of respect for your readers and his office, I will refrain from sharing a more fulsome view of my disagreements with him as a President, and as a human being.

What else would you like voters to know about yourself and your positions?

I ran for office in 2018 on climate change as the existential threat to our species and have continued to prioritize it through my terms in Congress, most recently through legislation that would remove the permitting barriers to cheaper, cleaner energy in the United States.

That said, I was once advised that everyone has two piles of work on their desk. One is the “want to do” pile, and the other is the “need to do” pile. Climate is the reason I ran, and dominates my want to do pile. But the oath I took to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, increasingly dominates the need to do pile.

As long as we have a President in the White House who is denying all Americans their equal protection under the Constitution, who is grossly abusing the power of his office for self-enrichment, and who is eviscerating our global standing in ways that jeopardize the post-WWII order, it behooves the Congress to act as a check on the Executive. That is all the more urgent since the Supreme Court has largely abdicated that responsibility by granting Donald Trump near total immunity in Trump v United States.

Congressional oversight will come if Democrats take the majority, but we also need to pass structural good government reforms, including but not limited to my governmental reform proposals, and use our power of the purse to withhold funding for agencies that refuse to comply with ethics and the rule of law - from ICE to the Supreme Court.