The Associated Press has declared incumbent Democratic Rep. Bill Foster the winner of the 11th Congressional District.
Foster received 55.7% of the vote to Republican challenger Catalina Lauf’s 44.3% with 95% of precincts reporting.
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Since 2013, Foster — noted for being the only Ph.D. physicist in Congress — has generally won reelection by wide margins but a newly drawn district provided fresh challenges, including Republican challenger Lauf.
Foster has represented the 11th Congressional District since 2013 but he had thousands of new constituents to convince after the district was redrawn following the 2020 Census.
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After the decennial redistricting following the 2020 Census, the Naperville Democrat was a candidate to more than half of all voters in his redrawn district, which now stretches northwest from Bolingbrook, through parts of Aurora, Naperville, Batavia and St. Charles, to Crystal Lake, Woodstock and almost to Rockford.
Lauf, a Woodstock resident, defeated five other candidates to win the Republican primary in June with 31% of the vote.
She had been appointed as an adviser to the U.S. Department of Commerce in 2018 by President Donald Trump. In 2020, Lauf ran for Congress in the 14th District and lost, but she was selected to speak that year at the Republican National Convention.
