Former Reps. Chris Collins and Jesse Jackson Jr. may disagree on many public policy matters, but if each wins back their old jobs in 2026, they can compare hard-earned experience on at least one topic — survival tactics in federal prison.
In 2012, Collins, a Republican and longtime western New York businessman, won a suburban Buffalo House district. But he resigned in October 2019 after pleading guilty to insider trading and lying to the FBI.
Collins began serving a 26-month prison sentence in October 2020. During the final weeks of his first term, President Donald Trump pardoned Collins on Dec. 22, 2020.
Collins, 75, has since moved to southwest Florida. He’s now seeking the Republican nomination for Florida’s open 19th Congressional District, covering Fort Myers and the Cape Coral area. That intra-GOP contest across the deep red territory will effectively decide who makes it to Congress. In 2024, Trump prevailed there over former Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, 64% to 35%.
In colder winter environs, Jackson Jr. is also seeking a comeback on the South Side of Chicago, which he long represented as a Democratic House member from Illinois. The son of Jesse Jackson, the media personality and two-time Democratic presidential candidate, Jackson Jr.’s House career lasted nearly 17 years. However, he resigned in November 2012 ahead of a federal guilty plea 10 weeks later to one count of wire and mail fraud, admitting that he had used campaign funds to make personal purchases. Jackson Jr. was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison and was released on March 26, 2015.
A decade-plus later, Jackson Jr., 60, is seeking a political comeback in Illinois’s 2nd Congressional District, covering the southern Chicago suburbs, far southeast Chicago, and east central Illinois. Winning the Democratic primary is tantamount to a general election win in the deep blue enclave. In the 2024 presidential election, Harris beat Trump in the district 66% to 33%.
The possibility of two former federal inmates returning to the halls of Capitol Hill makes for a Trump era update to Mark Twain’s quip, “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
The possible emergence of two ex-felons in Congress would also mark a new, bipartisan low in a long-running decline in voter expectations of public officials’ behavior. It’s a trend that Trump critics have pinned on the president’s political rise over the past decades. Though there’s never been a shortage of criminal members of Congress who end up serving prison time, with both Democratic and Republican lawmakers engaged in all kinds of law-breaking, these ex-House members usually disappear from public view once their prison sentences end.
A rare two-state House member?
Collins gained a measure of national exposure a decade ago as an early House GOP endorser of Trump’s upstart presidential bid against more than a dozen rivals, including several prominent current and former officeholders. In frequent media interviews touting Trump’s candidacy, Collins pointed to the once-thriving factory sector in his western New York district, where generations of blue-collar workers earned middle-class wages and were able to support families.
In this telling, Trump’s “America First” agenda on trade and other policies was just the tonic America needed to regain international competitiveness. Collins, a mechanical engineer-turned-business entrepreneur who earned considerable personal wealth, brought a certain moral authority to the cause. In Collins’s 2012 House win, he beat a future Empire State chief executive, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY).
Once Trump entered the White House in 2017, Collins’s political stature grew. However, it came crashing down on Aug. 8, 2018, when the congressman and his son, Cameron Collins, were arrested by the FBI. The former representative faced charges of insider trading and making false statements about an illegal stock tip he gave his son via cellphone from, of all places, the White House lawn, about a biopharmaceutical company’s failed drug trial.
After a year of bad publicity, to put it mildly, Collins resigned from Congress in October 2019 in conjunction with his guilty plea. Collins’s prison sentence began in October 2020, only to be sprung early two months later by Trump’s pardon.
Nearly five years later, ensconced as a Florida resident, Collins said on June 11 that he’s jumping into the 19th Congressional District primary scrum. The seat is open since its incumbent, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), is running for governor.
“Trump’s back in office,” Collins said in a radio interview with WBEN, a Buffalo station. “I’d like to go back and be his sidekick, if you will.”
However, Collins will likely face a crowded primary field, and he’s not even the only castoff politician from another state trying to revive their political career.
Former Rep. Madison Cawthorn, a Republican who represented a western North Carolina House seat from 2021 to 2023, is reportedly eyeing the seat. At the constitutionally minimal age of 25, Cawthorn was among the youngest House members ever and drew negative headlines over several scandals, embarrassing videos, unhinged rhetoric, and run-ins with the law.
Cawthorn also alienated voters in western North Carolina by announcing a campaign for an even more conservative district in the Charlotte area that he had almost no links to before a new court-drawn map foreclosed that possibility. In 2022, at age 27, Cawthorn narrowly lost renomination to Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC), a state senator at the time.
However, Cawthorn soon decided he was done with any part of the Tarheel State and bought a million-dollar home in Cape Coral, Florida, after his defeat in the primary. In November 2024, the ex-congressman told Punchbowl News that he was considering running to succeed Donalds, who was already making his gubernatorial ambitions clear. Cawthorn has recently told reporters he’s still thinking about it.
Though a win by Cawthorn would likely be unwelcome news for House GOP leaders and former colleagues, they can point to Cawthorn’s evidence-free insinuations from 2022 that an unidentified House colleague invited him to an “orgy” and he witnessed prominent conservatives doing “a key bump of cocaine.”
Yet Cawthorn and Collins are by no means the only out-of-staters who are running or might still do so.
Former Illinois state Sen. Jim Oberweis is seeking the GOP nomination. The dairy magnate had a successful business career and has significant personal wealth. However, he’s had limited success in the political arena. Oberweis, 79, ran for the House and statewide office in Illinois seven times between 2002 and 2020.
Amid that losing streak, Oberweis was able to win a state Senate seat in 2012 and stayed in office for eight years while representing far western Chicago exurbs and surrounding rural areas. However, his repeated Illinois defeats for the House, governor, and senator don’t exactly make him the most formidable candidate in Florida.
Marine veteran Mike Pedersen and businessman Jim Schwartzel are also running.
For his part, Collins is trying to join an exclusive club of House members from two states. The last was the late Republican Rep. Ed Foreman, who first represented a House seat in Texas, stretching across the state’s far-west end in El Paso and east through the Permian Basin oil fields. Foreman lost reelection in 1964 after former Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Texan, won a blowout victory. Foreman moved west to New Mexico, and in 1968 beat a House Democrat in a district straddling the U.S.-Mexico border. However, he lost reelection in his new political term after a single, two-year term.
Keep hope alive in Chicago’s South Side
In his quest for Illinois’s 2nd District Democratic nomination, Jackson Jr. has one crucial asset despite his felonious history — name recognition. He is trying to succeed Rep. Robin Kelly (D-IL), a Senate candidate. A frequent saying by his father, “Keep Hope Alive,” sums up Jackson Jr.’s current political plight well.
Jackson Jr. represented previous incarnations of the district until he admitted in a federal plea deal that he had spent $750,000 on campaign contributions and personal purchases. Jackson Jr., who as a congressman claimed to champion the downtrodden and financially destitute, turned out to have rather delicate tastes when it came to material possessions. According to 2013 court documents, his campaign credit cards were used for $582,772 in personal expenditures. Jackson Jr.’s purchases included a gold-plated Rolex watch costing more than $43,000 and almost $10,000 in children’s furniture.
Jackson Jr. is still in an exploratory phase of his comeback bid, but is highly likely to jump into the fray. Still, he will hardly have an easy road back to Congress. Six Democrats are already vying for the 2nd District, including state Sen. Robert Peters, Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller, Metropolitan Water Reclamation District Commissioner Yumeka Brown, businessman Eric France, policy strategist Adal Regis, and youth pastor and advocate Jeremy Young.
Should Jackson Jr. make it back to Congress, he would join his brother, Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-IL), who was first elected in 2022 to represent Illinois’s 1st Congressional District, covering parts of South Side Chicago and the southwestern Chicago suburbs.
The brothers wouldn’t be the first pair of male congressional siblings from Illinois, in which one drew waves of negative, scandal-tinged publicity.
The late Rep. Phil Crane represented a northern Chicago area district for more than 35 years before losing reelection in 2004. Crane unsuccessfully sought the 1980 Republican nomination, running to former President Ronald Reagan’s right.
Crane’s dentist brother, Dan Crane, won a central Illinois House seat in 1978. In office, a 1983 New York Times article said he “portrayed himself as a solid, churchgoing, family man, a conservative Republican who set himself apart from what he described as the fast living ‘Washington set.’”
Yet on July 14, 1983, the House Ethics Committee recommended that Dan Crane and former Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Gerry Studds be reprimanded for having engaged in sexual relationships with teenagers: Dan Crane with a 17-year-old female House page, and Studds with a male minor page. The full House voted to censure both. Crane lost reelection in 1984, even as Reagan romped to a 49-state landslide reelection win. Studds continued to win new House terms until retiring from Congress after the 1996 elections.
Of course, the glaring difference, should Jackson Jr. have his way politically, is that voters would return him to office even after a federal prison stint, rewarding bad behavior.
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It’s a similar case in the Florida congressional district Collins seeks to represent. A political inverse of Jackson Jr.’s desired Illinois constituency, with voters in both districts backing a presidential nominee by about two-thirds majorities.
Voters in both places, knowing the candidates’ felonious pasts, can’t be surprised if they draw scrutiny from the House Ethics Committee once back in office. And they’ll have only themselves to blame.