Millionaire physicist Bill Foster may be the only candidate for congressional office to have a section of his campaign website devoted to particle accelerators and superconducting magnets. More remarkably, the Democrat just won 53% to 47% in a Republican stronghold.
In early March, Foster defeated businessman and dairy magnate Jim Oberweis in a special election in Illinois to replace Republican representative and former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, who announced his retirement late last year.
“Back in the laboratory, we’d say that this was a pretty successful experiment,” Foster said in a victory speech at a banquet hall in Aurora. “We sent a clear message to everyone in Washington. You demanded change, and you are demanding it now.”
Foster founded a successful national theater lighting company, then had a 22-year career at Fermilab as a high-energy physicist. He worked on the collider detector that discovered the top quark and...