Taking the fifth

The race to fill Rahm Emanuel’s 5th congressional district seat is as crowded as a Garrett’s Popcorn shop. Some two dozen candidates have filed for inclusion on the special election’s March 3 primary ballot (the general election is April 7); half are, like Emanuel, Democratic, the party heavily favored to win. The field of Dems revealed the contest’s other dilemma at a candidates’ forum at DePaul University on February 1: similitude. “Part of the problem is that a lot of people are taking some very clear positions, but they’re all the same,” candidate Charles Wheelan told us. “It’s not that everyone’s equivocating; it’s basically that there aren’t that many positions that separate people.”

So if you 5th district residents can’t cast your ballots based on policy when early voting opens Monday 16, what should sway you? To get beyond all the rhetoric and see where the candidates’ loyalties truly lie, we constructed personals-ad–style profiles based on interviews with the Democratic front-runners.

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