Election season is here.
The Chicago municipal election is scheduled for Feb. 28, which means Chicagoans have just under two months to make sense of the coming tsunami of campaign ads, debates, town halls, forums, news stories and other information about the candidates vying for your vote to run our city for the next four years.
In this election, Chicagoans will elect members of City Council and the new police district councils; a city treasurer; a city clerk; and most important, the next mayor.
The mayoral candidates, in particular, will seize every opportunity to tell you, the voter, what they think. Voters will have ample opportunity to hear from the candidates. But we think the candidates ought to spend just as much time listening to voters and answering their questions. It’s simply part of earning your vote.
With that in mind, the Sun-Times, WBEZ and the University of Chicago Institute of Politics have teamed up for our “People’s Agenda” project, which launched Jan. 3. The idea is simple: We want to hear from Chicagoans about what they think mayoral candidates should be talking about ahead of the all-important Feb. 28th election.
We’re asking Chicagoans to tell us what issues matter the most to them — more job opportunities, better public schools, affordable housing, arts and culture or something else — and what questions they want to ask Chicago’s next mayor.
The idea is to let the people shape the candidates’ campaign agendas, not the other way around.
We will pose some of the questions we receive to the candidates themselves during a series of live candidate forums on WBEZ’s midday talk show, Reset, during the week of Feb. 6th. And to highlight the concerns of younger voters, we will host live remote broadcasts at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago and a City Colleges campus.
Your responses will also help to shape campaign coverage, including a digital candidates’ guide to help people vote.
Here’s a QR code to the survey:
It’s your turn now. We’ll make sure the candidates for mayor are listening — and we encourage Chicagoans to speak up and share their ideas.
Send letters to letters@suntimes.com
