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Dear Readers: For more than five decades, the Almanac of American Politics has set the standard for political reference books. In September, the Almanac is publishing its 2026 edition, with some 2,200 pages offering fully updated chapters on all 435 House members and their districts, all 100 senators, all 50 states and governors, and much more. For the 2026 edition, one of the Crystal Ball’s senior columnists, Louis Jacobson, has been named chief author—the third chief author since the Almanac’s 1972 founding, after Michael Barone and Richard Cohen. This is the eighth edition of the Almanac that Jacobson has written for, going back to the 2000 volume. Below, the Crystal Ball is pleased to excerpt the profiles of several Chicago-area congressional districts from the 2026 edition. As he did with the Brooklyn and Queens districts in the 2024 edition—which the Crystal Ball excerpted in 2023—Jacobson has updated the Chicago area district descriptions based on a day-long tour of neighborhoods with Chicago-based urbanologist, geographer, and local historian Max Grinnell. While all seven districts discussed here are heavily Democratic, Chicago as a whole shifted 10 percentage points rightward between the 2020 and 2024 elections. Given that overall movement, Democratic margins at the district level also dropped. Readers of the Crystal Ball can receive a 15% discount if they purchase the 2026 edition through the Almanac’s website and apply the code TAAP26CB at checkout through August. — The Editors |
IL-1: Chicago (South Side, Will County; represented by Democrat Jonathan Jackson)
The South Side of Chicago has been home to a large urban Black community for nearly a century; metro Chicago has the third-largest Black population in the nation, after New York and Atlanta. More than a century ago, there were just a few blocks where Black families from the South could settle in Chicago. The neighborhood grew rapidly with the first influx of Black migrants from the Mississippi Delta in the 1910s. By the 1920s, the South Side was well established as a center of Black-owned businesses and music.
Bronzeville, which is partly in the district, was home to civil rights icons and artists, including Ida B. Wells, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, and, for a time, Louis Armstrong. In Englewood, thousands of homes have been built with federal support in recent years, with a goal of creating a new Black middle-class community. However, Englewood has continued to struggle with high rates of poverty and crime. Since 1980, Chicago’s Black population has decreased by almost one-third; closed schools, abandoned lots, and food deserts have followed.
The 1st District includes about half of Chicago’s South Side African-American community. It has a northern salient that extends above McCormick Place and nearly to the Loop at South 16th Street. It includes the Gothic spires of the University of Chicago in Hyde Park and the mansions of Kenwood, now an eclectic and racially integrated mix of well-to-do inhabitants; Barack Obama lived there before he ran for president. The 1st also takes in several Black-majority Cook County suburbs on both sides of Interstate 57. Farther south, it extends into mostly white and conservative-leaning parts of Will County, which account for about 25 percent of the district, plus the western part of Kankakee County.
Early on, the South Side was heavily Republican, reflecting Black allegiance to the Civil War party. In 1928, the 1st District elected Republican Oscar De Priest, the first African American elected to the House in the 20th century. The New Deal attracted Black voters to the Democratic Party, and in 1934, Black Democrat Arthur Mitchell ousted De Priest. Since then, the South Side has been solidly Democratic.
In the 2022 redistricting, the 1st took much of its share of Will and Kankakee counties from the 2nd District, while shedding some southern Cook County suburbs to the 6th. The changes reduced Cook’s share of population in the 1st from about 80 percent to 69 percent.
IL-2: Chicago (Southeast Side, Kankakee; represented by Democrat Robin Kelly, who is now running for the open U.S. Senate seat)
Chicago is a center of commerce and industry. If the city’s white-collar offices are heavily concentrated in the Loop, its blue-collar industries are most visible on the far South Side, with remnants of its great hulking factories around Lake Calumet and the nearby rail yards. This is where the Pullman strike of 1894 was broken by federal troops and where policemen killed 10 union supporters in the Little Steel strike of 1937.
For decades, suburbanites have sped past these mostly empty buildings while navigating the Calumet and Dan Ryan expressways. In the Hegewisch neighborhood, Ford Motor Co. operates its Chicago Assembly Plant (also called Torrence Avenue Assembly), its oldest continuously operated plant, building the Ford Explorer and Lincoln Aviator. It is redeveloping an adjacent former Republic Steel mill.
The 2nd District blends the urban, majority Black landscape of Chicago’s old South Side industrial area with several Cook County suburbs to the south as well as some more-distant exurbs. From its northern tip, the district extends 130 miles through eastern Will and Kankakee counties to all of Vermilion County; with nine percent of the district’s population, Kankakee is its second-largest county. The Chicago portion of the 2nd is overwhelmingly Black, although many African-Americans are moving into suburbs to the south. Farther south are Flossmoor, high-income Olympia Fields and the still vibrant Park Forest. In the city, the district includes Jackson Park near the lakefront, where the Obama Presidential Center is being built on a 19-acre site in Jackson Park, and the Museum of Science and Industry, where the Columbian Exposition of 1893 was held.
The South Side has steadily lost population over the last four decades, as people move to the suburbs or beyond. Redistricters preserved Chicago’s two African-American districts on the South Side only by pushing the 2nd far beyond the county line; a Black-plurality district is on the West Side.
IL-3: Chicago (Northwest Side, eastern DuPage County; represented by Democrat Delia Ramirez)
Webs of acquaintances that reach back to ancestral villages made the Northwest Side of Chicago a natural port of entry for Eastern bloc migrants; more recent newcomers have arrived from Latin America and Southeast Asia. A few decades ago, Milwaukee Avenue was the main street of Polish Americans and Ukrainian Americans. A couple of blocks from the Chicago River and the Kennedy Expressway is the grand old St. Stanislaus Kostka Church, an iconic center of the Polish community since the 19th century; it now conducts its masses in Spanish. Chicago has gained the largest Latino concentration north of Texas and Florida and between the two coasts.
The 3rd District consists of a large swath of the Northwest Side of Chicago, starting close to the Lakefront, extending across the city to south of O’Hare International Airport and then southwest through Addison until it includes an eastern strip of DuPage County with the outskirts of both Elgin and Naperville.
The district contains the neighborhoods of Logan Square, famous for its boulevards and spacious mansions surrounding Milwaukee Avenue, and Humboldt Park, which includes the nation’s only museum that focuses on Puerto Rican arts and culture. Young professionals are moving in, with trendy restaurants, new condominiums, and boutique shops popping up alongside traditional Latin American taquerias and Hispanic churches. The gentrifying Milwaukee Avenue corridor is the core of Avondale. The Chicago Advocate referred to the area as the “Hipster Mecca of the Midwest.” The chief downside has been that tenants—many of them Hispanic—have been forced out by surging housing costs, with the price of an average home in Logan Square climbing from $218,000 in 2012 to $457,000 in 2020 to $600,000 in late 2024. Since 2000, many Hispanic families have moved to Chicago’s nearby inner suburbs.
IL-4: Chicago (Southwest Side; represented by Democrat Chuy Garcia)
Just west of the Loop, the Chicago River splits into the North and South branches, both penetrating the heart of old neighborhoods where immigrants got their start. The South Branch is the guts of Chicago. Not far away in an Italian-American neighborhood on Halsted Street was Jane Addams’ Hull House, the original settlement house where social workers instructed new immigrants on adapting to American life. To the south were Pilsen, the arrival neighborhood for the Bohemians (Czechs), and the Irish neighborhoods along Archer Avenue.
In recent decades, a wide variety of Hispanic immigrants have called these neighborhoods home. Pilsen began attracting Hispanics, including Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, in the 1960s and 1970s; since 1982, it has been home to the National Museum of Mexican Art, and walls lining the surrounding streets are decorated with intricate, vividly colored murals. Hispanic growth has extended into the once Bohemian suburb of Cicero, famous as a haven for Al Capone’s mobsters in the 1920s. Officially, about 81,000 people live there, almost 90 percent of whom are Hispanic. But town officials say the actual number may be higher due to immigrants living in the U.S. illegally.
The 4th District consists of much of this territory, which is crisscrossed by grid-pattern streets, the canal, and the railroad lines and switching yards in one of the nation’s major rail hubs. The 4th is now based on the Southwest side, though it continues to swing west of the city to take in a thin slice of DuPage County and a small part of Northwest Chicago, where the Hispanic population is more heavily Puerto Rican. Its expanded area on the Southwest side includes Midway International Airport, Chicago’s main airport between 1927 and 1955, when O’Hare International Airport opened. As a busy discount hub, Midway has renovated and expanded its congested terminals and parking lots, all squeezed into the heart of a busy commercial area. The Bridgeport neighborhood, a storied Irish stronghold, produced five mayors, including the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, who lived in Bridgeport his whole life; collectively, they served for much of the 20th century and into the 21st. In recent years, Hispanics and Asians have moved into Bridgeport, along with artists reclaiming old warehouses for studio space.
In the 2022 redistricting, the 4th evolved from one of the most bizarrely designed congressional districts in the country, shaped like a pair of earmuffs with a thin strip that connected the Northwest and Southwest sides, including losing half of its residents to the overhauled Hispanic-plurality 3rd District. The changes reduced the Hispanic share of the population from 67 percent to 61 percent.
IL-5: Chicago (North Side, O’Hare Airport; represented by Democrat Mike Quigley)
Few places in America today possess more ethnic and cultural diversity than the North Side of Chicago. Chicago was America’s top immigrant destination for Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians and Romanians. Wooden workingmen’s cottages from the late 19th century gave way to sturdy brick houses in the early 1900s, then to the prairie bungalows in the 1920s and the white-shuttered, orange-brick colonials in the 1950s. In the 1980s, upwardly mobile immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala, Korea, and the Philippines moved in. The collapse of the Soviet Union encouraged new rounds of immigrants in the 1990s. Yet for all of its diversity, Chicago is deeply segregated: Few African-Americans live on the North Side. The city remains more mosaic than melting pot.
In trendy Ravenswood and Lincoln Square, with large Victorian homes on tree-lined streets, the friendly business climate has become a hub for craft brewing and distilling; you can still take German lessons here. Baseball’s famed Wrigley Field, the ivy-covered park where the Cubs have played baseball since 1914, is here, while just east of gentrified Wrigleyville is Boystown, the epicenter of Chicago’s gay community.
The 5th Congressional District is oddly shaped, rambling from Chicago’s North Side to the northwest suburbs and eventually to a small slice of southern Lake County. In the city, the district runs from the lakefront to parts of Milwaukee Avenue, which touches old Polish and Ukrainian neighborhoods. (Voting patterns in Ukrainian Village shifted blue in 2024, seemingly due to Donald Trump-era policies skeptical of Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion.) The district also includes most of O’Hare International Airport. The district drawn after the 2020 Census dropped a portion that had dipped south into western suburbs and the eastern edge of DuPage County. Instead, from O’Hare, it swings up the Kennedy Expressway to well-maintained suburbs to the northwest. In Arlington Heights, the Chicago Bears purchased a 326-acre former race track site that was considered for a stadium, though it now looks like the team will remain downtown.
While the 5th has some Republican-leaning suburbs, it remains a solidly Democratic district overall.
IL-7: Chicago (Downtown, West Side; represented by Democrat Danny Davis)
An airplane passenger on a cloudless day will have a clear view of the biggest man-made cityscape between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans: Chicago’s Loop and its immediate surroundings. Its high rises and parks near Lake Michigan were built a century ago, and the Loop itself was named in 1897 for the quadrilateral shape the elevated train forms around the city’s center. This is the face Chicago likes to present to the world: giant structures rising where the prairies meet the great lake, a vast concentration of brains and muscle, the nerve center of the nation’s commodities markets, and, most recently, a hive of political activity.
When it opened in 1930, at the junction of the Chicago River’s branches, the 4-million-square-foot Merchandise Mart was the world’s largest building. International School modernists built their most impressive collection of buildings here and along Lake Shore Drive in the years after World War II; the city has more buildings by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe than any other city, and Bertrand Goldberg designed the iconic, corncob-shaped Marina City development in 1964. The Chicago Riverwalk, developed along the river in phases since 2000, offers cafes, bars, green space and boat and water taxi access. Barack Obama delivered his historic 2008 victory speech in front of 240,000 cheering onlookers in Grant Park. The Loop was host to massive Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 that led to sometimes violent clashes between police and protesters, calling to mind the chaos of the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Just north of the Loop is the Magnificent Mile, featuring high-end retail, the former Chicago Tribune building (now used for luxury condos), and the world’s biggest Starbucks, which in 2019 took over a five-story space on North Michigan Avenue from the Chicago-founded Crate & Barrel. Further north of the Loop is the affluent Gold Coast, where the rising level of Lake Michigan poses long-term peril. West of the Gold Coast is the River North neighborhood, which has become one of the city’s most vibrant. The nearby West Loop is where McDonald’s moved its headquarters in 2018 from suburban Oak Brook. In the South Loop, plans are underway for “The 78,” a huge riverfront campus featuring 10,000 residential units and a $250 million tech research hub affiliated with the University of Illinois. (Its name references the existing 77 official Chicago neighborhoods.) Southeast of the Loop is the McCormick Place convention center, North America’s largest.
The West Side, once heavily Eastern European and Jewish and now predominantly Black, includes the United Center, home of the Chicago Bulls, the Chicago Blackhawks, and the 1996 and 2024 Democratic National Conventions, whose generally smooth operations exorcised the memories of the unrest in 1968. (The West Side’s Blommer chocolate factory closed in 2024, its wafting scent passing into history.) The Illinois Medical District, south of the United Center, boasts four hospitals, two medical universities and a range of research labs. Further west are the neighborhoods of Austin, Lawndale and Garfield Park, home to Garfield Park Conservatory, opened in 1907 and one of the largest greenhouse gardens in the country. Two of the country’s grimmest public housing projects—Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes—were torn down, but like other minority neighborhoods in Chicago, the West Side has suffered from elevated levels of crime and violence.
The 7th Congressional District of Illinois includes the Loop, most of the North Michigan Avenue corridor, the Near North Side, and a few South Side neighborhoods, woven together by extensive above-ground transit, sometimes passing seemingly inches away from track-side buildings. It is the only district entirely within Cook County. Just outside the city limits but still in the district, is Oak Park, the boyhood home of writer Ernest Hemingway and the location of architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and museum as well as many of his prairie-style houses. The district’s population is 43 percent Black.
IL-9: Northern Suburbs of Chicagoland (Evanston, Northern Cook County; represented by Democrat Jan Schakowsky, who recently announced her retirement)
“Make no little plans,” architect Daniel Burnham once said, and he made no little plans for the Chicago lakefront. The glorious parks he designed are among America’s urban jewels, and the row of high-rise apartment buildings offer the parks a splendid accompaniment. Today, this part of Chicago has as much urban energy and lively diversity as any place in America. In what it describes as the largest capital improvement project in its history, the Chicago Transit Authority is modernizing 5.6 miles of the Red and Purple Lines from the North Side to Wilmette, its busiest route, much of which was opened in 1925.
The 9th Congressional District covers the north end of Chicago’s Lakefront, from just north of Montrose Harbor up through Rogers Park, home of Loyola University-Chicago. Rogers Park is the city’s most diverse neighborhood and the only one on the North Side with many African-American residents. Lincoln Park is the second-richest neighborhood in Chicago, after the Gold Coast along Lake Michigan. It abounds with boutiques, clubs, and restaurants and contains the nation’s largest Catholic university, DePaul. The area around West Argyle Street has attracted Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian and Thai residents and businesses; it is variously known as New Chinatown, Little Saigon, or Little Vietnam.
The district is centered in Evanston, founded by Methodists to promote temperance (a cause that never prospered in Chicago). Evanston, home to Northwestern University, long ago moved from Yankee Republicanism to postgraduate Democratic. In 2020, after Illinois legalized marijuana, its city council voted to use the tax revenue to pay for race-based reparations. The district spreads north and west through upscale suburbs like Wilmette, home to the only Baha’i Temple in the country—and one of only eight worldwide. It also includes Skokie, home to the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, as well as Morton Grove, Niles, and parts of Glenview and Northfield.
The Lakefront has long been the most heavily Jewish part of Chicago. The local Jewish community, prominent for more than a century, has never been as much of a political force as it has been in New York, yet these voters’ liberal impulses have been strong: a sentiment in the 19th century to resist state authority and cultural uniformity, and the impulse during recent decades to strive for social justice. They supported for mayor one of their own, Rahm Emanuel, but were disappointed when he fell short as a reformer; they broke hard for Lori Lightfoot in her 2019 victory, though her vote fell across the city when she failed to make the runoff four years later.
The district was entirely in Cook County until the 2022 redistricting, which added a thin arm that stretches to Hawthorn Woods in Lake County and Algonquin in distant McHenry County. Today, 82 percent of the district is in Cook.