What You Really Want to Know About the Candidates for Chicago Mayor

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CHICAGO — No, Rahm Emanuel isn’t running. But practically every other power player in Chicago is on the ballot on Tuesday in a race that is perhaps the most unpredictable mayoral contest in a generation for the nation’s third-largest city. It’s a free-for-all with no clear front-runner.

If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote — an extremely difficult bar, given that 14 candidates are on the ballot — the top two finishers will head to a runoff in April. The nine candidates who, according to some recent surveys, stand the best chance to be the next mayor stopped by our Chicago bureau, and we asked them some essential — and not so essential — questions.

[The latest from Chicago as the votes are counted on Election Day.]