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This North Side District Is One Of The Smartest In The Country: Report

By DNAinfo Staff | June 19, 2017 11:09am | Updated on June 19, 2017 11:21am
 Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Chicago)
Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Chicago)
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DNAinfo/Alisa Hauser

CHICAGO — Who's the smartest in Chicago? When it comes to congressional districts, that would Rep. Michael Quigley's 5th.

The city portion of the district makes a swing north from West Town through Lincoln Park and Lake View, up across North Center and North Park and into the Far Northwest Side neighborhoods of Jefferson Park and Dunning. And points in between.

The ranking is from Monday's New York Times, which looks at the highest educated districts across the country. Quigley's comes in at 15th highest in the nation, with 50 percent of its adults having a college degree.

Tops is Manhattan's 12th District, with 69 percent of its residents having at least a bachelor's degree.

Says the Times' Upshot column about Quigley's district:

Illinois’s Fifth is an odd one. It extends all the way from Lincoln Park, along Lake Michigan, to O’Hare International Airport, then heads south through many suburbs west of the city. It’s exactly the kind of weird-looking district you’d get in one of the most heavily gerrymandered states in the country.

It does nonetheless cobble together plenty of well-educated areas, whether young neighborhoods on Chicago’s North Side or office park-dotted western suburbs.

It’s the only district on this list that voted for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. He won it by three points.

(Quigley, by the way, graduated from Roosevelt University, earned a master’s degree from the University of Chicago and a law degree from the Loyola University School of Law. A Lakeview resident, he was also an adjunct professor of political science at Loyola University Chicago and Roosevelt University.)

The Times analysis finds that of the 15 top-educated districts in the United States, President Donald Trump won just one in the election. That district is Georgia's 6th District in suburban Atlanta, where Democrat Jon Osoff is closely battling Republican Karen Handel ahead of Tuesday's election there.

 


Illinois Fifth Congressional District