The 6th Congressional District, which includes southern Cook County and eastern DuPage County, as well as part of the Far Southwest Side of Chicago, is a contest between the 54-year-old incumbent Sean Casten, whom we endorsed in the Democratic primary earlier this year and in the 2024 general election, and Niki Conforti, 63, whom we endorsed in the Republican primary in February.
Conforti, an energy consultant and demonstrable expert in that field, is a very solid choice for Republican readers.
She told us that “the single biggest issue facing residents and businesses in the 6th District is affordability, with the high cost of living driven primarily by skyrocketing energy and healthcare expenses.” By way of a solution, she said she would “push for legislation that cuts burdensome regulations in the energy sector and limits the renewable energy component to increase grid resilience and lower utility bills.” Additionally, she asserted she would “leverage (her) professional background in healthcare to enforce medical billing transparency, which will foster free-market competition and drive down prices for patients, while also incentivizing the return of manufacturing jobs to the 6th District to stimulate our local economy.”
That all sounds good to us, but we judge Conforti squishy on matters of free trade, which is important to us. More importantly, Casten is one of our favorite Democrats in Congress, not least because he marries the needs of his district with an intellectual curiosity of unusual distinction.
He is a business-friendly Democrat on the moderate wing of the party, but also aware of the less prosaic parts of his job. “Our challenge is to provide hope,” he told us. “To let people see how our government works and trust that their officials are working for them.”
We also were taken with Casten’s answer to our question about immigration enforcement: “I have always been fond of Ronald Reagan’s description of America as a “tall proud city… teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace — a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and heart to get here.”
That dodges the hardest aspects of our question, for sure, but we think it’s the right philosophical framework and very much something in which Republicans used to believe.
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Sean Casten is endorsed.
Read all of the Tribune Editorial Board’s endorsements for the 2026 Illinois general election here.
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