The 3rd Congressional District — which includes large swaths of West Philly, Center City, and North and South Philly, along with the Northwest — is rated as the most reliably Democratic area in the country. Just as remarkably, since 1995, only two people have represented that cross-section of the city in the U.S. House of Representatives: Chaka Fattah, who resigned in 2016 following convictions on racketeering and corruption charges, and sitting Congressman Dwight Evans.

So, when Evans announced in June 2025 that he’d not seek re-election following a minor stroke, speculation immediately began to swirl about who’d be next in line. Nearly a dozen candidates quickly jumped in, but the field has since been winnowed ahead of the May 19 primary — leaving three viable candidates to replace the 10-year incumbent.

On Tuesday night, the trio of top contenders — Dr. Ala Stanford, State Senator Sharif Street, and State Representative Chris Rabb — interviewed for the job in front of a packed audience inside the Fitler Club ballroom. It wasn’t a debate. They were participating in The Citizen’s Ultimate Job Interview, an ongoing event series that, since 2023, has given voters a less confrontational and more meaningful look at the people vying to represent them in office.

The interview format is simple: Candidates sit with a panel who ask them, one by one, about their qualifications and experiences and then share questions from the in-person audience. This time, the panel consisted of Marcel Pratt, former City Solicitor and current managing partner at Ballard Spahr; Maggy Wilkinson, CEO of Athena Global Advisors; and Matt O’Donnell of 6abc Action News.

Whoever wins the primary next month is almost guaranteed to be headed to Washington, D.C. In what’s expected to be a low-turnout election, the ability of each campaign to mobilize voters will be critical. But it’s also a race that could come down to what voters believe is missing from Congress right now. Are they seeking a political outsider with a fresh perspective, like Stanford? Do they want a consummate insider and dealmaker, like Street? Or do 3rd District voters want a true progressive who won’t hold any punches against Trump, like Rabb?

Time will tell. But Tuesday night was an opportunity for each of the candidates to discuss the substance of their track record before voters make their choice. Below are a few highlights from the event.

The experienced outsider

First up on stage was Stanford, a Germantown native, pediatric surgeon, and founder of the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium. Asked to describe the traits that would make her a good fit for Congress, Stanford touted her medical experience as a valuable asset. “Your relationship with your doctor,” she said, “is predicated on trust” — something that is in short supply these days between voters and elected officials. “What I’ll bring from the start, if I represent the 3rd Congressional District, is listening.”

Although Stanford is a political neophyte, she described herself as a quick study. “I was in school for 18 years after high school, so I am an expert in learning. I have no problem ascertaining information,” Stanford said.

Additionally, she drew a distinction between a lack of experience holding office and a lack of public service — the latter of which she has in spades. President Biden appointed Stanford as a regional leader of the Department of Health and Human Services, a role she served in for one year.

“Leadership, to me, is doing the right thing when no one is watching — when you realize no one is coming to help people you deeply care about,” she said. “We’ve been doing things the same way for so long, with the same institutions and the same machines. And when we needed help the most [during the pandemic], it was not there. You need a fearless leader.”

The “neuro-spicy” progressive

Given his reputation as a progressive firebrand in Harrisburg, state Representative Chris Rabb has, unsurprisingly, drawn comparisons to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “I’m older than both of them — perhaps combined,” Rabb said, flashing a bit of his trademark humor.

In fact, the 56-year-old Rabb spoke about his sense of humor as an asset, part of his self-described skillset in getting bipartisan legislation passed at the state level. He also touted his ability to think creatively on divisive issues, like abortion. In 2021, amidst a nationwide push from Republicans to roll back reproductive rights, Rabb introduced a bill requiring Pennsylvania men to get a vasectomy within six weeks of having their third child — a parody, of sorts. “I was making the point that there was a huge double standard,” he said, referring to differences in how the government seeks to regulate the bodies of men and women.

Rabb, who has represented Northwest Philly in Harrisburg for the past 10 years, comes from a long lineage of trailblazers and changemakers. Among them, great-great grandparents who were conductors of the Underground Railroad; a grandfather who was a physician and activist in the Jim Crow South; a multi-great grandfather who signed the Declaration of Independence; and his grandmother, Madeline Wheeler Murphy, who was a community activist and journalist in Baltimore. Rabb described the latter as his political hero.

Asked for a new law he’d like to immediately pass in Congress, Rabb didn’t flinch: “Take money out of politics,” he said. “I have never taken a dime of corporate PAC money.”

The Philly pol

The scion of a local political dynasty — his father, John Street, was a City Councilmember for 20 years and Philadelphia’s mayor for eight; his uncle, the late Milton Street, served as both a Democratic state rep and Republican state senator — holds a degree in finance from Morehouse College and a J.D. from Penn Law. But Sharif Street, who’s served as a state senator since 2017, insists his home address at 16th Street and Lehigh Avenue keeps him grounded.

“Each and every day, I go back home to a low income community. I go back to the ghetto. I go back to the hood — and I don’t think a whole lot of members of Congress do that,” he said. The senator has intentionally hired people who are similarly connected to their neighborhoods. “Almost every member of my staff has lost someone to gun violence,” he said, adding that for his constituents, he’s endeavored for years to change PA law so that people convicted of felony murder — when the victim of a non-homocide dies as the result of the commission of a crime — were not condemned to life without the possibility of parole.

Street also spoke of reaching far across the aisle to Republican PA Senator Michele Brooks, someone whose “positions on many issues would be deeply offensive to most people in this room” — to obtain funding for drug and alcohol programs. He reeled off the numbers of legislators required to get bills passed in Harrisburg and noted that the biggest donors to his campaign have been the organized labor orgs consisting of “regular people who go to work every day and individually don’t have the power to stand up to big corporate interests.”

As chair of the PA Democratic Party from 2022 to 2026, he posited that if the Biden, then Harris, presidential campaign had focused less on “value propositions” like choice and democracy and more on “bread-and-butter” issues like job creation and crime reduction, maybe the top of the ticket would have shared in the success of Democrats in statewide races.

See a quick recap video here:

Photos from our Ultimate Job Interview: 3rd Congressional District below:

PAST CITIZEN EVENTS