Photo by Matt Cohen.

For the second time this election season, the top three mayoral candidates—Councilmembers Muriel Bowser (D-Ward 4), David Catania (I-At Large), and former At-Large Councilmember Carol Schwartz—faced off in a debate to help win over voters.

The debate, which was hosted by WAMU and took place at NPR’s studio, found the three candidates squaring off once again, tackling a variety of issues, including affordable housing, education, homelessness, marijuana policy reform, ethics, and more. According to the latest poll, Bowser is still leading the pack, but Catania is closing in, trailing behind by just eight percentage points. There’s a lot of hot button topics that are a big deal for District voters, but, as evidenced by last night’s debate, it seems as though catty personal grievances seem to dominate their conversation. Below are five takeaways from the debate, which you can listen to here:

Candidates’ Personal Grievances Are Getting In The Way of The Issues

Here are three big topics that weren’t even mentioned until the second hour of the debate: Relisha Rudd, homelessness, and education. Instead, the first hour of the debate mostly found the candidates relying on personal attacks and airing dirty laundry.

Catania and Schwartz traded barbs, regarding her 2008 At-Large reelection campaign, in which she says Catania “engineered” a campaign against her by supporting candidate Patrick Mara. Many believe that Schwartz is only running for mayor—for the fifth time and after a five-and-a-half-year absence from local politics—to pull votes away from Catania, but she defended her candidacy, saying “me running has nothing to do with you. I want to be mayor.” When asked who’d she vote for, given she wasn’t in the election, she said she’d “write her own name in.”

When Catania denied “engineering” a campaign against Schwartz’s 2008 reelection, Bowser jumped in saying “everyone knows that’s not true.”

These personal attacks boiled toward the end of the first hour, when Bowser interrupted Catania, claiming she wouldn’t stand for him calling her “uninformed” or a “puppet” anymore.

It felt as if the candidates barely got into the meat of the issues during the first hour because they were so bogged down in personal attacks.

All Three Candidates Feel Differently About D.C. General and The Community Partnership

When the debate finally did get into the big issues—particularly Relisha Rudd and the situation at D.C. General—all three candidates had fairly different opinions on what should be done. Most agree that the disappearance of Relisha Rudd was due to a failure by the contractor who runs the shelter, the Community Partnership to for the Prevention of Homelessness, and while all three candidates agreed that something needs to be done with the contract with TCP, their opinions skewed differently.

Catania said that the situation at D.C. General is a “disgrace” and he would “absolutely” sever the contract with TCP. Bowser said she’d “order a top to bottom review” of the contractor, but didn’t say if she’d cut ties with them. Schwartz, on the other hand, agreed with Catania to sever the contract, but said the shelter should be run directly by the D.C. government.

Is the D.C. United Stadium Deal More of A Contentious Issue Than It’s Being Played Out to Be?

One of the more interesting questions of the evening came from a WAMU listener, who said that the biggest issue for her is the D.C. United Stadium land swap deal. The listener said she’s vehemently against it and it’s the only issue she’s voting on in this election.

Well, it looks like she won’t be voting, because all three candidates expressed their support of the deal, albeit with some individual reservations. Both Catania and Schwartz said they liked the deal, but were wary of the land swap part, which would have the city trading the Reeves Center at 14th and U Street NW for the part of land in Southwest where the stadium would be built.

Bowser, however, enthusiastically defended the deal, saying that “soccer is the world’s game, and we have to do everything we can to make sure we have soccer in the District of Columbia.” She also cited the success of how the investment in Nationals Park paid off, and a new United stadium will help “grow the city.”

Education Is Still a Huge Issue in This Election

A good chunk of the debate’s second hour focused on education, with a heavy focus on the planned boundary and feeder school changes that Mayor Vince Gray accepted in August. While all of the candidates agreed that the plan, as it stands now, is not acceptable, they had different ideas of how it should be handled.

Bowser said that the plan isn’t ready and they need more time to work it out, but when pressed by moderator Tom Sherwood to give a definitive timeline for when a redefined plan would be implemented, she didn’t have one. Catania said that he’d hold off on the plan for a year as he’s concerned with the feeder school patterns.

Although Schwartz says the plan isn’t the best it could be, she said that instead of trying to stop it, we should prepare for the changes, as they’ve already been approved.

Affordable Housing Is at the Crux Of Every Major Development Issue

From the very first question asked by moderator Patrick Madden to Bowser—“what do you consider to be your signature achievement in solving affordable housing crisis.”—the underlying crux of the debate was affordable housing. Bowser cited her New Communities initiative as one of her achievements, but Catania struck it down, saying that the Council “has been MIA” on the issue. Schwartz’s solution was to implement fines for developers who don’t meet affordable housing requirements, while offering incentives for developers to create affordable housing.

The issue of affordable housing popped up several more times in the debate—in questions related to creating jobs, the redevelopment of the McMillan Sand Filtration Site, and in the controversy of the Park Southern apartment complex. The Park Southern controversy, in part, led to the most heated part of the evening, in which Catania criticized Bowser for not returning the money she allegedly received from the building’s managers following the controversy. Bowser fired back at Catania, criticizing him for the longtime second job he held at contractor M.C. Dean.

Still, both candidates, along with Schwartz agreed that affordable housing is a major issue facing the city.

Bonus:

When asked by Tom Sherwood what their favorite Halloween costumes were as a kid, all three candidates said “Wonder Woman.”