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1-2019

The 2018 Race for Governor of Illinois: Rauner vs.
Pritzker
John Jackson
Southern Illinois University Carbondale, jsjacson@siu.edu

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This is Simon Review Paper #54
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Jackson, John. "The 2018 Race for Governor of Illinois: Rauner vs. Pritzker." ( Jan 2019).

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 The Simon Review

The 2018 Race for Governor of Illinois:
Rauner vs. Pritzker

By Dr. John S. Jackson
Paper #54
January 2019

A Publication of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute

Author’s note- Sincere thanks to Cary Day and Bradley Marks for assistance in
making the maps in Appendix A-E, and to John Foster and John Shaw for their
review and advice.

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3

 The 2018 Race for Governor of Illinois: Rauner vs. Pritzker
Introduction
The 2018 race for governor in Illinois was unique in the annuals of the state and
nation. For the first time ever it featured two mega-rich candidates vying for a
job that pays $177,412 per year. Between the candidates, Bruce Rauner, the
incumbent Republican, and the challenger, J. B. Pritzker, the two campaign
committees spent a combined total of $251.7 million dollars on the race and
support for other allied candidates, making it the most expensive governor’s race
in Illinois history. This race came close to surpassing the national record of
Governor Jerry Brown vs. Meg Whitman in California in 2010 who spent between
them, $280 million in a state which is three times larger than Illinois. A very large
proportion of the total on both sides was provided by contributions from the
candidates themselves (Madhani, November 2, 2018; Miller, January 16, 2019, 1;
See also: https://www.elections.il.gov/CampaignDisclosure/D2Quarterly.aspx?).
This paper describes and analyzes how these two quite different former
businessmen, both of whom had vast personal resources, fought each other and
the opposition party with their personal fortunes and what that shift in candidate
recruitment and campaign funding has already meant for the Republican party
and may mean for the future for the Democratic Party and the state of Illinois.
The Candidates and the Campaign
J. B. Pritzker
J. B. Pritzker was the second very rich challenger to take on an incumbent Illinois
governor in the last two election cycles with Bruce Rauner being the first in 2014.
While Rauner’s fortune was measured in the hundreds of millions, Pritzker’s was
measured in the billions. Pritzker was so wealthy he could say to Rauner, “I will
see your tens of millions funding your campaign and helping your party, and I
raise you by whatever it takes for mine”. Near the end it was reported that
Rauner had spent a total of $95.3 million he had donated to his campaign fund
since he got into politics in 2013 with his most recent contribution having been
$50 million in December 2016. The wealthiest man in Illinois, Ken Griffin, had
added an additional $20 million to Rauner’s campaign war chest. Pritzker had

4

 spent over $146 million of his own personal funds near the end of the race. (Rich
Miller, Capitol Fax, October 1, 2018).
Pritzker inherited a fortune from his family who became very wealthy through the
Hyatt Hotel chain as the cornerstone of their wealth. The family resources were
so large that when it came time for the second generation to divide up the
fortune, after a protracted family fight, several became billionaires from the
proceeds. Some of the Pritzkers were Democrats and some were Republicans.
J. B. was a Democrat, but also a venture capitalist and private equity fund owner
who parlayed his inherited fortune into even more billions from his own
management and investments. He was well-known and active in Chicago
business circles. He and his wife were also prominent philanthropists who had
made major donations to various charities and non-profits in the Chicago area.
This included the Northwestern University School of Law to whom they gave $100
million in 2015, a Holocaust Museum and Educational Center in Skokie, and the
Pritzker Consortium for Early Childhood Development at the University of
Chicago, a non-profit which specialized in trying to improve early childhood
education and the feeding of disadvantaged young people which he claimed
helped feed more than 230,000 school children. Pritzker also founded and funded
the 1871 a start-up innovation center in Chicago which his campaign claimed had
already created 8,000 new high tech jobs (Jackson County Democrats, September,
2018, Meyer, October 5, 2018; Madhani, November 2, 2018).
As a wealthy businessman and philanthropist, Pritzker was also involved in politics
in Chicago and Washington. After receiving his undergraduate degree from Duke
University, Pritzker worked on the staff of two U. S. Senators, Terry Sanford of
North Carolina and Alan Dixon of Illinois. After an early defeat in a Democratic
primary in the 9th congressional district in Illinois soon after receiving a law degree
from Northwestern, he considered running for other public offices on several
prior occasions and he also advised prominent state and national politicians.
His interactions with former Governor Rod Blagojevich, got him into trouble
when their phone conversation was recorded by a FBI wire-tap on Blagojevich,
who was under investigation at the time. The recordings captured Pritzker
discussing various prominent African-American leaders who Blagojevich was
considering as replacements in the U. S. Senate seat held by Barack Obama. In
5

 January of 2009, Governor Blagojevich was impeached by the General Assembly,
removed from office and then sentenced to 14 years in federal prison for
influence peddling and trying to sell the senate seat. All of this became a part of
the 2018 campaign context, and provided plenty of fodder for Governor Rauner’s
thousands of attack ads against Pritzker.
Bruce Rauner
Bruce Rauner was ranked by Forbes to be a half billionaire when he won the
governorship in 2014 as the first extraordinarily wealthy candidate in Illinois
history to win the office. An earlier paper which I wrote on that election (Jackson,
January, 2015) noted that at the time Rauner epitomized the growing trend for
very wealthy candidates to emerge from the business community and use their
wealth to plunge into American politics at the very top echelons of elite public
offices, including governor, senator, and then in 2016, president of the United
States. When Rauner was elected he became one of twelve governors across the
United States who had turned their wealth into access to the top office in their
states. Most of those had not held previous public office of any type which marks
a significant change in the way potential candidates are recruited, or selfnominated.
Rauner beat the then incumbent, Pat Quinn, who had been in state politics for his
entire adult life. Quinn took the traditional route to the governor’s office as he
worked his way up through the ranks of various elected and appointed lower
offices, including Commissioner of the Cook County Board of Property Tax
Appeals, Revenue Director for the City of Chicago, State Treasurer, and Lt.
Governor before gaining the top rung (Illinois Blue Book, 2013-2014, 21).
In 2009 Quinn was elevated to the governor’s office once his predecessor Rod
Blagojevich was impeached and convicted (Sierachi, 2009). He won election to a
full term in November of 2010 when he beat Republican State Senator Bill Brady
in a hard fought and close race by only 31,832 votes, or less than one percent of
the total (Jackson, January, 2011). Quinn’s route to the top was fairly typical for
those who have been professional politicians for most of their careers and who
have had the diverse array of experiences and training that comes from having
fought many electoral battles and occupied several lower offices before reaching
the top.
6

 Those professional politicians, like Pat Quinn, go through a long recruitment,
political socialization and civic education process regarding how the system
works, who their allies and opponents are, and what are the issues and policies
they will need to be conversant with in order to continue to climb the electoral
ladder. These experiences make them seasoned veterans, even before they reach
the top and teach them to understand the powers and limits of their office, and
all those they share power with, and how to wield power as they negotiate the
labyrinth of state and federal politics.
Bruce Rauner was a quite different type of candidate compared to Pat Quinn. He
epitomizes the new breed of business-man-turned-politician, a type which is
increasingly finding success in the rough and tumble of American politics. We are
in an era now when repeated presidential, gubernatorial, and congressional
elections have been dominated by the battle-cry that the nation, or state, needs
an “Outsider” to clean up politics or “drain the swamp”. This has meant that being
a professional politician is now considered to be a major liability rather than a
mark of competence achieved by a candidate who has worked in and studied the
system and learned how the vastly complicated state and national political
systems really work and how to get things done in Springfield or Washington.
Bruce Rauner’s Record
In 2018 Rauner was, of course, the incumbent governor of Illinois seeking a
second term. In this respect the roles were reversed from his first election in
2014 when he was the outsider running to unseat a wounded Democrat, Pat
Quinn. This time Rauner had his own record to defend, and that record, and his
management of the government of Illinois became the top issue in the campaign,
much as it had been in the Quinn vs. Rauner campaign of 2014.
Otherwise, the similarities between Pritzker in 2018 and Rauner in 2014 were
striking. Neither of them had ever held public office before, and both of them
were very rich businessmen who wanted to start a new career at the top of the
political ladder. In this background they are the epitome of this whole new breed
of very rich people (mostly men) who decided to leave the private sector and seek
a second career in the public sector in their middle age years.
Rauner lived in Winnetka then, one of the most expensive suburbs of north shore
Chicago. He was purported to own eight private residencies scattered throughout
7

 the U. S. and if he won the race, the governor’s mansion in Springfield would
become his ninth place to call home. He promised to move to Springfield if
elected, and he made good on this promise although it was almost two years into
his term before renovations to the governor’s mansion became complete and he
and his family were able to move into a building that had been in serious need for
major repair for decades. Rauner promised to get the mansion renovated and to
get it done with private funds. This was one promise he kept, with assistance from
the governor and his wife, and J. B Pritzker and his wife all of whom made
significant personal donations to the building fund supporting the renovation.
As he promised during the campaign, Rauner attempted to govern like he ran his
business. That is, instead of participating in the give-and take of negotiating with
others and learning the art of compromise and understanding that he could not
just give commands and expect to have everyone take his commands as marching
orders, he had to work with others in his own party, and in the other party, which
controlled the General Assembly to get them to reach a mutually agreeable
position they could all live with. Rauner as governor staked out firm positions
which advanced his political agenda, especially the Turnaround Agenda, and then
refused to compromise or to give much quarter especially to the General
Assembly when they failed to act on or pass much of his program. When the
governor’s bills failed to pass he attacked the General Assembly and especially the
legislative leaders loudly and personally, decrying state politics as broken and the
as leadership corrupt. Frequently Illinois was faced with governmental gridlock
when not much real policy got passed and conflict between the executive and
legislative branches sank to historic depths during Rauner’s term (Leonard, May
2017).
Divided government, with the Republicans controlling the executive branch under
Rauner, and the Democrats controlling the legislative branch under Speaker of
the House, Michael J. Madigan, and President of the Senate, John Cullerton, led to
a two year gridlock over the budget which is one of the most fundamental
functions (along with public safety and national defense) state and federal
governments must perform.
That failure to adopt a state budget for two consecutive fiscal years meant that
the state had a budget process that had broken down and that essential function
8

 of the state was taken over by a series of ad hoc administrative decisions, court
rulings and one time only “stopgap” appropriations that kept the government
going but which caused great uncertainty and long-term damage. This period of
chaotic rule did enormous damage to state agencies and the clients they serve,
especially in the human services areas. It also deeply damaged the state’s once
premier system of higher education with wounds that will take years if not
decades to overcome.
The budgetary impasse was ultimately broken midway through 2017 when the
General Assembly overrode Governor Rauner’s veto of the budget that the
legislators had passed earlier. That veto was overridden by the vote of almost all
of the Democrats and ten Republican legislators in the House and one in the
Senate. Finally the state had a budget which included in its base a five billion
dollar tax increase which was built in as necessary to achieve an almost balanced
budget for FY2017 and then essentially repeated for FY2018.
All this conflict and chaos was the backdrop against which the 2018 elections
played out. The gridlock period was particularly relevant because it was an
inescapable part of the record of Governor Rauner who had to bear the onus of
being a key player in that recent history. Not surprisingly, as the incumbent
governor, Bruce Rauner was forced to defend his record during the campaign. His
opponent, J. B. Pritzker, repeatedly called him a “failed governor” who had
proven incapable of managing the state. That charge was ironic since it was the
exact same charge that Rauner hurled repeatedly against the then-incumbent, Pat
Quinn, when he defeated Quinn in 2014.
The Rauner and Pritzker cases were strikingly similar in some respects. Rauner
was a very rich businessman when he first ran, with an annual income well over
one hundred million dollars according to reports filed with the Secretary of State’s
office. While he was not a multi-billionaire like Pritzker, he was nevertheless very
well off by comparison with the average voter.
This extraordinary wealth may have caused him to overdramatize his attempts to
try to appear to be just an ordinary citizen who could identify with and
communicate with more ordinary people. His formal and informal speech after
he was elected often took on a pattern of ostentatiously dropping of the “g” at
the end of many words. Commentators doing post mortems on his State of the
9

 State and Budget addresses to the legislature frequently derided his somewhat
affected speech patterns. They likewise derided his penchant for wearing what
he must have thought were ordinary guy clothes especially when he was away
from Springfield or Chicago. The Carhartt work jackets became his signature
apparel, and the butt of numerous jokes by political commentators. None of this
would have constituted more than just individual idiocrasies except for the fact
that it became a part of a public persona that helped critics to question the
honesty and genuineness of the governor, his ability to communicate with
average voters and just how closely his public image reflected his private life and
value commitments.
After winning in 2014 Governor Rauner wasted little time in effectively taking
over the Republican Party organization. The governor of Illinois is the head of the
executive branch and he has many jobs to fill, contracts to let, and ways he can
help his friends and punish his enemies. To these advantages Rauner also used his
personal wealth to engineer this take-over at the grassroots level in many
counties especially by supporting candidates sympathetic to his cause. In addition
he also threatened to put a candidate up against any recalcitrant legislators in the
next primary. This earned him considerable ill-will from some legislators, and
deep enmity from others, like State Senator Sam McCann who did get a
challenger in the 2016 Republican Primary in 2016 although he won. McCann then
ran against Rauner in the 2018 general election and he attacked Rauner
vigorously from the right in that race.
The most controversial part of Rauner’s record, and the element which caused
great controversy in his attempts to manage the state stemmed from his early
introduction of a set of revolutionary programmatic proposals for Illinois which he
termed “The Turnaround Agenda” (Leonard, May 2017). It originally included a
total of forty-four policy changes which he said were absolutely necessary to
address the state’s negative reputation, stabilize the budget, and put Illinois on
the right track to reform and prosperity. He promised that this plan would lead to
a healthy state government, one which would attract new business and industry
to Illinois, would stabilize its finances and stop the drain of people from the state.
These proposals included: instituting term limits for legislators, taking the power
over redistricting away from state legislators and giving it to an independent
10

 commission, getting control of public pensions, reducing the income tax and
property taxes, limiting the power of labor unions, particularly public employee
unions, by curtailing their collective bargaining rights, eliminating the prevailing
wage requirements on union contracts, creating “empowerment zones” at the
discretion of local governing authorities where union power would be diminished,
decreasing workers’ compensation rates in Illinois, and a number of other
ancillary legal and constitutional proposals, all of which proved to be highly
controversial. Rauner was vigorously opposed by the state’s labor movement,
and the unions who had supported Quinn only tepidly in 2014, mobilized and
poured millions of dollars into their campaign to defeat Rauner, and to elect new
legislators who would be supporters of union causes.
In fact, the Turnaround Agenda, and Rauner’s strict adherence to his own
priorities, most of which were rejected by the Democratically controlled General
Assembly, and then his veto of two consecutive state budgets passed by the
legislature produced gridlock in the making of state policy and significant
uncertainty, and at times outright chaos, in the management of state
government.
By the end of his term, Rauner had reduced his focus on the Turnaround Agenda
to a short list of major objectives, including term limits, property tax reductions,
and limits on labor unions. But by then, his political capital had been so depleted
that he was unable to get any of the original Turnaround Agenda enacted, and
Pritzker came into office with his own plan for the future of state government
which he could start implementing when he took office in January of 2019.
Rauner’s record in office, and Pritzker’s relationship to Speaker Madigan and both
of the candidates’ use of their own private money enabled them to fund an
extraordinarily divisive and mostly negative campaign for governor which
promised to become the most expensive in the history of the country at the
outset, a promise it lived up to in the end.
The Primaries
Before either candidate could face off in the general election, they had to win
their own party’s nomination. This turned out to be fairly easy for Pritzker and
much harder for Rauner than had been anticipated. When it was over it was
evident that Rauner’s close race and Pritzker’s surprisingly easy victory in the
11

 Democratic Primary strengthened one and injured the other for the general
election. A brief examination of the record of that primary race in March provides
some useful clues as to the outcome of the fall campaign.
As would ordinarily be expected for the out party, the Democratic primary field
was a large one, totaling six in all. However, only three of these were generally
considered to be major contenders. In addition to Pritzker, the three included
Daniel Biss, a young and well-regarded State Senator, from Evanston. Biss was
originally a math professor at the University of Chicago before he got into state
politics. He upheld the consistently and almost purely progressive end of the
party’s ideological continuum.
The other major primary candidate was Chris Kennedy, a real estate and
investments businessman from Chicago, who had managed the Chicago
Merchandise Mart for many years, and then more recently with his wife ran a
non-profit, Top Box Foods, which addressed hunger problems. He was a scion of
the dynastic Kennedy family, a nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of
Senator Robert F. Kennedy. He moved to Chicago to look after the family real
estate investments in the city especially the Merchandise Mart. His prior public
experience consisted of serving as the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the
University of Illinois, by appointment from Governor Pat Quinn in 2009. This was
a position which brought him into considerable contact with the media and with
opinion leaders in the field of higher education, although he did not have
significant prominence statewide.
So, when the campaign began, none of the three major candidates had a
statewide reputation and image, although each had some recognition and base in
Chicago. Only Dan Biss had held elective office when the campaign started. He
was the only one who had essentially paid some party and legislative dues and
had followed the recruitment requirements that had traditionally been the route
to the top in Illinois and other states with a strong party organization. Pritzker
and Kennedy followed the newer route to success requiring the candidate to have
significant personal or family resources, instead of prior public office, although
Kennedy had achieved some public profile by virtue of his appointed role as Chair
of the University of Illinois Board.

12

 Pritzker was considered to be the frontrunner from the first and he quickly drew
criticism from his opponents. There were various charges and negative stories
which the other candidates raised against Pritzker in the primary. One especially
harsh story was a tape recording of Pritzker talking with now disgraced,
impeached, and imprisoned former governor, Rod Blagojevich, where they
discussed the appointment of a successor to U. S. Senator Barack Obama after he
was elected to the presidency in 2008. The recording was made by the FBI who
had a wire-tap on Blagojevich. In it Pritzker was clearly heard using some less
than flattering language to discuss some of the prominent African-American
leaders who were being considered, and he ended by saying that Secretary of
State, Jesse White, would be the “most presentable”, of those being considered.
This produced a sensation in the media and charges of racism from Pritzker’s
opponents and some in the media.
Pritzker’s campaign fairly effectively counter-balanced these charges of racial bias
with an emphasis on his long record of philanthropy in Chicago, including the
establishment of a non-profit which specialized in the care and the daily feeding
of some eight thousand disadvantaged Chicago school children. He also pointed
to the energetic support of his running mate, Juliana Stratton, who was an
African-American State Representative from Chicago’s South Side and was well
regarded in Springfield as well in her community.
After a spirited battle, Pritzker took the primary with a surprisingly strong
showing. He won 45.1% of the total vote in the Democratic Primary. Biss came in
second at 26.7% and Kennedy a close third with 24.4%. The also-ran candidates
got the remaining 3.8%. Pritzker won a total of one hundred counties while Biss
won two counties, Champaign and McLean, both of which are home to major
state universities. Kennedy did not take a single county. (Illinois State Board of
Elections, March, 2018). See Appendix A.
Pritzker’s prior record and his running mate probably helped insulate him from
any significant bleeding away of support in the predominantly black wards in
Chicago, and the primary results indicated that Pritzker had done well with black
voters. None of the negative charges raised against Pritzker by his primary
opponents seemed to have undercut his strong support from the party base. This

13

 hard-fought primary campaign and convincing victory over two significant
candidates put Pritzker in a strong position for the general election.
Governor Rauner, on the other hand, had an unexpectedly vigorous challenge and
weak showing in the primary which then dogged him into the general election.
His opponent, Jeanne Ives, was a very hard line conservative state representative
from Wheaton, a Chicago suburb, who had been a harsh critic of the governor.
She was especially known for her hard right rhetoric and for scorched earth
tactics in the legislature. This rigid and confrontational approach led her to be a
darling of the state’s most conservative media outlets but it did not endear her to
her colleagues in the General Assembly or to Governor Rauner.
Many on the right were especially outraged by the governor’s having signed a bill
that offered protection for gay people to marry and another which guaranteed
state subsidy for Medicaid payments for abortions, both of which Ives stridently
opposed. So, she had a built-in constituency in the Republican Primary, and one
which empowered her with support from many grassroots conservatives in the
party.
All of this worked to the benefit of Ives, the challenger, who took 48.5% of the
Republican primary vote to 51.5% for Rauner. This unexpectedly strong showing
for Ives, and weak showing for the incumbent governor, clearly indicated that
Rauner was in trouble for the general election. Rauner won a total of sixty-three
counties, well-distributed across the state, while Ives prevailed in thirty-nine
counties. Rauner won Cook and Lake Counties in Northeastern Illinois and his
other counties were well-distributed across the state. Ives, however, took four of
the five Collar Counties, McHenry, Kane, DuPage and Will, which used to be the
heartland of the Republican Party. She also did well in a smattering of counties in
northern and western Illinois, but the largest number of counties she won was in
central and southern Illinois.
These predominantly rural downstate counties are becoming the new base for
the Republican Party in Illinois. Ives started with virtually no name recognition
outside her suburban Chicago legislative district and her campaign was
dramatically under-funded compared to Rauner’s. When the votes were counted
her strong showing, challenging a first-term incumbent governor with lots of

14

 advantages and resources, indicated that Rauner had real problems within his
Republican Party base. See Appendix B.
In addition, while Ives begrudgingly conceded defeat, she pointedly refused to
endorse the governor specifically, although she rather generically said that she
was a Republican and would support the party ticket. In this disappointing
outcome for the governor, the primary results showed that he had been wounded
by the primary, and by his record of the last four years, and that those wounds
would be very hard to heal for the general election.
The General Election
The general election was fought on what had already become familiar grounds in
the primary. Pritzker was accused of being a lackey of Speaker of the House Mike
Madigan and of having colluded with former governor Rod Blagojevich to sell
Obama’s U. S. Senate seat. He and his wife also looked bad when a story surfaced
explaining how the Pritzkers had removed the toilets from a second downtown
mansion they owned to claim a property tax break on grounds that the building
was then uninhabitable. Implicit in these charges, and sometimes explicitly as the
campaign intensified in the fall and the negative ads took over the air wars, was
the charge that Pritzker was corrupt (via his connection to Madigan and other
Cook County politicians) and a racist (via the connection to Blagojevich). In fact
Governor Rauner’s first negative attack ads came up in the spring and were
essentially a rerun of the already familiar recorded replay of Pritzker’s telephone
conversation with Blagojevich regarding who would be the best candidate to
appoint to the senate seat.
Pritzker’s first advertisements also came up early in the spring and featured a
biographical theme introducing the general public to who the candidate was, how
his family, especially his mother had influenced him, what he had accomplished as
a philanthropist, and what issues he planned to advocate for Illinois. These first
ads were all positive and were addressed to the fact that Pritzker was the
challenger, was still unknown to the voters, and was in effect a blank slate for
many voters since he had not run for office before, had little state-wide image
and no public record to defend.
Soon enough, however, the Pritzker ads also turned negative and trained fire on
Rauner and his record and his shortcomings as governor. The critique of the
15

 governor’s record was a scathing one, emphasizing that he had presided over a
government that for two of his four years in office had failed to produce a state
budget causing grave harm to the operation of the government and especially to
the state’s social service delivery structure and the state universities and
community colleges. This theme of mismanagement of the government was laid
directly at Rauner’s door steps and was remarkably similar to the points he had
made against Pat Quinn four years previously.
There were tens of millions spent early in the race and then a total of well over
two hundred million dollars spent by these two super rich candidates. This lavish
spending bought hundreds of hours of air time and millions of printed and posted
images and word messages sent out from both camps by the time it was all over.
In the end it was hard to decipher just what difference all the air wars had made.
Since both candidates could effectively spend as much as they chose, and they
roughly matched each other in the advertising bought, they probably reached a
point of diminishing returns in paid and free messages and advertising well before
the campaign ended. Since they were roughly equal in the air wars other factors,
especially party identification and the voters’ feelings about the state of the state
and who was to blame for the negatives and who had the best possibilities for
dealing with the very real problems Illinois faced for the future probably drove
the final election results. However, the money was crucial in carrying the message
of both candidates.
The Poll Results
This race was almost unique in Illinois in that the published public opinion polls
showed unanimously that Pritzker led by a wide margin from the beginning to the
end of this race. There was an early consensus among the pollsters and those
who follow them closely that Pritzker was highly likely to win. That view never
changed. The only real question was by how much and whether Rauner could
close the gap by November 6th. The national rating experts put the Illinois race at
the top of all their lists of states where the governorship was likely to switch
parties, and Rauner was rated as the GOP’s most vulnerable governor.
The Simon poll was conducted the last week of September, five weeks before the
November 6th election. Among likely voters, 49% statewide said that they
intended to vote for Pritzker, and 27% said they would vote for Rauner. This poll
16

 showed a large 22 percentage point gap between the two candidates with 17%
undecided. In the media coverage of the poll the authors stated that it would be
difficult for Rauner to close a gap that wide. The extent of Rauner’s problem and
the pervasiveness of Pritzker’s lead is indicated by the following summary taken
from the press release for the poll.
Pritzker led in Chicago by 65 percent to 22 percent and the five suburban
Collar Counties by 53 percent to 23 percent. Pritzker and Rauner were
essentially tied downstate with Pritzker at 35 percent and Rauner at 34
percent. Pritzker enjoyed an 81 percent to 6 percent lead among
Democrats while Rauner took a 67 percent to 6 percent lead among
Republican voters. McCann was taking 7 percent among Republican voters
while Jackson garnered 6 percent among Republicans (Jackson, Leonard,
and Shaw, October 2, 2018).
This was an almost unprecedented lead for a Democratic candidate for governor
in the Collar Counties and it indicated that Rauner was in grave danger with a
virtual tie for the two candidates Downstate, a region where the Republicans are
ordinarily dominant. In addition the Simon poll showed that there was a marked
gender gap in the returns with women being much more likely to vote for Pritzker
than male respondents. Male voters favored Pritzker by 45% to 31% whereas
female voters favored Pritzker by 54% to 22%. In addition, there was also a clear
correlation with income wherein the more educated the respondents the more
probable their vote was to go to Pritzker. Likely voters with the lowest
educational levels favored Pritzker by a 41 to 32% margin, a nine point lead, but
those with a college degree preferred Pritzker to Rauner by 53% to 24%, a 29
point lead.
The authors did warn that the race was likely to tighten up somewhat since
Rauner was at that point only garnering two-thirds of the Republican partisans’
vote intentions compared to over eighty percent among Democratic partisans in
their intentions to vote for Pritzker (Jackson, Leonard, and Shaw, October 2,
2018). Ordinarily the partisans ultimately “go home” to their chosen party as the
race nears its end, and the indications are that this also happened with the
Republicans in this race, although not in numbers adequate to save Rauner.

17

 The General Election Results
As Table 1 indicates, in the final analysis Illinois voters chose the challenger by a
massive majority of 713,005 votes or 54.5 % to 38.8 %, a 15.7 percentage point
edge. This Pritzker victory was much larger than Rauner’s 4% margin over Quinn
in 2014. (Jackson, 2015; Jackson, 2011). Pritzker only carried sixteen counties;
however, the sixteen counties included eight of the ten largest counties in Illinois.
Most importantly, Pritzker took Cook by a 71.9% to 24.3 % margin and took four
of the five Collar Counties by a comfortable margin. Of the Collar Counties Rauner
carried only the exurban Republican strong hold of McHenry by a 10.8 point
margin. Rauner carried the other 85 counties, and most of downstate, but he only
carried Sangamon (Springfield), McLean (Bloomington-Normal) and Madison
(Metro-East St. Louis) among the state’s largest counties (Illinois State Board of
Elections, December, 2018). See Appendix D.
Overall these results clearly provided an overwhelming margin of victory for the
Democratic challenger, J. B. Pritzker. Illinois repudiated the incumbent in 2014
and voted for change to a new man and a different party and in 2018 they did the
same thing in reverse. In both case the incumbent’s record of governing, or
failing to govern successfully, was the major brief against him and delivered the
office to a new incumbent who promised to make the government function again.
Table 1
2018 Illinois Governor Race by Geographic Region
Region

Rauner

Pritzker

Region Total Votes

% of Votes

Cook County

426,196

1,262,334

1,756,583

38.63

Collars

523,428

558,394

1,148,366

25.25

168,347
109,287
77,289
60,646
107,859

176,556
128,603
81,310
48,633
123,292

816,127

659,018

1,642,708

36.12

(1) DuPage
(2) Lake
(3) Kane
(4) McHenry
(5) Will
Downstate

18

 Total State

1,765,751

2,479,746

4,547,657

100.0

Note: All data taken from Illinois State Board of Elections website.
The primary results had raised the warning flag for Rauner. The fact that Ives
carried thirty-nine counties, four of which were Collar Counties, and took 48.5%
of the total vote indicated that the governor had real problems within his own
party. When Ives then refused to clearly endorse the governor and continued to
keep up a steady drumbeat of negative comments about him during the general
election campaign, the governor’s weaknesses and troubles within Republican
ranks were on full display. In its public face Governor Rauner made a spirited
campaign of it, spending tens of millions on television and social media and
traveling the state extensively. He also mounted a vigorous defense of his record
although he consistently blamed Speaker Madigan for his inability to get more
done. However, it was a record that too many voters had already made up their
minds about and in the final analysis, Rauner’s campaign was too little, too late to
overcome his deficits from the previous four years.
After the election Rauner revealed to a Chicago television reporter that he had
actively recruited at least four other people to take his place at the head of the
ticket offering to drop out in their favor and to help fund their campaign. One of
those was the then-Republican nominee for the Attorney General race, which is
discussed below. This was an offer which was made in August when the
campaigns had already been in full swing since the March primaries. His lack of
appreciation for the chaos this would have caused in the race, and the grave
disservice this abdication would have done to the Republican Party was an
additional mark of his almost total inability to grasp the basic rudiments of state
politics although he had been governor for almost four years at that time (Miller,
December 14, 2018).
In addition to their losses in the governor’s race, the Republicans also failed to
win any of the constitutional offices and they lost ground in the General
Assembly. Some of the losses the Republican incurred could be attributed to J. B.
Pritzker running so well at the top of the ticket and to the muscular financial
strength he brought to the down ballot races.
Not only did Pritzker spend lavishly on his own campaign, he also subsidized a
number of other Democrats running for other offices in the state. He built a
19

 network of campaign offices throughout the state that became the center of his
effort in that county or region and became an asset for other Democrats running
on his ticket. In this party network building he took a page from Rauner’s 2014
playbook and expanded it significantly in 2018. The fact that Pritzker could selffund his governor’s race meant that this freed up the state party, under Speaker
Madigan, to raise and spend millions of dollars on races for the General Assembly.
In the final analysis this spreading of the playing field statewide paid handsome
dividends for the Democratic Party.
The Democrats’ control of the house expanded to a supermajority of 74
Democrats compared to 44 Republicans and they controlled the Senate by a 40 to
19 margin. Thus, both Speaker Madigan who was the target of thousands of
attack ads from the Republicans actually saw his margin of control increase as a
result of the 2018 outcome, and Senate President Cullerton, who stayed out of
the spotlight, also had their majorities increase. Illinois entered a new era of
Unified Government on the back of the blue wave which engulfed most of the
state on November 6th despite the very mixed outcomes which produced Divided
Government nationally.
The ground war could also be another reason Pritzker and the Democrats won so
handily. Pritzker established an extensive network of personal campaign
organizations all across Illinois. Unlike other Democrats who previously ran for
governor or statewide office, Pritzker did not concentrate his attentions on Cook
and the Collar Counties to the exclusion of the others. He had a far-flung field
organization at the county level, and he also worked with the local county and city
party organizations to build up the entire ticket. The result was a well-integrated
statewide campaign closely coordinated with Democrats running for legislative
seats which then produced positive results for the entire party.
The Attorney General Race
Among the constitutional offices, the only other real race was for Attorney
General. As in many other states the Attorney General position in Illinois is a
political prize, an office with real powers which provide the holder with statewide
prominence and it is often a spring board to seeking higher office. The position
had been held for four terms, sixteen years, by Attorney General Lisa Madigan.
She had been a high profile and activist Attorney General who made a name for
20

 herself by carving out territory in consumer protection, advocacy and protection
for children and the elderly, and advocacy for women’s rights.
In the past two election cycles Madigan was mentioned frequently as a very
obvious possible candidate for governor. She encouraged that speculation by
openly toying with the possibility of running in 2014, but in the end pulled back
from the race. She was not only prominent in her own right and because of her
successful record in office, but Madigan was also the daughter of the Speaker of
the House, Mike Madigan. Indeed she faced some challenges in carving out an
image and record independent of his pervasive influence and reputation. This
conflation of the two roles and reputations was often cited as a significant factor
in her decision to pass on the governor’s contest in 2014. It was therefore
something of a surprise and even a political shock when she announced that she
was not going to run for Attorney General again in the 2018 race, and that she
would withdraw from politics for a time.
This unexpected opening of a prized office near the top set off a scramble in both
parties to be Madigan’s replacement. There were eight candidates in the
Democratic Primary including State Senator Kwame Raoul, of Chicago and most
notably former governor, Pat Quinn, who was trying to make a comeback after
losing to Rauner in 2014. In 2004 Raoul won the Illinois State Senate seat in a
district including part of the downtown loop and near south side part of Chicago
being vacated by Barack Obama when Obama was elected to the U. S. Senate.
Raoul was a serious leader in that part of Chicago and drew some immediate
comparisons with Obama, comparisons which he encouraged, although he had
little statewide prominence and presence.
Raoul was a graduate of DePaul University and the Chicago-Kent College of Law.
He was the son of Haitian immigrants and thus a first generation American. Not
surprisingly he vigorously opposed the Trump Administration’s attempts to
withhold federal funds to cities, like Chicago, which styled themselves as
sanctuary cities. He also opposed many other Trump Administration policies and
promised to be a persistent critic of the president including filing law suits against
the enforcement of Trump Administration policies if he became Attorney General.
Raoul ran on a platform of increased transparency for government agencies and
providing more funds for and enforcement of the FOIA laws and the Illinois Open
21

 Meetings Act. He also promised increased protections for organized labor and a
vigorous defense of their rights. Raoul had been an advocate for children and
promised more protections for them.
On the Republican side, the number was smaller, only two candidates, and the
Republican candidates being not so prominent likely indicated the thinner bench
strength of the statewide Republican Party. Erika Harold, an attorney in private
practice in Champaign, was generally considered to be the favorite. She had
attained some political notice by running unsuccessfully against Representative
Rodney Davis in the 2014 Republican Primary for the 13th congressional district.
She was also famous in her earlier life from being crowned Miss Illinois in 2002
and Miss America in 2003. That experience would not have been very relevant
except for the fact that in her answer to a question from the Miss America
contest judges she opposed the placement of foster children in a home with same
sex parents. Although Harold denied that this answer fairly represented her
current view this earlier interview was dug up and became a public controversy
and a problem for Harold in the general election. Harold also took some pains to
separate herself from President Trump; however, she could not avoid some
association with Governor Rauner since he contributed significant sums to her
campaign and she appeared with him during the campaign on several occasions.
Harold ran on a platform of supporting anti-bullying programs in schools, and a
promise to root out public corruption. She proposed to do this with enhanced
investigatory powers for the Attorney General including the right to empanel a
statewide Grand Jury and increased subpoena powers. She also argued that state
law should be changed to prohibit legislators from appearing as legal
representatives in property tax appeals cases (which was a shot at Speaker
Madigan and his private law practice).
As Table 2 indicates, Raoul won this one handily by 54.7% to 42.7% or a 12 point
margin in the popular vote. Raoul fashioned a victory on the Democratic Party’s
familiar base in the larger cities and suburbs. He won a total of only 11 counties,
five fewer (Kendall, Winnebago, Knox, Peoria, and Fulton) than Pritzker won, but
the counties Raoul won were most of the large counties that any Democrat needs
to win statewide. Most notably, the counties where Raoul was victorious
included all of the Collar Counties, except for far exurban McHenry. He
22

 compensated for this with a victory in DeKalb County which is the home of
Northern Illinois University. Raoul achieved an overwhelming victory in Chicago
and Cook County by a 72.1% to 25.7% margin. See also Appendix D.

Table 2
2018 Illinois Attorney General Race by Geographic Region
Region
Cook County

Harold
452,625

Raoul
1,268,742

539,249

581,434

171,711
109,916
80,217
61,299
116,106

184,917
134,919
85,027
51,707
124,864

Downstate

952,268

638,150

Total State

1,944,142

2,488,326

Collars
(1) DuPage
(2) Lake
(3) Kane
(4) McHenry
(5) Will

Note: All data taken from the Illinois State Board of Elections website
Starting with his northeastern Illinois base, Raoul then added Rock Island County,
in northwestern Illinois, Champaign County in central Illinois, St. Clair County in
the Metro-East St. Louis area, and Democratic strongholds, Jackson and Alexander
Counties in southern Illinois (See Appendix D).
Harold took all the rest and on geography she won a decided victory of 91
counties. Downstate Harold beat Raoul by 314,118 votes. She actually won five
more counties statewide than Governor Rauner did. If this were a national race
for the United States Senate, or the Electoral College, Harold would have won in a
red landslide, as the map in Appendix D shows so graphically. But, of course, it is
ultimately people, not geography which counts in statewide elections. Even on
the counting of individual voters measure, however, Harold did reasonably well
23

 since she won 1,944,142 total votes statewide, which was 178,391 more than
Rauner won. This strong showing, in the face of a bad year for Republicans in
Illinois, means that Harold will continue to be watched as a potential Republican
candidate for future statewide races. In a party which seems to not have many
prominent statewide leaders, and even fewer women or minority leaders Erika
Harold will undoubtedly be a part of the political mix for the Republicans in the
near future.
The 2014 Results Compared to the 2018 Results
It is useful to compare the 2014 and 2018 statewide results for the governor’s
race. This comparison is especially interesting in the case of Bruce Rauner who
was a candidate in both races; however, he was the challenger in 2014 and the
incumbent in 2018. In a fundamental sense, the 2018 election was a referendum
on Rauner as governor in 2014 just as it had been a referendum on Pat Quinn in
2014.
As the research in this series of papers has documented previously, in 2014
Rauner enjoyed a sweeping victory from the perspective of geography, winning
101 of the state’s 102 counties (Jackson, January, 2015). Quinn took only Cook
County but the fairly narrow margin of less than four percent in the popular vote
indicated that Quinn, while losing, had done reasonably well in the other big
counties. Rauner beat Quinn by a 142,284 total vote margin, i.e. 1,823,627 to
1,681,343 (Illinois State Board of Elections, 2014). The key to Quinn’s loss was
that his vote totals slipped in comparison with his first election in 2010 despite
the advantages of being the incumbent. Support for Quinn actually declined by
63,876 votes in his 2014 re-election race compared to his 2010 total which was
his first bid to be re-elected governor in his own right (Jackson, January, 2015, 12).
Quinn’s mentor, Dan Walker in 1976 was the last Illinois governor who failed to
gain re-election when he chose to seek a second term, although Walker was
defeated in the Democratic primary. Of course, in 2018 Bruce Rauner became the
third name on that list.
Quinn took 66% of the two party vote in Cook in 2014, but he had won 69.24% of
the two party vote in Cook in 2010. Rauner swept all the rest with 61% in the
Collar Counties and 64% Downstate. The results of Quinn’s two races for
governor showed just how extremely polarized the state of Illinois had become
24

 since he carried a total of only four counties in 2010 (Cook, St. Clair, Jackson, and
Alexander) and only one in 2014. Rauner’s 2014 victory also showed that a
Republican can win in Illinois, a reliably blue state in presidential politics, but it
takes a good candidate, or a wounded Democrat running, or a combination of
both in 2014 for that to happen.
Pritzker’s overwhelming victory in 2018 showed what would happen when a
strong Democratic candidate could accomplish statewide when he mobilized the
Democratic base effectively, appealed to the moderates and independents who
might only lean toward the Democrats, and convinced a modicum of Republicans
to cross-over to support him. Pritzker’s victory in 2018 was accomplished with a
798,403 net vote increase over Pat Quinn’s 2014 loss total. Rauner, by contrast,
lost ground in 2018 when he garnered 1,765,752 total votes compared to
1,823,627, for a net decline of 57,876 votes in four years. Being the incumbent in
2018 hurt rather than helped Rauner, just as it had done for Quinn in 2014.
Pritzker’s victory also showed especially graphically the power of the Collar
Counties and how deeply the Democratic inroads now extended into suburban
northeastern Illinois. The suburbs, especially those close in to the city had become
increasingly diverse and as that trend grew, the fortunes of Democratic
candidates increased steadily. This change was also probably due to key voting
groups, especially suburban women and well-educated voters, both men and
women, reacting negatively to both Rauner and Donald Trump although suburban
women voters had been predominantly moderate Republicans up until recently.
This point will be discussed more extensively in the conclusion.
These results cannot be good news for the Republicans in the near term in Illinois,
and they do not bode well for the Republicans nationally in the long term,
although nationally the Republicans can certainly win again, and win with Trump
in 2020, if he runs for a second term, given the distribution of his base throughout
the nation in a pattern that creates a Republican advantage in the electoral
college. As was the case in 2016 the crucial states will be Wisconsin, Michigan,
Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Those are states which traditionally go Democratic in
presidential elections (except for Ohio which is usually a toss-up), but which
Trump won in 2016, states which sealed his victory. If he could win all or even
most of those states again Trump could quite plausibly win again in 2020 with
25

 another Electoral College victory coupled with a popular vote loss. That election’s
results will largely depend on what the Democrats do in their upcoming
nominations battle, what strategic plan they adopt, who wins their nomination,
and the case they make for their candidate’s election.
The inability to heal the primary wounds and to unite the party to provide an
enthusiastic base from which to fight the general election was ultimately the key
to Governor Rauner’s demise. He needed the right wing of his party in the
general election since they were newly energized by Jeanne Ives at the state level
and Donald Trump at the national level although they had never been nearly a
majority in the Republican Party in Illinois. Because the Republicans were the
minority party overall in the state Rauner also needed the more moderate middle
of the Republican Party, which had historically been the backbone of the state
party and he needed to add a modicum of support from true Independents and at
least a small percentage of Democrats to win. Those were the keys to his 2014
victory.
Undoubtedly the governor and his advisers understood this strategic challenge;
however, they were never able to land on a strategy that would appeal to both
wings and Rauner’s campaign seemed to vacillate between appealing to first one
horn and then the other of this dilemma. Indeed that was the way he had
governed as well, and his priorities and the people closest to him on his staff
frequently shifted back and forth between conservative and moderate or
pragmatic depending on the issue and the circumstances. This shift in direction
and changes in personnel at the top often came with head spinning rapidity.
Nothing was so symptomatic of Rauner’s inability to make up his mind about his
direction and his basic loyalties as the summer 2017 appointment of several high
level officials from the very conservative Illinois Policy Institute to his Chief of
Staff and Chief Spokesperson positions. These new staffers brought in a team
from their previous employment. In the brief interlude of one month the Illinois
Policy Institute team was in and then out replaced by somewhat more pragmatic
people but the governor’s fundamental commitments were still not completely
clear (O’Connor, September 17, 2018).
Rauner’s record in office, included his original strong advocacy for his
controversial Turnaround Agenda which he later pared down to only four major
26

 objectives which he considered to be the foundation, but the governor also could
not get the legislature to enact even the pared down proposals. This policy failure
coupled with the two year budgetary stalemate and all the damage it caused, and
bills he had signed and decisions he had made as governor which angered both
the conservative base in his party while at the same time not systematically giving
the traditional moderate wing something to be proud of were fatal drags on
Rauner’s reelection bid. He did not have many loyal friends in the Illinois General
Assembly, even among the Republican members. He went into the campaign with
major problems in trying to govern, and a job approval rating that was
consistently about twenty points underwater. He was never able to conceive and
execute a consistent strategic plan to overcome the negatives he had
accumulated over the almost four previous years.
The Influence of National Politics on State and Local Elections
Added to all those problems was the failure of the Rauner campaign to deal
effectively with the ever-present specter of President Trump dominating the
national scene. Trump’s presence was felt in every high profile race for governor
and the congress across the country and extended all the way down to the races
for the state legislature and even county offices. This challenge for Rauner was
made more difficult initially by the fact that the governor was running in a state
that had gone for Hillary Clinton by 55.8% to 38.8%, a healthy 17 point margin in
2016 and a state where the president’s job approval was also anemic in 2018.
Trump was definitely an anchor around Rauner’s neck in the general election, and
he could not seem to decide whether to embrace it or try to toss it off. He
vacillated in trying to keep a discreet distance and not comment about Trump
during most of the campaign only to publicly endorse Trump somewhat tepidly
near the end.
This eleventh hour conversion to Trump only solidified the potential for Rauner
suffering the worst of both sides of the conundrum. Being associated with Trump
further alienated the moderate and independent voters, and especially the better
educated women in Cook and the Collar Counties and many of the bigger cities
Downstate. It probably helped Rauner carry the rural and smaller counties
Downstate, where Trump’s base was stronger, but Rauner likely would have
carried those counties anyway. More importantly, no candidate can win Illinois
27

 with those counties alone, especially while getting clobbered in the suburbs and
the larger cities.
The results of the Illinois general election provided a template for many of the
recent trends in American politics. While Illinois is a solidly Democratic state in
presidential politics, it is still a bellwether state overall in terms of demographic
and economic mega-trends and the polarization that divides the nation so deeply
(Jackson, 2004; Jackson, January, 2011; Jackson, Leonard and Dietz, 2016). The
state’s geographical divisions, with the big city of Chicago, and its surrounding and
heavily populated suburbs are typical of urban America today (Bishop, 2008;
Gelman, 2008; Levendusky, 2010). Illinois’s vast geographical expanse of the
remaining ninety-six counties, contains a diverse economy based traditionally in
agriculture and evolving now with increasing rapidly in the service sector of the
economy. Statewide these geographic divisions contain within them all the socioeconomic, racial, religious, partisan, and ideological divisions that mark the United
States as we are about to enter the third decade of the 21st Century.
These divisions were evident well before the 2016 elections; however, they were
exacerbated as never before by the tenor of the 2018 campaign. These divisive
themes were reinforced by the endless negative ads and charges and countercharges on television, the social media, and in the content of the candidates’
speeches. Donald Trump won in 2016 by playing on a narrative of deepening
national peril with constant threat from the outside world and decay at home.
This external threat was most vividly represented by the first promise he made
when announcing for the presidency which was to build a physical wall between
the United States and Mexico in order to keep unwanted immigrants out, a
promise which led to a partial shut-down of the federal government starting at
the end of 2018 and extending into 2019, the longest in history.
In 2016 Trump won the presidential election by a divided outcome which featured
a comfortable electoral margin of 306 to 232 while Hillary Clinton beat him by
almost three million popular votes. This was the second time this century when
this divided outcome marred the presidential election. Such divided outcomes
are much more likely in the future as both parties play to their base and then rely
on trying to hold down the vote for their opponents by mounting the most
negative campaign possible, hoping to discourage and dispirit the opponent’s
28

 base and the small margin of independents and undecided voters who might be
persuadable.
Trump’s first two years in office solidified and celebrated this divisiveness and
boiling level of toxicity in American politics. He tried to govern as he had
campaigned, appealing to and depending only on his loyal base. In this he took
the opposite tack from Rauner’s vacillations back and forth regarding the
committed base in Illinois. Trump’s divisive approach made it almost impossible
for the Republicans to get much done in the making of public policy if it required
passing laws since the Republicans, although the nominal majority in the
Congress, were deeply divided internally and hamstrung by the ever-present
former Tea Party faction which had been re-labeled as the Freedom Caucus. The
Republicans’ major accomplishment in the legislative realm was getting the 2017
tax cuts done and two Supreme Court nominees confirmed after a contentious
and destructive battle over the second one. The Republicans had hoped to make
the tax cuts the center-piece of their 2018 campaign narrative, touting it and its
benefits in helping stimulate a booming economy as a platform that their
candidates for the U. S. House, Senate, and down-ballot candidates in governor
and state legislative races could also stand on. Trump made no efforts to reach
out to the Democrats and to those who did not support him in 2016, except to
hammer them again and again with tweets and insults.
At the end of the 2018 campaign Trump reverted to his original form and
launched an intensive personal campaign during the last month when he restarted the public rallies held in large venues like athletic and entertainment
stadiums and airport hangars. The enthusiastic Trump supporters flocked to
those places to hear their champion sound the familiar attacks on the opposition.
He used the twin themes of fear of the immigrant caravan and loathing for the
Democrats over the way they had handled the Kavanaugh hearings and, by
extension, their alleged assault on American men in general to fire up the base.
Trump’s ire turned frequently toward the media, who were always there in the
crowd dutifully recording and reporting every word, with the president frequently
again belittling individual reporters and their networks by name, and raising his
then familiar “enemy of the people” refrain against the press. The now
dependable responses of “lock her up” and “build the wall” chants coming from

29

 the enthusiastic crowd signaled that the loyal base was back in the fold and ready
to do battle with the enemy.
Contrary to the well-known aphorism attributed to former Speaker of the House,
Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neil, all of American politics is no longer local. In fact one
could say that almost all politics is now national, driven by the national leaders,
especially the president and the congressional leaders, the mass media, and the
competing narratives of all these major actors (Cf. Jacobson, 2018, 165-188).
The congressional races, the contests for governor and control of the state houses
and the court houses are all dominated by those national figures and the issues
they put onto the political agenda. Those stories are now filtered through partisan
lens which color how most voters will react at the ballot box and which
candidates will win. The television and social media ads feature the faces and
names of Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Maxine Waters, Chuck Schumer, Mitch
McConnell, and Donald Trump as surrogates for whatever candidate is being
attacked. Those state and local contests play out in the context of a nation that is
deeply divided by not only partisanship, but also ideology, issues, race, religion,
geography, class, and gender.
The realignment of the 1970s through the beginning of the 21st Century was
driven by these national issues and personalities. Thus, southern Illinois, for
example, which was once a bastion of strength for the Democratic Party has
almost completely realigned to dependable support for Republican candidates
from the White House to the court house, with only Jackson and Alexander
Counties as exceptions in the deep south and St. Clair County in the Metro-East
area. These transitions in southern Illinois are quite typical of much of the rural
Midwest, and almost all of the South, as formerly Democratic districts
transitioned out of the Democratic Party and became the new bedrock for the
Republican Party. The old “Blue Dog” Democrats who could be elected in rural
and southern districts, and the liberal to moderate Republicans of the Northeast
and parts of the Midwest are now almost extinct, and the middle has largely
disappeared from both parties.
While the transition in the opposite direction is not nearly as complete in the
suburbs, it is well underway and was a key to the Democrats taking control of the
U. S. House in the 2018 elections. In Illinois, the five collar counties, and
30

 especially DuPage County used to be the backbone of the Republican Party and
provided most of its leadership echelon. The suburbs are not as homogeneous as
much of rural Illinois and as they have become more diverse, Democrats are
increasingly winning there too as the results of this election demonstrate.
The national battle to energize the base came home to Illinois in an October 27th
rally at the Southern Illinois airport located between Murphysboro and
Carbondale when the president appeared before another cheering crowd
variously estimated to be between eight and ten thousand strong. He was in
town to campaign for Congressman Mike Bost, a two term Republican who was
fighting a close battle with his Democratic opponent, Brendan Kelly, in a district
which had been dependably Democratic since World War II until Bost won it in
the red wave election of 2014.
After a brief introductory prelude when Trump read dutifully from the
teleprompter citing the nation’s horror at the mass killings of eleven worshippers
at the Squirrel Hill Synagogue in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, which had occurred just
over twenty-four hours earlier, he then went off the script to riff on all the
familiar attacks directed against those who oppose him. The crowd responded
with an enthusiastic affirmation of the president’s continuing ability to hit a nerve
with them. The Illinois base was back in the fold and charged up to turn out for
the election which was then only ten days ahead.
This presidential visit is particularly relevant to this paper on the governor’s race
in Illinois because it also directly involved Bruce Rauner who was by then locked in
a desperate last ditch effort to save his lease on the office. After all he was the
sitting governor of Illinois and had an invitation to attend the Jackson County
campaign rally. He rode down from Springfield on his Harley-Davidson
motorcycle, replete with his Harley colors and multiple lapel pins on his jacket.
He also had on a “Back the Blue” ball cap instead of the famous “Make America
Great Again” red ball caps that were the uniform of the day at Trump rallies.
Rauner was backstage while Trump introduced and then warmly endorsed Mike
Bost and called him to the stage for a few words. Trump then called out and
introduced other incumbents, including Rodney Davis from the neighboring 13th
Congressional District, a race which he ultimately won over a woman challenger,
Betsey Dirksen Londrigan by 50.4% to 49.6%, an unusually narrow margin. Trump
31

 next introduced Representative Randy Hultgren from the 14th District who was
fighting for his political life in a district located in the northwestern suburbs of
Chicago, some three hundred miles away, in a long-time Republican stronghold,
which was the home of earlier Republican power-houses, former Speaker of the
House, Denny Hastert and long serving congressman, Henry Hyde. This is a race
which Hultgren ultimately lost to an African-American woman, Lauren
Underwood, who epitomized what happened in many House races where
Democrats prevailed in purple and even red districts because of the suburban and
women’s vote. In spite of Trump’s endorsement, Underwood upset the
incumbent, Hultgren, by a decisive 52.5% to 47.5% margin.
After these introductions the President then went on with his speech where
among other topics he extolled the many good qualities of the Republican
candidate for governor of California and predicted a victory for him. Trump
inexplicitly and probably deliberately failed to mention Illinois’s own incumbent
governor, Bruce Rauner, who had been there behind the scene, but was never
publically introduced. It appeared that Trump was exacting revenge for Rauner’s
earlier reluctance to embrace him and Rauner’s eleventh-hour conversion was
too little too late to placate the president.
This incident seemed to be an omen for how the Rauner campaign would finish
and it seemed emblematic of his failure to win the enthusiastic loyalty of either
the hard right Jeanne Ives wing of the party or the more pragmatic long time
dominant wing of more moderate Republicans like Jim Edgar, George Ryan and
Jim Thompson.
Conclusion
Two weeks later when the race had ended and as the results came in, Bruce
Rauner conceded to J. B. Pritzker less than an hour into the vote count. The
Rauner era was over in Illinois and with it the divided government he had brought
to the state was drawing to a close. J. B. Pritzker and the Democrats won a
resounding statewide victory and the ball was then in their court to see whether
they could govern and what plans they could create and transform into policy
designed to address the very real problems which have mounted in the State of
Illinois since the turn of the 21st Century.

32

 Trump went back to the White House after his stop-over in southern Illinois only
to return to Cape Girardeau, Missouri on Monday the day before the election for
the very last mass rally of the 2018 campaign which was held at 10 p. m. on behalf
of Josh Hawley who was challenging incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill. The
rally and Trump’s strategic decision to mount a vigorous appeal to the base in
order to motivate them to turn out in the numbers that the Democrats were
already showing in the early polls worked in Missouri and North Dakota and most
other red states and Congressional districts. However, even in some Senate races
where Trump had won by large margins in 2016, like Montana and West Virginia,
where the Republican challengers had the advantage of attacking the Democratic
incumbents by linking them to their national leaders, the recourse to the base
was not enough and Jon Tester and Joe Manchin prevailed in those states. It did
work in the razor thin victory of Governor Rick Scott over incumbent Democrat,
Senator Bill Nelson, in the crucial battle-ground state of Florida. The Senate
campaign finished finally after the November 27th general election in Mississippi
with a 53 to 47 Republican majority, a pick-up of two senate seats, which gave the
Republicans and Trump their most important victory in the 2018 season.
Then there was the House races and when the smoke had all settled and the last
ballots were counted, the Democrats picked up a net of 40 seats, while another
contested seat in North Carolina remained unsettled. They also took a net gain of
seven governorships, among them the one in Illinois, 336 state legislative seats,
and six state legislative bodies flipped from Republican control to Democratic
control. The Democrats won the popular vote by 9 percentage nationwide
according to Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight. They claimed victory, but were initially
drowned out by the President who also proclaimed a famous victory for the
Republicans based on the Senate results. He then moved on quickly to other
subjects where the president can dominate the nation’s discourse on any
particular day and win the twenty-four hour news cycle with a well-aimed tweet.
However, the president could not avoid the reality of divided government starting
in January where the Democrats would once again control the House and Nancy
Pelosi would again be the Speaker. Many of the Democratic candidates had run
and won on the pledge to use the power of the Congress to “take care to see that
the laws are faithfully executed” in the language of the constitution via their
power to investigate the president and the executive branch. There was much
33

 talk about a long list of Trump’s alleged sins of omission and commission that
various Democrats believed were worthy of investigation by House Committees
newly under the control of their party. They list included Trump’s tax returns, his
association, if any, with the Russians before and during the 2016 campaign, his
alleged violation of the emoluments clause of the constitution via his family
business and his profiting personally from his position in the office, and
potentially obstruction of justice charges based on the way he responded to the
Robert Mueller investigation. Some of the more radical of the new Democrats in
Congress had even talked during their campaigns about impeachment, no matter
how unlikely that was given the Republicans’ solid control of the Senate. While
the Democratic leaders in congress were reluctant to raise the issue before the
Mueller investigation was complete, some of the more progressive new members
of the House were eager to start that discussion.
The race for the White House was already on as America had to contemplate two
more years of deep division in the nation and heated conflict among the officeholders which are the hallmarks of our politics as we head into the 2020
campaign. The final moral of this story is that when a candidate is elected to
high office, like governor or president, they must learn to govern and deliver
tangible results or the voters will look for someone new in four years.
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36

 Appendix A

Jo Daviess Stephenson Winnebago

Carroll

Boone

The 2018 Democratic Primary Race for Governor
Lake

McHenry

Ogle
Kane

Dekalb
Whiteside

DuPage

Cook

Lee
Kendall

Rock Island

Grundy

Mercer

Putnam

Henderson

Stark

Livingston
Woodford

Peoria

Tazewell

Fulton

Iroquois

Ford

McLean

Mason

Schuyler
Adams

Kankakee

Marshall

Knox

Warren

McDonough

Hancock

Will

LaSalle

Bureau

Henry

De Witt

Logan

Vermilion

Menard

Cass

Brown

Champaign
Piatt

Macon

Christian

Coles
Shelby

Greene
Macoupin
Calhoun

Montgomery

Jersey

Cumberland
Effingham

Fayette

Clinton

Richland

Wayne
Washington

Monroe
Randolph

Jefferson

Perry

Hamilton

White

Saline

Gallatin

Franklin
Jackson

Williamson

Union

Johnson

Pulaski
Alexander

PRITZKER N=100

Crawford
Lawrence

Clay
Marion

St. Clair

Counties won by

Jasper

Clark

Bond

Madison

BISS N=2

Edgar

Moultrie

Scott

Edwards

Pike

Douglas

Sangamon

Pope

Massac

Hardin

Wabash

Morgan

 Appendix B

Jo Daviess Stephenson Winnebago

Carroll

Boone

The 2018 Republican Primary Race for Governor
Lake

McHenry

Ogle
Kane

Dekalb
Whiteside

DuPage
Cook

Lee
Kendall

Rock Island

Grundy

Mercer

Putnam

Henderson

Stark

Livingston
Woodford

Peoria

Tazewell

Fulton

Iroquois

Ford

McLean

Mason

Schuyler
Adams

Kankakee

Marshall

Knox

Warren

McDonough

Hancock

Will

LaSalle

Bureau

Henry

De Witt

Logan

Vermilion

Menard

Cass

Brown

Champaign
Piatt

Macon

Christian

Coles
Shelby

Greene
Macoupin
Calhoun

Montgomery

Jersey

Cumberland
Effingham

Fayette

Clinton

Richland

Wayne
Washington

Monroe
Randolph

Jefferson

Perry

Hamilton

White

Saline

Gallatin

Franklin
Jackson

Williamson

Union

Johnson

Pulaski
Alexander

IVES N=39

Crawford
Lawrence

Clay
Marion

St. Clair

RAUNER N=63

Jasper

Clark

Bond

Madison

Counties won by

Edgar

Moultrie

Scott

Edwards

Pike

Douglas

Sangamon

Pope

Massac

Hardin

Wabash

Morgan

 Appendix C

Jo Daviess Stephenson Winnebago

Carroll

Boone

The 2018 Governor’s Race in Illinois
Lake

McHenry

Ogle
Kane

Dekalb
Whiteside

DuPage

Cook

Lee
Kendall

Rock Island

Grundy

Mercer

Putnam

Henderson

Stark

Livingston
Woodford

Peoria

Tazewell

Fulton

Iroquois

Ford

McLean

Mason

Schuyler
Adams

Kankakee

Marshall

Knox

Warren

McDonough

Hancock

Will

LaSalle

Bureau

Henry

De Witt

Logan

Vermilion

Menard

Cass

Brown

Champaign
Piatt

Macon

Christian

Coles
Shelby

Greene
Macoupin
Calhoun

Montgomery

Jersey

Cumberland
Effingham

Fayette

Clinton

Richland

Wayne
Washington

Monroe
Randolph

Jefferson

Perry

Hamilton

White

Saline

Gallatin

Franklin
Jackson

Williamson

Union

Johnson

Pulaski
Alexander

RAUNER N=86

Crawford
Lawrence

Clay
Marion

St. Clair

PRITZKER N=16

Jasper

Clark

Bond

Madison

Counties won by

Edgar

Moultrie

Scott

Edwards

Pike

Douglas

Sangamon

Pope

Massac

Hardin

Wabash

Morgan

 Appendix D

Jo Daviess Stephenson Winnebago

Carroll

Boone

The 2018 Attorney General Race in Illinois
Lake

McHenry

Ogle
Kane

Dekalb
Whiteside

DuPage

Cook

Lee
Kendall

Rock Island

Grundy

Mercer

Putnam

Henderson

Stark

Livingston
Woodford

Peoria

Tazewell

Fulton

Iroquois

Ford

McLean

Mason

Schuyler
Adams

Kankakee

Marshall

Knox

Warren

McDonough

Hancock

Will

LaSalle

Bureau

Henry

De Witt

Logan

Vermilion

Menard

Cass

Brown

Champaign
Piatt

Macon

Christian

Coles
Shelby

Greene
Macoupin
Calhoun

Montgomery

Jersey

Cumberland
Effingham

Fayette

Clinton

Richland

Wayne
Washington

Monroe
Randolph

Jefferson

Perry

Hamilton

White

Saline

Gallatin

Franklin
Jackson

Williamson

Union

Johnson

Pulaski
Alexander

HAROLD N=91

Crawford
Lawrence

Clay
Marion

St. Clair

RAOUL N=11

Jasper

Clark

Bond

Madison

Counties won by

Edgar

Moultrie

Scott

Edwards

Pike

Douglas

Sangamon

Pope

Massac

Hardin

Wabash

Morgan

 Appendix E

Jo Daviess Stephenson Winnebago

Carroll

Boone

Governor’s Race Results for Pritzker in 2018
Compared to Presidential Race for Clinton in 2016
Lake

McHenry

Ogle
Kane

Dekalb
Whiteside

DuPage

Cook

Lee
Kendall

Rock Island

Grundy

Mercer

Putnam

Henderson

Stark

Hancock

Kankakee

Marshall

Knox

Warren

Livingston
Woodford

Peoria

McDonough

Tazewell

Fulton

Iroquois

Ford

McLean

Mason

Schuyler
Adams

Will

LaSalle

Bureau

Henry

De Witt

Logan

Vermilion

Menard

Cass

Brown

Champaign
Piatt

Macon

Christian

Coles
Shelby

Greene
Montgomery

Jersey

Cumberland
Effingham

Fayette

Crawford

Bond

Madison

Lawrence

Clay

Richland

Marion

Clinton
St. Clair

Wayne
Washington

Monroe
Randolph

Jefferson

Perry

Hamilton

White

Saline

Gallatin

Franklin
Jackson

Williamson

Union

Johnson

Pulaski
Alexander

Counties Prtizker won in 2018
Clinton lost in 2016

Jasper

Clark

Pope

Massac

Hardin

Wabash

Macoupin
Calhoun

Edgar

Moultrie

Scott

Edwards

Pike

Douglas

Sangamon

Morgan