Gov. JB Pritzker sailed to a rare third term as Illinois’ chief executive Tuesday with his second consecutive reelection victory over Republican challenger Darren Bailey, lining up the incumbent to become the longest-serving Democratic governor in state history.
But a quick election night for Pritzker only underscored the question of just how long he intends to stay in the governor’s mansion — and when he might announce a run for president as the 2028 field of contenders takes shape.
The Associated Press called the race for Pritzker within a minute of the polls closing, just like it did in 2022 when the billionaire governor trounced Bailey, a southern Illinois farmer and former state legislator, by nearly 13 percentage points.
With less than 8% of the vote counted, Pritzker led with about 67% over Bailey’s 30% and 3% for Collin Corbett, a socially moderate fiscal conservative who mounted an independent campaign.
With Pritzker’s bottomless campaign resources towering over a fractured Illinois Republican Party, the main question for most Springfield observers after Bailey crushed the field in March’s four-way GOP primary was whether the hardline conservative challenger could keep his vote deficit from ballooning further in reliably blue Illinois.
That, along with the question of if — or when — Pritzker will announce a White House bid.
In front of about a thousand American flag-waving supporters filling the floor of Navy Pier’s Aon Grand Ballroom, the first half of Pritzker’s 19-minute victory speech running down a lengthy list of things he loves about Illinois, from its “horseradish capital of the world” in downstate Collinsville to the White Sox fan it sent to the Vatican.
But Pritzker soon addressed the presidential elephant in the room.
“There is one question I have gotten a lot in the last few months: What’s next?” he said. “I’m going to ask you to continue to hope, and to wrap your hope in courage. We climbed one mountain tonight, but we are sitting at the base of another.”
In a potential preview of a presidential stump speech, Pritzker described “a healthcare system we need to break down to the studs and rebuild” and “an electoral system that needs real campaign finance reform, because no special interest should be able to simply buy the regulations they prefer” — problems that sure sound like they’d best be addressed by a federal office.
“If you go to work in the morning and come home at night, you ought to make enough money to put food on your table, to see a doctor when you’re sick, to live in a dignified home, to save for retirement and to take a vacation every once in a while,” Pritzker said in front of a packed stage decked with a massive American flag. “We can make that happen, and we must make that happen.”
Bailey and other Republicans have long accused Pritzker of eyeing his latest reelection as a stepping stone to the White House, an ambition that Pritzker has hardly downplayed.
Still, Pritzker maintains that he has unfinished business in Springfield after two terms spanning some of the most tumultuous years in state history, from a global pandemic to a chaotic federal deportation campaign and numerous run-ins with the Trump administration.
Whether or not his focus is solely on his current job, Pritzker becomes the first three-term Illinois governor since Republican Jim Thompson won the third of his record four terms in 1982.
An heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune, Pritzker used his astronomical financial advantage in the race to remind voters of the state’s 12 credit rating upgrades and a slew of progressive legislative victories he has shepherded through the General Assembly since unseating GOP former Gov. Bruce Rauner in 2018.
Pritzker’s self-funded, $90 million-plus campaign also blanketed the internet and airwaves with ads painting Bailey as a lackey of Trump, who campaigned alongside Bailey four years ago and endorsed him once again.
Several dozen people were on hand for Bailey’s election night watch party at an Effingham hotel, many supporters clad in red campaign merchandise and one decked out as a full-on Abraham Lincoln impersonator. Bailey still hadn’t appeared at his party by the time Pritzker finished his victory speech.
Momentum proved elusive for a campaign that tried to distance itself from Trump, who remains unpopular with voters in Cook County and the collar counties, that once-fertile ground for the Illinois GOP.
Instead, Bailey labored to keep the focus on concerns around the rising cost of living, which critics can tie to the president’s tariffs and war in Iran; crime, during a year when Chicago has seen a historic drop in homicides; and the education system, which is heavily reliant on the property taxes that Bailey pledged to cut.
Pritzker told his supporters they had “vanquished the MAGA Illinois GOP” but also offered Bailey “the blessings of peace in the days ahead: “Let’s commit to work for a time when all our political disputes will be resolved by the better angels of our nature.”
Contributing: Isabela Nieto, WBEZ