With the 2022 election over a year away, Gov. Pritzker is more vulnerable than many think.
Let’s start with how Pritzker got elected. Pritzker ran against a profoundly unpopular governor who had barely survived a primary and had alienated his base during a national wave election that caused statewide voter turnout to jump 25% compared to 2014.
In a favorable climate and against a damaged incumbent, Gov. Pritzker won with only 54.5% of the vote. And as anyone who remembers the hundreds of millions of dollars in TV ads will recall, the 2018 election was positioned as a rejection of President Trump and Gov. Rauner, not an embrace of Gov. Pritzker.
Gov. Pritzker has not successfully sold voters on his vision since his election. According to a poll conducted by 1892 Polling earlier this year, only 41% of voters have a favorable impression of the governor.
Even worse for Pritzker, his Tax Hike Amendment, which was a proxy for his governing vision, was rejected by 53% of voters despite Democrats at every level putting their full weight behind it.
On the policy front, sure, the federal bailout led to a bond rating upgrade. But property taxes are still too expensive, the unemployment rate is stubbornly high, government spending and pensions remain unsustainable, and families continue to head for the exits.
Gov. Pritzker has not tackled Illinois’ other major problem, its culture of corruption. In fact, he has benefited from it. Pritzker helped prop up former House Speaker Mike Madigan with $7 million in campaign cash. He gave a pay raise to politicians. He indicated he would sign a toothless ethics bill that does little beyond providing political cover for the status quo.
Pritzker may have a few vanity metrics like the bond rating upgrade he can campaign on, but families aren’t materially better off than they were three years ago.
With few accomplishments to run on, Gov. Pritzker signaled his campaign will focus on the COVID pandemic. His announcement commercials highlight the heroic stories of Illinoisans helping each other during the pandemic, but they are sparse on what Pritzker actually did.
That is because Pritzker’s record on COVID is at best mixed. There are the heartbreaking deaths of the 36 veterans at the LaSalle Veterans’ Home, the Department of Employment Security’s tragic inability to provide benefits to desperate families, and the millions of dollars wasted on faulty PPE and unused McCormick Place overflow beds.
Add it all up, and Pritzker is a weak incumbent with little to show for three years in office. But for his billion-dollar bank account, he’d be considered one of the most vulnerable governors in the country.
So how can Republicans capitalize?
In 2018, 38% of the overall vote came out of Cook County. However, this Democratic stronghold can be balanced out by the 96 downstate counties where 37% of the vote is. So, rather than a state dominated by Chicago, if Republicans can drive turnout among their voters, they can cancel out Democratic margins in Cook County.
If Republicans can successfully neutralize Cook County by turning out downstate voters, the election will be decided in the suburbs, where the remaining 25% of the vote is.
And we just saw that there are voters who can be moved by the right message. In 2020, there were over 600,000 voters statewide who voted against Pritzker’s Tax Hike Amendment but not for President Trump.
These voters, predominantly located in the suburbs, have rejected Pritzker’s cornerstone issue, but they evaluate candidates individually. In that same 1892 survey, 10% of Biden voters had an unfavorable view of Pritzker, and 22% had no opinion. They are with Republicans on the message; Republicans just need the right messenger.
It remains an open question which Republican candidates up and down the ballot can successfully prosecute the case against Pritzker and the Democrats while clearing a competence and character bar that President Trump struggled to clear in the minds of many voters.
2022 will be a referendum on Gov. Pritzker’s performance, just as 2018 was a referendum on Rauner and Trump.
Pritzker has failed on the economy, corruption, taxes, managing government, and on parts of his COVID response.
Sitting here today, Pritzker and, by extension, down-ballot Democrats remain vulnerable to disciplined candidates who can articulate a vision for a better Illinois and highlight the failing record of those in power.