Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s national stature has been growing in recent months.
He appeared on The View in mid-February and The Blueprint with Jen Psaki, the former White House press secretary, a few days later. He went on Fox News for the first time earlier this month.
He’s not done yet: On Sunday, Pritzker is headlining the 2025 McIntyre-Shaheen 100 Club dinner. It’s the largest Democratic fundraiser for New Hampshire, a state that’s held one of the nation’s first primary contests for more than 100 years.
All of the appearances are helping Pritzker introduce himself to a wider Democratic audience, even though the two-term governor has not confirmed what his future plans are or if he’ll seek another term in any office at all.
Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said Pritzker is doing what candidates often do if they’re exploring a presidential run: getting name recognition by latching onto an issue partisans care about.
“There’s really one way that that happens today in the Democratic Party,” Sabato said. “It’s to go after Donald Trump … and to do it effectively.”
Pritzker has attacked Trump throughout his political career, but the pace and ferocity has increased, whether it’s calling Trump “rich in stupidity” on the Democratic National Convention stage in Chicago last summer or taking a more serious tone to warn of parallels between the Trump administration and the rise of Nazi Germany during his February State of the State speech.
The governor also made stronger inroads with the national Democratic party last summer. He and his wife, MK Pritzker, donated nearly $6 million and helped ensure there weren’t outstanding debts after the DNC concluded.
His messaging on certain topics is setting him apart from other presumed presidential frontrunners. Speaking in late March at a Human Rights Campaign fundraiser in Los Angeles, Pritzker defended transgender Americans, particularly kids, against an increasing stream of political attacks.
“I know that there are transgender children right now looking out at this world and wondering if anyone is going to stand up for them and for their simple right to exist,” he said.
“Well, I am. We are. We will,” Pritzker continued, his voice rising as applause increased.
That appearance came a little more than two weeks after fellow potential presidential candidate California Gov. Gavin Newsom launched his podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom.
In one portion of the program, Newsom and his first guest, conservative talk show host and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, discussed whether transgender people should be allowed to play sports according to their gender identity.
Newsom said it’s “deeply unfair” for trans people to play sports outside of their assigned sex at birth, which outraged progressives, including those who cheered on Pritzker.
Pritzker said his HRC speech had nothing to do with Newsom and people should not analyze it as an attempt to stake a progressive position against people like Newsom.
“These are things that I’ve said here in the state of Illinois. I repeated them in another venue,” he told reporters at an unrelated news conference in Springfield. “To the extent people see that as a lane, that’s their view.”
Despite Pritzker’s continued appearances, donations and progressive messaging, Sabato said Pritzker still has his work cut out for him if he’s considering a presidential run.
“I could go out here in Virginia — I doubt I could find one person, if I interviewed a thousand on the street, who even knew who he was,” he said. “That’s not to criticize. It’s just simply to say, ‘Why would anybody here know who the governor of Illinois was?’ I mean, honestly, people have other priorities.”
Either way, Pritzker is prepping for New Hampshire.
Jordan Abudayyeh, who handles Pritzker’s external political communications, didn’t comment on speculation that this visit is strategic. She said Pritzker is getting invites from Democratic organizations all over the country because it’s “important in this moment to unite in standing up Trump’s racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic agenda that’s tearing apart the fabric of our nation.”
Alex Degman is an Illinois statehouse reporter for WBEZ based in Springfield.