Gov. JB Pritzker will announce his campaign for a third term as Illinois governor on Thursday, sources told the Sun-Times.
The billionaire Democrat who has dominated Illinois politics since supplanting Republican former Gov. Bruce Rauner in 2019 had long been expected to try to extend his tenure as he mulls a 2028 presidential bid.
Pritzker will make his third consecutive statewide campaign official with reelection campaign kickoff events in Chicago and Springfield. Invitations went out to supporters early this week.
But it’s still unknown whom Pritzker will tap to join him on the top of the ticket as lieutenant governor. His current second-in-command, Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton, is vying for the U.S. Senate seat that Sen. Dick Durbin will give up next year.
Representatives for Pritzker’s campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment.
His splashy first term saw Illinois legalize recreational marijuana, raise the minimum wage to $15 and double down on protections for abortion rights that continue to make the state a haven for the medical procedure in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Besides championing in-state abortion protections, the 60-year-old heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune has poured some of his estimated $3.7 billion net worth behind out-of-state politicians who support abortion rights, much of it via his dark-money nonprofit Think Big America.
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COVID-19 upended his second year in office, blasting a gigantic hole in the state budget and bolstering his household familiarity via televised daily briefings in the early stages of the pandemic. Business shutdowns, mask mandates, an unprecedented vaccination campaign and other coronavirus “mitigations” further embittered conservative opponents.
Republican resentment went into overdrive in 2021 as the state abolished cash bail under Pritzker’s watch, earning him widespread progressive praise in the criminal justice reform movement — and near universal GOP condemnation for allegedly being “soft on crime.”
Pritzker also signed landmark climate legislation with the goal of weaning the state off fossil fuels completely by 2050, but the state is far behind schedule — even as electric bills are expected to soar this summer.
And his signature $45 billion capital infrastructure upgrade plan is funded largely through a massive expansion of gambling, including the legalization of sports betting, which has prompted an uptick in young men seeking treatment for gambling addiction.
The achievement Pritzker and his Democratic allies in the General Assembly most often point to is the state’s balance sheet. After a years-long budget impasse brought many social services in the state to a grinding halt, Pritzker and Democratic supermajorities have muscled through ever-increasing budgets that rebuilt a “rainy day” fund — and helped notch nine state credit rating upgrades during his tenure.
Pritzker, who has pumped some $350 million of his personal fortune into his gubernatorial campaigns, cruised to reelection in 2022 in part by boosting hardline conservative former state Sen. Darren Bailey in the GOP primary, viewing him as a weaker general election opponent. The gambit worked; Pritzker beat him by almost 13 percentage points.
But he hasn’t gone undefeated at the ballot box. Pritzker suffered the biggest loss of his political career in 2020 with voters rejecting his proposed amendment to the state constitution that would have shifted Illinois to a graduated income tax system, placing a greater burden on the ultra-wealthy to shore up state finances. The tax bracket tussle pitted Pritzker’s deep pockets against fellow billionaire Ken Griffin, who moved to Florida after Pritzker was reelected.
All the while, Pritzker has positioned himself as a national voice of progressive outrage against President Donald Trump, whose administration has sued the state, Cook County and city of Chicago over sanctuary policies limiting local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
Pritzker — a regular face on national political talk shows and a reliable attack dog for national Democrats — was vetted as a possible vice presidential candidate for Kamala Harris. But he has downplayed his ambitions beyond Illinois.
“The work that I do now as governor is work that I love doing,” Pritzker told the Sun-Times last fall. “I think back to my first days in office, my first two years in office, when Donald Trump was president, and we had to defend Illinois against an awful lot of policies that the Trump administration was imposing that we needed to make sure we were addressing, and so I think that work is going to continue.”
Illinois doesn’t have term limits for governors. Former Gov. Richard Oglesby served three non-consecutive terms from the 1860s into the 1880s, and former Gov. Jim Thompson was elected to four terms from 1977-91.