Gulp! Two politicians from Illinois, the nation's most wretched state, may run for president. One could win.
They are:
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a billionaire who bought his way into office.
Rahm Emanuel, ex-Bill Clinton adviser, ex-congressman, ex-Obama chief of staff, ex-mayor of Chicago, ex-US ambassador to Japan.
Pritzker has just announced he’s running in 2026 for re-election as governor. But that doesn’t mean that he has given up on his well-publicized dream of running for president.
He’d easily be re-elected in the deep blue state of Illinois, gliding in on the far left foolishness that works in Illinois. Never mind that it cost the Democratic Party the White House and both Houses of Congress.
Electing Pritzker would be like reinstalling Joe Biden in the White House. Pitzker has taken a broken state and turned it into a disaster. It ranks in or near the bottom on just about any measure.*
How proud he is that he has turned Illinois into a “Sanctuary State.” While other states were opening after the Covid pandemic, Pritzker continued to lock up the state longer than necessary. Businesses were hurt. School children were unnecessarily confined to home.
Pick any cultural issue—transgenderism, abortion, race, immigration, LGBT+ism, cancel culture, free speech. climate change and environmental justice—Pritzker aligns with the far left on one and all.
His 2026 budget increased by $17 billion. Illinois is the first state to have its bonds reduced to junk. He’s approved 49 new taxes. Government pensions still are breathtakingly underfunded, to the tone of least $140 billion. Likely more.
Illinois is among the most anti-business states. It’s rated last for economic health, It’s rated last for employment and wealth for racial equality. It’s among the worst states for crime, smog and quality of life.
Is it any wonder that it’s the most hated state—by its own residents? And that so many are moving from Illinois?
(Further details can be found here, in my booklet, The governor you don’t know, published before his last election.)
Rahm Emanuel has his own problems. Chief among them was his attempt as Chicago mayor to cover up the unjustified fatal shooting by police of a black youth, Laquan McDonald.
Not far behind was his decision to close 50 Chicago Public Schools whose attendance was terribly low. It was the right decision for a financially challenged school district. But “activists” are clubbing him.
Having lost credibility with black voters and the Chicago Teachers Union, Emanuel passed on running for a third term as mayor. .
Then there’s Emanuel’s abrasive personality. Like Trump, getting even is high on his agenda. Just not as publicly. In a dispute with a pollster, he reportedly sent the guy a dead fish with a card saying, “It’s been awful working with you.” Once, he repeatedly stabbed a steak knife into a restaurant table, shouting death and the names of his political opponents.
As a Sun-Times columnist, one of his minions doxed me for writing disagreeable stuff about him while in Congress. (The doxer posted a Google picture of my house and berated me for having a swimming pool. Except the pool was the next door neighbor’s and I had moved out of the place a year earlier.)
And yet…
He was prescient in 2019 when he said, "The Democratic Party is at risk of talking to itself, not to the country." During President Joe Biden’s term in 2021, he warned "Wokeness is not a strategy; it’s a trap. You lose the middle class with lectures." He was against “defunding the police,” the “Green New Deal” and “Medicaid for all.”
Above all, Emanuel is a pragmatist. "You can't govern if you can't win. First, win the election," he said. His quote, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," has become a neologism, a part of the popular culture.
He hasn’t softened with age. He challenges the party’s drift (or should I say, rush) to the far left, urging it to worry less about “a child’s right to pick his pronouns” and more about “children who do not know what a pronoun is.”
The Democratic Party, he conceded, “… is less popular than Elon Musk right now.” The party’s “brand,” he said, is “toxic,” and “weak.” He told the Wall Street Journal, “I’m tired of sitting in the back seat when somebody’s gunning it at 90 miles an hour for a cliff.”
He has poked the party’s left wing with everything but a sharp stick in the eye. That he’s got his eye on the Oval Office is more than a rumor. He’s scheduled a September appearance in Iowa, where the state’s party caucus is the starting gate for presidential horse races.
For that, he’s getting ripped by left-wing evangelists. So much the better. Emanuel has a smart strategy for a party that has a death wish, committed as it is to the same recipe that got Donald Trump elected. Emanuel is positioning himself as an alternative party leader—maybe not the only one, but surely a strong one compared with the party’s fuzzy wuzzy ideologues.
For middle-of-the road Democrats, he’d be a breathe of, well maybe not fresh, air. He’s filling a void that gets keeping larger and larger as the media give increasing attention to the wonky New York city lefties such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani.
This is important: He’s got the chops to win elections; he’s six for six, including running campaigns and fundraising for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. He’s been called a fund-raising raising juggernaut. In 2006, as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, his planning and fundraising managed to turn over control of the House to Democrats for the first time since 1994.
Okay, so maybe he can win the Democratic presidential nomination if progressives can’t agree on a single candidate. But how about the general election? Let’s put it this way: He’d be a stronger candidate for Democrats and independents than the likes of Kamala Harris or any other hardcore leftwing candidates. In testimony to the wisdom of Emanuel’s strategy, witness far-left California Gov. Gavin Newsom as he trips over his tongue rushing to the middle ground.
This isn’t a prediction; it’s a possibility. A possibility that Republicans might want to consider.
*Pritzker’s troubling record in this piece was compiled from multiple sources. Here are two of the best:
as a conservative Jew I would welcome more religious (Christians and Jews) running for office, but in today's Democrat party the animus towards Jews and Christians is palpable so 2 Jews from ILLAnnoy? yeah I need more popcorn