* Tribune…

State Rep. Jeanne Ives, the Wheaton Republican who came within 3 percentage points of knocking off GOP Gov. Bruce Rauner in the March primary, said she’s not surprised by poll results showing the governor with weak support from conservatives.

Ives also acknowledged she has not spoken to Rauner about the election since the primary. Asked if he had reached out to her, Ives said, “Not that I know of.” […]

“I’m not surprised by the poll results. I travel the state still. I’m asked to speak around the state at various functions and I hear directly from Republican voters and so I’m not surprised by any of this,” Ives said at an unrelated downtown Chicago news conference. […]

Asked by a reporter if the meager showing for Rauner among conservatives was indicative of the conservative split, Ives said, “I think that is what the poll would indicate.” Still, Ives said she intended to stick to her commitment to “vote for the Republican nominee” on Nov. 6.

Yeah, that poll just doesn’t have a whole lot of good news for Rauner. The thing that jumped out at me the most was that 20 percent of registered voters who self-identified as conservative/very conservative said they were voting for Pritzker, while 55 percent were with Rauner.

* Politico talked to David Axelrod about the race…

“Any consultant would say you’ve got to take the other guy down. It may be too late for him to project any sense of why the next four years would be any different than the last four years. That’s the question,” Axelrod said.

“If he were to come back under these conditions, it would be one of the greatest political rehabilitation stories in Illinois history,” said Axelrod, who expects Rauner “to run brutal negative ads and hope he can knock Pritzker down to the point to pass him.”

Axelrod said Rauner’s favorability numbers also need to rise in order for him to get out of his funk. The poll shows voters have a negative opinion of him by a 2-to-1 margin. Those numbers seem “almost impossible to surmount,” said Axelrod. “But impossible things happen in politics.”

Told of Axelrod’s comments, Rauner spokesman Alex Browning responded, “Pundits and public polling were wrong about Bruce Rauner in 2014 and they’ll be wrong again in 2018. With Illinois’ future on the line, voters care about lowering taxes and fighting corruption, not polling and prop bets.”