* Not surprisingly, considering the source, the Chicago Tribune editorial board rules that Bruce Rauner has plenty more time to talk about specifics…

Quinn wants Rauner to issue an austere budget plan so Quinn’s plan isn’t the only politically perilous one on voters’ radar.

Rauner plainly sees no reason to oblige for now. He’s surely relishing last week’s projection by the political numbers geeks at FiveThirtyEight.com: Early polling suggests that Quinn has a 25 percent chance of winning — and a 75 percent chance of losing — on Nov. 4. Of all the states with elections for governor this year, only Pennsylvania now has a higher likelihood than Illinois of switching parties.

Rauner will have to get more specific about his spending priorities. Voters aren’t paying much attention in June to an election to be held in November. But come fall, if Rauner doesn’t get into the dirty details, he’s going to invite comparisons to 1968 and Richard Nixon’s so-called secret plan to get the nation out of the Vietnam War.

So, because Rauner has a good chance of winning and voters aren’t paying much attention yet, he doesn’t have to say what he’ll do if elected.

Check.

* But about that projection. Here’s what FiveThirtyEight.com recently published…

Illinois’s Democratic governor, Pat Quinn, has trailed in nearly every single early poll against Republican businessman Bruce Rauner. This is one state where early polling may not be telling the whole story. Almost all the polls in Illinois have been conducted by automatic dialers that use a recorded message, which tend to overstate the GOP position (though the only live-interview poll we have also had Quinn down). Moreover, Quinn managed to win in 2010, despite trailing in most surveys during the campaign; it was probably the biggest general election polling blunder of the past six years.

The website back then had Quinn with almost no chance of winning because it made the very same mistake that many pollsters did. Instead of asking voters about all the candidates running, most pollsters cheaped out and just asked about Quinn and Bill Brady. But it turned out that third party candidate Scott Lee Cohen was taking more votes away from Brady than from Quinn. Garbage in, garbage out. The blunder wasn’t in the polls, per se, it was that the pollsters tried to short-cut the process and FiveThirtyEight failed to see what was going on. So, in the end, it was as much a blunder by the famed prognosticator and his computer program as it was by the pollsters. And now they’re trying to rewrite history.

Gov. Quinn has also been trying to rewrite history by repeated pointing to FiveThirtyEight’s horribly wrong prediction in 2010 as proof that he’ll be fine this year. But I wouldn’t be too sure of that if I were him. The website was wrong because the pollsters made a huge mistake and it didn’t catch that mistake, and still apparently doesn’t realize how badly it screwed up.