“If voters like the way things are going in the state of Illinois, if they like what the state Legislature has done, they should vote for Democrats, they should vote for … Mike Madigan’s candidates,” said Nick Klitzing, executive director of the state Republican Party. “If they want a new direction, if they believe that reform is possible in Illinois, then they should give Republicans a shot.”
So, by that logic, if the Democrats manage to hold their losses to a minimum on Tuesday, then it shows voters like the way things have been going?
Democratic challenger for comptroller, Chicago City Clerk Susana Mendoza, has nearly $2.7 million in her campaign fund. Her largest donation received was $650,000 from the Democratic Party of Illinois on Oct. 31, according to records.
There were large numbers of transfers in the final week before the election, including, $500,000 transferred from Citizens for Durkin to the House Republican Organization. The Democratic Majority also transferred $400,000 to Friends of Kate Cloonen whose race in the 79th District is now the second most expensive in the state.
Democrats are focusing on Sam Yingling’s race as well in the 62nd District, transferring more than $500,000 to support his campaign. And the Democratic Party of Illinois also transferred $250,000 to Mendoza’s campaign in the final days of the campaign, records show.
Here are the top 10 contested state races and total money raised so far, via the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform. Incumbents are listed first:
1) Comptroller, Leslie Munger (R), Susana Mendoza (D): $10.7 million
2) House, Kate Cloonen (D), Lindsay Parkhurst (R): $4.1 million
3) House, Daniel Beiser (D), Michael Babcock (R): $3.86 million
4) Senate, Jennifer Bertino-Tarrant (D), Michelle Smith (R): $3.76 million
5) Senate, Thomas Cullerton (D), Seth Lewis (R): 3.37 million
6) House, Sam Yingling (D), Rod Drobinski (R): $2.97 million
7) House, Dwight Kay (R), Katie Stuart (D): $2.93 million
8) House, Michael McAuliffe (R), Merry Marwig (D), $2.75 million
9) House, Andy Skoog (D), Jerry Long (R), $2.63 million
10) House, John Bradley (D), Dave Severin (R), $2.43 million
OK, but Rep. Cloonen transferred $310,100 from her committee to other committees (including Speaker Madigan’s) since late September. So, her position on that list when it comes to spending money on her own campaign won’t turn out to be as high.
* Also, not all of those folks on the above list are among the 26 races where the contribution caps have been busted. Rep. Bradley’s race is still capped.
Democrat Corinne Pierog’s bid to unseat Republican state Sen. Jim Oberweis received a good-sized boost Tuesday from a statewide fund dedicated to electing Democrats.
The Senate Democratic Victory Fund has paid $31,838 for “production and postage” to the Palladin Political Group, according to a financial disclosure statement the campaign filed Tuesday.
That brings to $42,754 the amount of aid the Victory Fund has supplied to Pierog. It has paid for a campaign manager and research, state records show.
* In other news, this mailer started hitting the not-so-Latino areas of Park Ridge and the 41st Ward over the weekend…
The mailer appears to be going to independents and Republicans, by the way. And the law firm has ties to Speaker Madigan.
* I have a funny screen capture of this TV ad against Republican House candidate Mike Babcock that I’ve been sharing with friends today, but it’s not appropriate for the blog. So, here’s a short video clip. Watch what Babcock’s head does to the background text…
There’s no greater supporter of First Amendment rights than this newspaper, but there’s a line between political expression and hate speech that must not be crossed. The filth spewed by two-time felon Bob Romanik, a radio host and candidate for the Illinois state House, has no place on the public airwaves.
In recorded ads played this week on AM station KZQZ, sandwiched between ads for local St. Clair County “Freedom Coalition” politicians, Romanik referred repeatedly to County Board Chairman Mark Kern as a cross-dresser and “f****t.”
Listeners must not allow this abuse of the public airwaves to stand. The Federal Communications Commission needs to hear from anyone who believes Romanik’s hate speech deserves sanction. Romanik makes GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump seem like a model of good manners and decorum.
Oof.
* And, finally, from a friend of a friend who saw this in Grayslake today…
A Madison County election judge is facing felony charges of voter fraud, only days before the election.
Audrey R. Cook, 88, of Alton is accused of sending in an absentee ballot in her late husband’s name. According to law enforcement, she said she did it because she believed it’s what he would have wanted.
Cook is a Republican election judge in Madison County, according to Madison County State’s Attorney Tom Gibbons. She was charged Friday with two felony election-fraud counts. […]
Gibbons said the county clerk’s office carefully examines every absentee ballot at multiple levels, including checking the names against the death records. The ballot was never opened or submitted, after a clerk found it had been submitted in the name of a deceased person, Gibbons said.
“The good thing is that it shows that we catch these things,” Gibbons said.
Campaign advertising that depicts Fifth District Appellate Court candidates John Barberis and James “Randy” Moore as judicial “activists” in flyers sent to Republican households and as “judicial bobbleheads for Bruce Rauner” in flyers sent to Democratic households have infuriated supporters of the judges.
The direct mail pieces were produced by the political action committee Fair Courts Now, a group funded primarily by asbestos lawyers who practice in Madison County - the nation’s busiest asbestos court. The group formed in mid-October and has raised and spent more than $1 million in negative advertising.
“Fair Courts Now has nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with keeping Illinois’ status quo as one of the worst states in the nation for legal fairness,” said Travis Akin, executive director of Illinois Lawsuit Abuse Watch. […]
The ad going to Republican households says: “Republican voter alert. ‘Not qualified’ and ‘not recommended’ activist judges don’t deserve our vote.”
The ad going to Democratic households is more descriptive: “Election alert for Democrats. John Barberis and James Moore. Bobbleheads for Bruce Rauner…Barberis and Moore support Bruce Rauner’s cuts to schools, child care, senior services and women’s health care.”
Illinois State Board of Elections official Tom Newman said that nothing in state disclosure law speaks to what a PAC can or cannot say. He said that there is no “party prohibition.”
In 2015, Illinois generated 41 percent more electricity than we need, even as power demand shrunk 3.8 percent since 2011
Sierra Club and NRDC have joined forces with coal-plant operator Dynegy and nuke-plant and ComEd owner Exelon for a monster bill to bailout both unneeded nukes and unneeded coal plants
The energy bill would subsidize unnecessary nukes, meaning Illinois ratepayers will effectively be paying more so ratepayers in other states who use our surplus power will pay less
“…that’s just another incentive for commercial and industrial consumers – and employers – to jump the border”
Social services have been devastated, the state is now two years without a budget, but Exelon would have you believe our top legislative priority is passing a $16 BILLION RATE HIKE for a company that just announced quarterly PROFITS of $841 MILLION to prop up power plants that cannot compete in the Illinois energy market.
JUST SAY NO TO THE EXELON BAILOUT
BEST Coalition is a 501C4 nonprofit group of dozens of business, consumer and government groups, as well as large and small businesses. Visit www.noexelonbailout.com.
* I’ve been watching Twitter today because Mayor Emanuel and Gov. Rauner were on the same bus together during the Cubs victory parade and I wanted to find a photo of the two of them together. Doing so was difficult…
Rauner and Rahm playing the "we can't be seen in the same shot together" game at this rally #FlyTheW#CubsParade
* I told subscribers about this the other day, but thought you might like to see it too. From WSIL TV in Carterville, the home of several contested legislative races…
Just during the month of October, 75% of WSIL’s advertising has been geared towards state and local politics.
U.S. Rep. Cheri Bustos is among female athletes featured in Sports Illustrated’s Campus Rush in a story examining the correlation between women who left the playing field for the political arena.
Bustos, a Democrat who represents the 17th Congressional District in the state’s northwestern corner, played volleyball and basketball while attending Illinois College in Jacksonville. Now she’s the shortstop for the Congressional Women’s Softball Team.
The women in the story said sports taught them to be competitive, show teamwork and not to stew after defeat.
Another Illinoisan in the piece: Susana Mendoza, a Democrat running for Illinois comptroller who was all-conference in soccer at what’s now known as Truman State University in Missouri. She’s now Chicago city clerk.
In the past, SI says, women were left on the sidelines in politics and sports. The magazine noted that in 1961, the Amateur Athletic Union barred women from road races after “fringe opponents” worried “that a woman might run so hard, and so fast, her uterus could just fall out.”
* From the story, a version of which also ran in the magazine…
A 2013 study from the Women & Politics Institute found that women who played sports were 25% more likely to express political aspirations than those who did not. It certainly made a difference for Cheri Bustos (D., Ill.), who has been in the House of Representatives since 2013 and is currently seeking reelection. Bustos grew up in an “incredibly competitive neighborhood” with siblings who each received offers to play Division I sports: basketball for her sister, Lynn, and baseball for her brother, Dan. (Her father, Gene Callahan, was the lobbyist for Major League Baseball when Congress threatened to strip the league of its anti-trust exemption.) To earn a spot in pickup games, “you had to prove yourself, every single day,” Bustos says. That competitiveness fueled her at Illinois College, a Division III school in Jacksonville, where she played volleyball and basketball, and propelled her into politics—another competitive arena.
Bustos isn’t the only female former athlete on the campaign trail. Susana Mendoza, who was all-conference in soccer at Northeast Missouri State, is running for Illinois comptroller. Senator Kelly Ayotte (R., N.H.), who’s up for reelection, was on the ski team at Penn State, while her colleague Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.) played tennis and squash at Dartmouth. Gillibrand told The Times that sports “took the fear out of losing.”
Gillibrand and Bustos formed a friendship through the Congressional Women’s Softball Team, which plays the Washington Women’s Press Corps every June in a game benefitting the Young Survival Coalition. (Gillibrand is one of the team’s pitchers; Bustos plays shortstop.) They are also tennis partners, often playing singles matches in the morning before work. It was during that time, in multiple conversations over the net, that Gillibrand, a passionate advocate of sexual assault prevention and education, persuaded Bustos to join her in working to address campus sexual assault. They’ve both been vocal supporters of the Campus Accountability and Safety Act.
“At practice, you’re talking about everything: Your family, your kids, legislation,” Bustos says. “I’ve built close enough relationships with people there that it’s led to me to crossing the aisle legislatively and do things that were good for our country.”
The goal all along for Gov. Bruce Rauner’s Illinois Republican Party has been to chip away at House Speaker Michael Madigan’s veto-proof majority.
Right now Democrats outnumber Republicans 71-47 in the House. But since at least 71 votes are required to override a veto, losing even one seat would erode some of the Democrats’ power to buck the governor.
So, while the amounts both parties are spending on targeted legislative races number in the millions, the real magic number for Republicans is simple: one.
Just one Republican win in an Illinois House election in a seat currently held by a Democrat will help make a difference, according to a top Republican strategist.
“A pick-up breaking their super majority in a presidential year when the Democrats drew the maps, it would be a very good thing,” the strategist said. […]
“That was their goal two years ago, and now they’re going to pay $40 million and they still only want to get one?” Brown said. “I’m not sure what they hope to portray that as, because as anybody who has been around the Legislature knows, there really isn’t a working 3/5ths [majority],” Brown said. “It sounds like they’re trying to lower expectations.”
* If not for Rauner, Illinois Republicans would be cowering in fetal positions right now preparing for a massive blowout. Their presidential and US Senate candidates are trailing by double-digits, creating hurricane-force headwinds. The comptroller’s race would be another under-funded massacre. The House and Senate Democrats have recruited strong candidates in GOP-held districts (McAuliffe, Kay, Bourne, Jesiel, McConchie, Rezin, Luechtefeld, to name just a few) and would be poised to add to their considerable majorities against Republican incumbents who would once again not have much money or troops and would be fighting for their political lives under a Democratic-drawn district map.
At the very least, Rauner might have stopped that pulverization from happening this year - although national headwinds are extremely tough to overcome, even with money. Some of that could still happen. That’s one reason why I love politics at this level. There’s real mystery to it.
* But tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions and a unified anti-Madigan theme has naturally and justifiably raised expectations. You can’t just dump all this cash and then say, meh, no biggie. It may not be a lot of money to Rauner and Ken Griffin, but it’s almost an obscene number to most others.
And, seriously, they’re likely gonna pick up one seat anyway with Rep. Jack Franks’ departure. That bar is too low.
* The Republicans need to prove that they can hold their incumbents and pick up seats during presidential years.
If they can’t do that after all this effort, then any seats they gain in the 2018 off-year (assuming Clinton wins) could conceivably be lost in the next presidential in 2020 - or, at least that’s what the Dems will surely say.
* I have my own thoughts that I haven’t yet shared publicly about where the bar should be this year. What are yours?
* The Daily Show took a look at US Senate races last night, including our own…
Oof.
* Related…
* Kirk, Duckworth in final debate tonight: The debate will be held at 7 p.m. at the studios of WLS-Ch. 7 and is co-sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Illinois and Univision Chicago. It will air live on the station’s digital channel, 7.2, and be streamed. It will be broadcast later that night on ABC-Ch. 7 at 10:35 and will be replayed Sunday at 10 a.m. on WGBO-Ch. 66 and Univision America-AM 1200.
Story No. 1 concerns the big super PAC that state Sen. Dan Biss put together, the one no one had heard of until a couple of weeks ago, when it suddenly started spending big money—now $10 million or so—on ads tying Gov. Rauner to the GOP presidential nominee, who may be popular in some places but not in most of Illinois.
Biss says he was just engaging in “an act of citizenship. . . .I wanted to be involved” in educating voters in an uncommonly important election.
But the fact is, the ads will mostly help not candidates for the chamber in which Biss serves but the far more numerous contests for the House, where Madigan’s long reign as speaker is being challenged.
So, is there something more afoot? Perhaps a good old fashioned deal in which Biss last year abruptly dropped out of the race for Illinois comptroller, clearing the field for Madigan-backed Susana Mendoza, and in exchange got certain, um, future considerations. Like maybe Madigan’s backing for his new super PAC, which might help Biss establish his name and run for governor in 2018.
Biss denies that. “There was no deal,” he says. Madigan might like what the super PAC is doing, but that’s it.
However, Biss concedes he spoke with Madigan before dropping out of the comptroller race. And the biggest donor to Biss’ TV campaign—Chicago financier Michael Sacks, who has given at least $2.5 million—says little about political chatter that Madigan encouraged him to write the big check. He only says, in an email: “Democratic values have been under attack for two years. We all have a responsibility to defend our values.”
For the record, Biss says he “very much doubt(s)” he will run for governor and is “not thinking about it.” Madigan spokesman Steve Brown says he doesn’t offhand know whether and when his boss and Biss spoke, and put it all down to Rauner troublemakers.
I kinda doubt that Madigan would want Biss to run for governor. Not exactly his kind of guy. And talking to the powerful state party chairman before dropping out or starting a new super PAC is standard procedure here. A professional courtesy, if you will.
Either way, I was most skeptical of the Sacks stuff. Madigan always wants money for his own campaigns, which is why people haven’t trusted him in the past to fairly run coordinated state campaigns. “We’ve got a million federal bucks for statewide voter registration? Let’s send it to Kankakee.”
OK, that was an exaggeration, but not by much.
* In checking around, however, I think Madigan probably wanted the Biss PAC to move forward and succeed. It was likely his way of striking back (without direct fingerprints) at Rauner for all those anti-Madigan ads the governor has funded. And he appears to have as much cash as he needs for his legislative races, although Sacks has been weighing in on those lately, too.
* Sen. Dick Durbin has sent a letter to the US Attorney General asking her to look into vote-by-mail problems in Rock Island County…
Dear Attorney General Lynch:
I write to urge the Department of Justice to look into reports of a troubling incident involving unprocessed absentee ballot requests in Illinois.
Last week, more than 1,500 absentee ballot requests were discovered in a Rock Island post office box. News reports indicate that a third party group solicited these ballot requests from voters, but delayed submission of the requests to the Rock Island County Clerk’s office for processing. The ballot requests accumulated for several days, and they were found at the post office after voters contacted the County Clerk, asking when they would receive their absentee ballots. Officials have indicated that similar incidents may have also occurred in other Illinois counties.
Thankfully, following the discovery, the absentee ballot requests in Rock Island were forwarded on to the County Clerk, who has indicated that all of the applicants will be mailed absentee ballots. Local law enforcement and the Illinois Attorney General are reportedly now investigating the incident to determine if it involved a criminal effort to suppress the vote.
Voting is, as the Supreme Court has said, a right “preservative of all rights.” Efforts to suppress this fundamental right should be promptly investigated, remedied, and, if appropriate, prosecuted. In light of the troubling nature of this incident, I urge the Department to examine this case, provide assistance to local and state law enforcement officials as they investigate the case, and, if warranted, pursue a Federal investigation of the incident.
There’s a ton of paranoia out there that the group was sitting on Democratic applications. But the local county clerk told me yesterday that the apps also came from Republicans, and some top Republicans told me yesterday they were not pleased at all with the way that process was handled by the Illinois Opportunity Project because some of their voters were in that undelivered stack, too.
The Illinois Opportunity Project on Wednesday said Rock Island County Democrats and the Illinois Attorney General’s office are suppressing voter turnout and harassing people involved in its vote-by-mail program.
“This is a clear case of powerful politicians, including and especially Attorney General Lisa Madigan, using their offices to harass their political opponents,” said Pat Hughes, co-founder of the conservative group. “In doing so, they are denying numerous Illinoisans one of their most basic civil liberties: the right to vote.”
On Friday, Rock Island County Clerk Karen Kinney said she thought the Chicago-based nonprofit group cofounded by radio host Dan Proft might be part of a voter suppression scheme. Her comments came after more than 1,500 Rock Island County absentee ballot applications were found in a Rock Island post office box rented by the organization. […]
“How am I suppressing anything?” [Kinney] asked. “I want to be able to administer a fair process here for the voters. I don’t care what party you’re with.
“Here’s my fear,” she said. “I want my applications. What if someone shows up on Monday and dumps a bunch of applications on me that I can’t process?”
The clerk is right. She’s just trying to get the ballot applications into her office on time. Hughes is upset because the clerk, the attorney general and others have been on his case to process his group’s applications. But, that’s what they do, particularly when the apps aren’t being delivered on a regular basis.
