Scott Stantis/For the Chicago Tribune
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD | Chicago Tribune
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker played the role of designated attack dog within the failed Kamala Harris presidential campaign and he played it with rhetorical flourish. At the Democratic National Convention, where (unlike most others) he used almost his entire speech to criticize Trump, Pritzker called Trump “weird,” “dangerous” and said he was “rich in only one thing: stupidity.”
“He’s a racist, sexist, misogynistic narcissist who wants to use the levers of power to enrich himself and punish anyone who dares speak a word against him,” Pritzker said of Trump on June 9, while President Joe Biden still was the presumptive Democratic nominee.
And that’s among the more polite things the Illinois governor said about the man the nation just elected for a second term as president. He also has described him as “a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist and a congenital liar.”
Trump, of course, has responded in kind. To wit, also in June, on Truth Social: “Sloppy JB Pritzker, the Rotund Governor from the once great State of Illinois, who makes Chris Christie look like a male model, and whose family wanted him out of the business because he was so pathetic at helping them run it, has presided over the destruction and disintegration of Illinois,” Trump wrote.
Now an inconvenient truth. Trump is to be the next president of the United States with a mandate from the American people and more likely than not sufficient majorities to push through whatever he wishes to enact. Many of those policies will have profound impacts on the people of Illinois.
Now another inconvenient truth. Trump did very well this past election in Illinois.
When all is buttoned up, Harris will almost certainly have beaten Trump in the Land of Lincoln by less than 9 points.
In 2020, by contrast, Biden won Illinois with 58% of the vote to Trump’s 41%, a 17-point margin. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won Illinois with 56% to Trump’s 39%, also roughly a 17-point margin. Illinois remains a reliably blue state, but with a margin now only in the single digits. Trump sliced away nearly half of the prior Democratic presidential candidate’s advantage even though we, like many others, stated many times that his personal behavior and convictions meant that he was no longer qualified to be president.
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