In his run for Illinois governor, billionaire J.B. Pritzker is investing an average of about $171,000 a day from his fortune to try to win a job that pays $177,412 a year and comes with major headaches.
The same enormous wealth that has benefited Pritzker’s campaign is now complicating what until a few weeks ago looked like an easy victory for him in the March 20 Democratic primary.
Rivals are pointing to his fortune to suggest the Hyatt hotel heir is out of touch with average voters. One opponent, State Senator Daniel Biss, has created an online calculator that pictures Pritzker in a tuxedo and asks visitors to enter their salary to see how quickly his team would spend that amount.
It adds to a separate perception challenge for Pritzker, in a party primary where non-whites are likely to account for a third or more of the vote. A recently released audio recording from almost a decade ago captured Pritzker and then-Governor Rod Blagojevich, now serving a long prison sentence for corruption, making crass comments about several of the state’s prominent black politicians.
While politics in the nation’s sixth-largest state has long been a blood sport, it has never been so expensive. The contest is shaping up as an extreme example of the consequences of escalating campaign spending: Increasingly, only the rich can afford to run for statewide office in places with costly advertising markets.
As a billionaire, Pritzker, 53, is the heavyweight, but several of the other candidates also have sizable bank accounts. Chris Kennedy, a son of late liberal icon Robert F. Kennedy, is a multimillionaire. Awaiting the Democratic winner will likely be Republican Governor Bruce Rauner, a former private-equity executive worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The governor faces a primary challenge and plenty of other problems as he seeks a second term. Illinois has the worst bond rating of all U.S. states and has struggled to fix its finances amid gridlock between Rauner, who took office in January 2015, and Democratic lawmakers. Rauner has pushed a pro-business, anti-union agenda that he argues is needed to pull the state out of its budget crisis. Decades of financial mismanagement has left Illinois awash in debt and facing more than $8 billion of unpaid bills and mounting pension costs.
For television stations in Illinois, the campaign has been a windfall. Pritzker, an investor and philanthropist, ran his first television ad on May 3 and has been on the air almost continually ever since. His commercials have appeared almost 34,000 times so far, according to Kantar Media’s CMAG, which tracks political advertising. Biss, his nearest Democratic rival on ad spending, has run his commercials about 3,200 times.
Pritzker, the brother of former U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, has an estimated net worth of $3.6 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. If he wins the primary, it could make the Illinois campaign the most expensive governor’s race in the nation’s history.
“It’s certainly possible because you have the people with the means to supply a very exorbitant amount of money,” said Pete Quist, research director at the nonpartisan National Institute on Money in State Politics.