Bailey implores Republicans to improve turnout as he plans to shift focus to Chicago

SPRINGFIELD — Darren Bailey told supporters on a downstate campaign tour this week that they won’t be seeing him again soon. Instead, he’ll be focusing his energy from now through November in Chicago and its suburbs.

It’s the Republican gubernatorial candidate’s answer to a frequently faced question, following his 12-point loss to Gov. JB Pritzker in 2022: Why will this time be any different?

Bailey told supporters in small towns throughout the southern half of the state that he thought 2022 was going to be a close race but was instead the victim of voter apathy. This year, he insists his new focus on Chicago will put him over the edge, but only if Republicans improve their turnout downstate.

“This race is ours to lose, but I need your help,” Bailey told a group of about 20 supporters outside a grocery store in Nokomis, a town of about 2,100 people in Montgomery County. “I need you to have the conversations with everybody that you see.”

The Bailey campaign faces major monetary and historic headwinds.

Midterm elections are often referendums on the party in power in Washington, D.C., which this year is his Republican Party. His opponent, Gov. JB Pritzker, has dumped $90.5 million into the race and is now launching TV ads attacking Bailey.

There is not yet any independent polling available to show a snapshot of the race, but Bailey told supporters he’s receiving a different reception in Chicago than he did four years ago when he called the city a “hellhole.” People are now asking him to pose for pictures instead of heckling him, he said.

After cruising to victory in the primary, Bailey pledged to focus his campaign on Chicago and the suburbs. He says he’ll fulfill that promise now after stops in Marion, Anna, Beardstown, Paris, Bloomington and others this week.

“Cindy and I have spent just three weeks in our home since March,” Bailey, of Clay County, told about a dozen supporters at a cafe in Virden in Macoupin County. “The rest of the time we’ve been in Chicago. We wanted to make one more sashay through the heartland, through the southern edge of the state.”

Bailey received 66% of the vote in Macoupin County in 2022 and 69% in Montgomery County. But combined, the two counties provided about 20,000 of Bailey’s votes in an election that saw about 4 million people cast a ballot, though only about half of registered voters participated.

In Cook County, Bailey received just 23% of the vote four years ago. Bailey’s running mate, Aaron Del Mar, is the Cook County Republican Party chair. He told Capitol News Illinois they are hoping to receive upwards of 33% of the vote in the Chicago area this year. Despite the obvious need to campaign more in that region of the state, he said downstate voters are still important.

“If southern Illinois doesn’t come out, it doesn’t matter,” Del Mar said.

Bailey said in an interview with Capitol News Illinois on Monday he will especially focus on the suburbs, where voters exhibit more tendencies to support Republican candidates than in Chicago, though Democrats have increasingly won more races there, too. He said he wants to boost turnout to 2024 levels, which saw 70% of registered voters cast a ballot and President Donald Trump reduce 17-point losses in Illinois in 2016 and 2020 down to 11 points.

Bailey’s supporters

A few dozen people attended Bailey’s Monday morning events, which Del Mar attributed to people being at work. The campaign held a variety of other events throughout downstate over the five-day tour, which concluded Tuesday, including some ticketed fundraisers and larger county Republican dinners.

Supporters at Bailey’s events are buying his message that he can do better in Chicago.

“I just really feel like it’s time that somebody downstate, that understands what’s going on down here and also understands what’s going on in Chicago, I think it’s time for somebody like that,” Kurt Aumann, who owns an auction business in Nokomis, told Capitol News Illinois. “I really don’t see where JB Pritzker has had a struggle his entire life. He doesn’t know what I go through.”

Aumann said high property taxes and heavy regulations are among his top concerns, adding he doesn’t have those concerns about other states where his business operates.

Jay Martin, Bailey’s Montgomery County coordinator who works for an agricultural company, shared that sentiment.

“We have eight years of pretty much failed policies and we feel that downstate considerably, especially now with some of the higher real estate taxes that have been hitting us,” Martin said.

Bailey and Del Mar discussed a variety of topics as they mingled with voters, including closing coal plants, state spending to help undocumented immigrants, public safety, and how Bailey would navigate a likely Democrat-controlled legislature.

His supporters said they see a sharp contrast between Bailey and Pritzker.

“Darren starts with humble surroundings,” James Meister, of Springfield, said in an interview. “He’s a farmer. He’s been working his entire life. As soon as he found out his school board wasn’t doing very well, he wanted to make changes. He didn’t sit back and let someone else do it. He made changes.”

Bailey has faced criticism over the years for supporting property tax hikes while on the North Clay Board of Education.

Martin said voters in Montgomery County feel they relate better to Bailey, believing the billionaire Pritzker struggles to understand issues facing rural residents.

“He’s not heartless,” Martin said of Bailey. “And I don’t want to suggest to you that I think JB is. It’s easy to just grow estranged to how everybody else has to deal with life when you don’t have to fight for much.”

On the issues

While Bailey faces his own uphill battles to win the election, he thinks Pritzker does, too.

“To sit here and tell us that he has made life more affordable, I mean, no one is realizing that,” he said in an interview. “I really believe a third term — just the economy and ultimately the Chicago Bears — I personally believe it is going to be a huge win. That it is going to be a huge win that is going to shock this state and this nation.”

High property taxes and the SAFE-T Act criminal justice reform that abolished cash bail remain top talking points for Bailey, who thinks problems with the law have become more apparent to the public over the last four years.

Bailey is also calling for a 1% cap on property taxes, which are levied by local governments and not the state, pointing to such policies in neighboring Iowa and Indiana. His supporters said they liked the idea and Bailey said he believes the state can reprioritize enough funding in the budget to cover education costs if school districts are limited in what they can raise in property taxes.

But Bailey is also facing backlash from Pritzker’s campaign for what is apparently taught in the private school he founded with his wife, Full Armor Christian Academy, which teaches a biblically based curriculum that includes the teaching of creationism in science classes.

The Pritzker campaign has criticized the school for using textbooks that suggested humans and dinosaurs once roamed the earth at the same time, though it is a generally accepted scientific conclusion that dinosaurs predated humans by about 65 million years.

Bailey didn’t deny that curriculum’s teaching in an interview with WGN-TV last week and later told reporters at the State Fair to “ask Fred Flintstone.”

“Everything the man says is a lie,” Bailey told CNI on Monday, referring to Pritzker. “My wife and I took our family to the Ark Encounter. There’s nothing in any curriculum. We took our family to the Ark Encounter. He saw that on our Facebook page so he wants to throw that out there. He’s tossing things at the wind.”

The school received a violent threat on Friday, Bailey’s campaign said, blaming Pritzker’s rhetoric.

As for the Fred Flintstone comment, Bailey said it was a “humorous” reference to Pritzker dressing up as the cartoon character on Halloween last year. The fictional Fred Flintstone cartoon character lived at the same time as dinosaurs.

Bailey has also selected other names for Pritzker, including calling him a “jackass” earlier this month. He said it’s what voters want to hear. Pritzker, in turn, has called Bailey dangerous and an “extremist Donald Trump puppet.”

“Everywhere I go, people say, ‘Darren, we need you to step up. We need you to be real, we need you to get the message out,’” Bailey told CNI. “When I say jackass, it’s the party’s symbol.”

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.