Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO —Billionaire Democrat J.B. Pritzker soundly defeated first-term Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner Tuesday, who conceded his re-election bid less than an hour after the polls closed, giving his party near total control of Illinois’ state government.

“Voting is an act of optimism that the levers of our Democracy still work,” Pritzker told supporters moments after declaring victory. “You embody that optimism. You light the beacon fire on the hill of history that signals from one generation to another that these are the things that we stand and fight for.”

In conceding defeat, Rauner called for unity after a grueling, bitter race in which the two candidates accused each other of criminal activity. They broke national campaign funding records by tapping their personal fortunes for hundreds of millions of dollars.

“This is a time for us to come together,” Rauner said. “This is a time for us to unite.” The governor called Pritzker before speaking to the crowd at his campaign party and promised a smooth transition, Rauner’s campaign said.

“To Mr. Pritzker, I said, Godspeed,” Rauner said. “I hope and pray you serve Illinois well.”

Unofficial results showed Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune, holding a dominant margin of victory over Rauner in early returns. Pritzker held 56 percent of the vote to Rauner’s 37 percent with more than half of precincts statewide reporting. Conservative Party candidate Sam McCann and Libertarian Grayson “Kash” Jackson were pulling about 6 percent of the vote combined.

Pritzker will be inaugurated in January, taking control of a massive state government with $7.5 billion in unpaid bills and will have to navigate a likely Democratic legislature to get his agenda moved. He has proposed overhauling the state’s tax structure but can’t do so unless voters approve the plan two years from now, and he frequently has rebuffed requests for specifics about how it would work. He favors legalizing sports betting and the recreational use of marijuana.

Pritzker pumped $171.5 million into his campaign fund over the course of two years. The money paid for a nonstop stream of advertising on TV and the internet to both attack Rauner and get Pritzker’s name in front of voters in a state where he’s never held elected office. And some of it went to other Democratic campaigns and causes, building the party with his personal wealth just as Rauner did for Illinois Republicans.

After self-funding his 2014 governor bid, Rauner put $50 million into his re-election campaign in December 2016 but hasn’t added money since. He struggled to unite Republican voters after his signature on laws to expand abortion, gay and immigrant rights angered conservatives and led to a primary bid he nearly lost.

Rauner supporters began gathering at his election night party at The Drake hotel about an hour before the polls closed at an event held in a noticeably smaller room than the governor used previously.

The stage at the front of the room was backed by a large American flag, and two TVs near the stage were mostly being ignored as CNN began collecting national results. In his concession speech, Rauner both called for cooperation with Democrats and referenced the pro-business agenda he failed to enact in his four-year term.

“I call on my friends in the Democratic Party. Let us work together. Let us find common ground. Let us listen to each other, respect each other,” Rauner said. “Let’s study what other states have done to move themselves forward. Let’s realize that many states have made the exact changes that we need to make in Illinois.”

At Pritzker’s election night campaign headquarters, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin made the rounds early in the evening, confidently predicting a win. He noted the Champagne glasses already in the ballroom at the Marriott Marquis in South Loop.

Durbin praised Pritzker for efforts to stir support outside the Chicago area.

“Pritzker did something different in this campaign,” Durbin said. “Here was a Chicagoan, clearly a Chicagoan, who wasted no time getting Downstate. I looked around and thought, ‘This is what I’ve been looking for —a governor who starts off by unifying the whole state.’”

Comptroller Susana Mendoza, who easily won re-election, had harsh words for Rauner. She took the stage at Pritzker’s party to declare victory in her own race and call the governor “the biggest bully in the state” with “a sick quest” to dismantle organized labor.

“Governor,” she said to loud applause, “you’re fired.”

Pritzker overcame big challenges late in his campaign. Rauner focused the final weeks of his message on a confidential report from Cook County’s top watchdog that found Pritzker improperly received $330,000 in property tax breaks on one of his Gold Coast mansions as part of a “scheme to defraud” taxpayers.

Pritzker paid the money back after the report surfaced, and also had to contend with racial controversies that arose inside his massive campaign organization. Three weeks before Election Day, several Pritzker staffers filed a federal lawsuit alleging racial discrimination in their months on the job, accusations he called “just not true.”

Weeks later, two of his campaign workers were fired over a video displayed on social media showing one of them wearing a dark facial cosmetic mask resembling blackface.

Both episodes stood to remind voters about an earlier storyline from Pritzker’s primary campaign, when he embarked on an apology tour after the Chicago Tribune released a secretly recorded federal government wiretap that was part of the corruption investigation of then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who is now in prison. The wiretap involved a replacement for then-President-elect Barack Obama for his U.S. Senate seat.

During the conversation, Pritzker pitched Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White as a replacement for Obama. White, Pritzker said, would take care of the “African-American thing” and would be the “least offensive” of the potential black candidates Blagojevich was considering. Pritzker also called former state Senate President Emil Jones “crass” and former U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. “a nightmare.”