Inside JB Pritzker’s power play in Illinois’ Senate primary – and what it means for a 2028 run

The Illinois state troopers’ code name for Juliana Stratton, the lieutenant governor and the new Democratic nominee for US Senate, is Sprinter. Their code name for JB Pritzker, the governor who put his political capital and upward of $10 million behind getting her there, is Believer. There was Believer outside a school on the corner of 24th Street and South Millard on a Tuesday morning that had warmed up to 19 degrees. Carefully standing on the legal side of the blue cone that marked the boundary for electioneering, Pritzker talked up his candidate to each voter who passed or the preschool teachers who popped out to ask for selfies, even after Stratton had already headed back to the car.

There were many doubters of Stratton’s chances, people who cited her seeming discomfort on the campaign trail, the huge campaign donations collected by Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi and the candidacy of Rep. Robin Kelly potentially splitting the Black vote. As they arrived at Stratton’s victory party Tuesday night, Pritzker and his team were taking an “I told you so” victory lap. “A lot of people have suggested that this election tonight was personal to me,” Pritzker, his voice hoarse from the final stretch, said as he introduced Stratton.

“And I’m here to tell you all: They’re right, it was.” What played out in Tuesday’s Senate primary was more complicated than Stratton’s win being good news for Pritzker, though he can walk onto a future presidential debate stage and say he stood by the person who’d supported him for years, now on track to be only the sixth Black woman in the Senate ever. With many assuming Pritzker is at most a year away from launching a 2028 presidential campaign, this race was an early demonstration of what kind of larger operation he might run, with even eager “Pritzker for President” boosters worried he and his inner circle need to sharpen up ahead of a campaign when he won’t be the front-runner on his home turf.

Pritzker and his aides push back on over-indexing on the Stratton campaign, but they argue it shows what he might carry forward into a presidential campaign: loyalty to those loyal to him among fellow politicians and operatives, a willingness from a hotel fortune heir to put his money to use, strength among less reliably blue voters and success despite early chatter about underperforming. “I start with, ‘Do I like this person? Do I think they’re going to agree with the things that I believe?

And are they going to do a good job?’ And in this moment in particular, ‘Are they going to go fight, fight, fight because we need fighting?’” he told CNN in an interview Tuesday at Chicago’s iconic Manny’s Deli. “I don’t write checks every time I support somebody. There are plenty of times when I’ve endorsed somebody and I haven’t written a check.” ‘JB doesn’t do anything halfway’ Their meeting last spring after longtime Sen. Dick Durbin announced his retirement didn’t take long. Stratton said she wanted to run; Pritzker said he was all in, though wary of how Durbin has emphasized his own role in getting now-Sen. Tammy Duckworth into politics, Pritzker told her she needed to run on her own.

He’d pump her up, make introductions, but he wanted her to come across more as a senator from Illinois than a senator from Pritzker. The prevailing sentiment in Illinois during the winter, as Krishnamoorthi dominated Chicago airwaves with unchallenged ads, was that Stratton was trailing and the governor was not doing enough to support her. Even after reports surfaced that Pritzker had sent $5 million to the pro-Stratton super PAC in December, many questioned whether it would be enough to counter Krishnamoorthi’s $20 million head start.

At Krishnamoorthi’s election night watch party, where they turned off election results early in the evening and only a few dozen supporters remained to hear his concession speech, no one doubted Pritzker’s impact on the race. Some grumbled that Pritzker had bought a Senate seat, even though Krishnamoorthi had doubled the spending by the pro-Stratton group. Pritzker’s allies privately acknowledge that they were calling much of the shots of the effort to back Stratton. His longtime aide Quentin Fulks, a veteran of the Biden-Harris 2024 campaign, ran a super PAC that was funded almost entirely by Pritzker’s money and was responsible for most of her ads. “No one can win you a Senate campaign.

People can help you, but at the end of the day, the candidate has to win,” said one person familiar with Pritzker’s thinking, adding, “JB doesn’t do anything halfway.” Anyone in Chicagoland watching the local news or streaming video has been bombarded with images of Pritzker smiling next to, putting his arm around, saying he’s voting for what is effectively his own slate of candidates. A good chunk of that has been via the PAC he funded for Stratton, but candidates for Congress and state comptroller and more have put him in their ads too, to the point that the governor has been telling people even his wife has been joking how much she’s seeing of him.

“I just saw something this morning with a candidate I’ve never heard of who put out literature that’s, ‘I can’t wait to go to Springfield to work with Governor Pritzker on X, Y, and Z.’ And I was like, ‘That’s very flattering. I hope we meet sometime,’” he joked. Pritzker likes to point out that he thinks more about values than about money and is clearly tired of being reduced to his wealth, as if he hasn’t accomplished anything else in his seven years as governor and is secretly pulling everyone’s strings. He knows he’s caught in the trap of being hit if he spends a lot of money but questioned if he doesn’t.

“One would think we’re past all that, but I don’t know what to say except that I guess I understand people have some fascination and I can’t stop them from doing that,” Pritzker said. But not tired enough to stop spending a lot of money, as critics note. “People are sick and tired of money in politics,” progressive Illinois Rep. Delia Ramirez told CNN when she arrived at Manny’s Deli herself, arguing Democrats need to grapple with the choices they’ll put in front of Americans in 2028.

“As a billionaire running for president, there is work to be done so that the American people know he’s going to fight for them, and he’s not going to let big money get in the way of democracy.” Just two weeks before the primary, Congressional Black Caucus chair Rep. Yvette Clarke put out a statement blasting Pritzker for backing Stratton over Kelly, warning that “his behavior in this race won’t soon be forgotten by any of us.” The logic of the statement was tricky: Clarke was ripping Pritzker for not backing a Black woman from the CBC because he was backing another Black woman.

What the New York congresswoman was actually trying to do, besides being loyal to a former CBC chair in Kelly, was to fire a warning shot at Pritzker for 2028, according to a person who discussed the statement with her. The message Clarke wanted to send to Pritzker: Don’t see this race as a model for not paying deference to the CBC and spending big to work around Black voters. Pritzker, who spent Tuesday morning with Stratton by his side crisscrossing Black political clubs full of politicians who’ve long supported him and voters who went so far as custom-making their own Pritzker hats, chalked up Clarke’s statement to wanting to help Kelly and pointed out that he’s not short on relationships with the CBC.

Pritzker said he hadn’t even noticed the not-so-subtle fat jokes: In the space of two sentences, Clarke referred both to Pritzker’s attempt to “tip the scales” and “heavy-handing” the race. “What am I supposed to do? I can’t stop people from saying whatever they’re going to say,” he said. “Listen, if this was a problem for me, I wouldn’t have run for public office.” He is noticeably slimmed down and passed on the tall pastrami sandwich he might usually order at Manny’s, instead sipping from a diet soda. “I’m already carrying around a lot of pastrami,” he joked, patting his sides.

The foundation of a potential future campaign For now, Pritzker is wrapping his arms around Stratton not just as a winner, but for some of what she discussed during the campaign. While he’s not on board with her support for Medicare for All, Pritzker said in his interview, he is glad to be talking about a path to universal health care. And while he is skeptical of going higher than the $15 per hour minimum wage he signed into law on a state level, he agrees with her on pushing for a $25 federal minimum wage.

What he definitely agrees with her on: a late ad that was one of the few aired by the campaign itself featuring clip after clip of people – including Duckworth – saying “F**k Trump,” even though he didn’t join the chorus saying those two words when he appeared with her at the end. Few politicians, of course, have been as out front and aggressive in pushing back on Trump. Talking with one of the voters outside the polling place he visited Tuesday morning, Pritzker pointed to the green whistle she was wearing around her neck to call attention to ICE actions in Chicago and said he’d been talking to people all around the country about those efforts.

The profane ad got at the fundamentals of why he backed Stratton, Pritzker said, and whatever may be ahead for him politically. “I didn’t feel like it was something I wanted to say, but I didn’t object to her having an ad like that,” Pritzker said. “Do I feel that feeling that I think people were expressing with those words? Yeah, I do. And indeed, I have said something like it myself, though not intentionally for publication. Anyway, but I support Julianna, and I think it was a very shorthand way to express what I think a whole lot of Democratic voters are feeling.” South Carolina Rep.

Jim Clyburn is the elder statesman of the CBC and kingmaker in his crucial (at least for now) first state in the Democratic primary order. On a visit to Chicago last week to promote his book—including at an event Pritzker hosted— Clyburn said he wasn’t aware of Clarke’s statement and Pritzker is “free to support anyone he wants to.” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren went further. When she was running for president herself in 2019 and 2020, Warren was so enraged by former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s spending to buy a berth in that race she would sometimes visibly shake when talking about it.

That was not her take on Pritzker last week, even after she spent a chunk of her time on stage at an event for Stratton declaring, “Ultimately the power is not with the billionaires.” Asked before the event about Pritzker, Warren told CNN, he “is clearly a man who fights from the heart, and I’m really interested to hear what he has to say and what he does next.”