At the outset of the race, Darren Bailey has ignored his rivals, instead targeting Gov. Pritzker, but there’s room for movement in the contest with nearly half of voters (47 percent) saying they’re undecided.

“We’re not going in here with a chainsaw,” his running mate, Aaron Del Mar, said. “We’re going in here with an X-Acto knife. We are doing this as a purely public policy effort.”

“I’m no stranger to being accused of wrongdoing,” Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich said on social media. “[B]ut if you didn’t do it, the honorable thing to do is to fight. If necessary, go down fighting. But Gov. Waltz (sic) decided not to fight. He is running away and quitting which makes me think his hands are unclean on the Somali $9 billion fraud scandal.”

While Illinois consistently ranks in the Top 10 for electric vehicle registration, the state ranks near the bottom in the nation when it comes to EV infrastructure. All of this is happening as Gov. JB Pritzker is proposing one million registered electric cars and trucks on the road in the Land of Lincoln by 2030.

The most recent audit for Illinois through the Federal Audit Clearinghouse shows the state receiving opinions of either severe or specific material weaknesses over handling of various federal taxpayer-funded programs. In the state’s comprehensive financial audit for fiscal year 2023, there were adverse opinions for the Crime Victim Assistance Fund and the COVID-19 Homeowner Assistance Fund Program, a repeated finding for that program for failure to monitor subrecipient cash draws and failure to establish subrecipient monitoring procedures.

State Rep. Steve Reick argued the issue reflects spending priorities at the state level, pointing to recent budget growth. “We’re running a $50-plus billion state budget,” he said. “We spent about a billion dollars to insure illegal immigrants. That’s a billion dollars that could have gone to local governments to ease their suffering.”

According to Realtor.com, Illinois currently has just 41 percent of the active housing listings it had before the pandemic. The national average sits at 88 percent – more than twice Illinois’ rate. Illinois is recovering far more slowly than most other states when it comes to getting homes back on the market.

“I will be filing Articles of Impeachment against Kristi Noem. I’ve had enough,” U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly said in a statement. “She has turned ICE into a rogue force, violating the Constitution, tearing families apart, and leaving death in her wake.”

Said Gov. JB Pritzker: “The Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act sets a national standard in the effort to lower energy costs and marks a historic step forward in our clean energy vision. Once again, Illinois is stepping up where the federal government is failing.”

Air Force veteran and state Rep. David Friess says U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly’s call for troops to refuse “illegal orders” undermines the chain of command, as the Defense Department moves to downgrade his retirement rank and pay over the remarks.

Because the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized “a significant regulatory burden on the use of property” can be considered such an illegal taking, U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman said, courts must compare the way a given regulation affects the value of a property.

“When U-Haul released its latest “Growth Index” this week, it made us wonder if blue states will ever get a clue…. From 2012 to 2022, California lost more than 1.6 million people to net domestic migration; New York almost 1.8 million; Illinois nearly 900,000, according to Unleash Prosperity’s “Vote with Your Feet” analysis of IRS data.”

Bailey, a former legislator from southern Illinois who is again seeking the Republican nomination, sent out a weekend fundraising e-mail, saying one of his first actions as governor would be to “launch DOGE for Illinois.”

Truth in Accounting’s Sheila Weinberg said single audits she’s reviewed of Illinois programs raises questions. “The state agencies were passing money, but they were not ensuring whether that money was being used for authorized purposes,” Weinberg said. “Why did the federal government keep on giving these states money if they weren’t monitoring the money properly?”