In less than two weeks, the super PAC has spent nearly $340,000 on mailers and digital advertising to support four Democratic state House primary candidates — Paul Kendrick in the Lincoln Park-area’s 12th District, Adam Braun in the Uptown neighborhood’s 13th District, Aja Kearney in the South Side and south suburban’s 34th District and Rep. Jaime Andrade in the Northwest Side’s 40th District.

“But a video of a former president saying he thinks he flew on (Jeffrey) Epstein’s jet with (Gov. JB) Pritzker and likely Epstein himself? … The video is on the internet, and the internet is forever and quite strange. … It is undoubtedly false, but I doubt it’ll ever totally go

Neighboring counties, including Effingham County and Shelby County, have already approved similar advisory referendums asking voters whether local leaders should explore the idea of forming a separate state.

“Funding for our public schools, including for wraparound services like tutoring and afterschool programs, should be sustainable and stable, not subject to the whims of donors writing checks to unregulated scholarship granting organizations for tax breaks.”

“But for decades, there’s been a version of the same paradox: many places run by Democrats who champion the issue of affordability also happen to be among the least affordable places to live. This is often the result of what journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson labeled in their 2025 nonfiction book Abundance as ‘chosen scarcities.'”

“The point is: we’ve turned this battleship around in the right direction, and now we’re accelerating in that direction,” Gov. JB Pritzker said, talking of Illinois’ economic headwinds. “But remember: Some of these problems took literally 50 and 75 years for Illinois to get into the problem. And it’s going to take a few years to come out of them.”

“Talking to small business owners across the state, they’re already struggling with minimum wage mandates at $15 an hour and paid leave mandates,” said Noah Finley, the Illinois state director for the National Federation for Independent Business. “They’ve had to absorb a lot of costs based upon these state mandates and many of them are really struggling.” Finley goes on to say this could cause Illinois business owners to bump up their prices for consumers.

That law was enacted in 2021 by Gov. JB Pritzker and Illinois Democratic state lawmakers. The measure, known as the “Employee Background Fairness Act,” amended the Illinois Human Rights Act to make it a civil rights violation for employers to make hiring decisions based on arrest records revealed in employment background checks.

Concerns stem from a discrepancy in the language of the bill, allowing municipalities to count the value of a megaproject toward its tax base, despite not receiving corresponding property tax payment to account for it.

In a February 2025 press release, IFT said “educators and state workers from the 105,000-member Illinois Federation of Teachers” had rallied at the Capitol in Springfield. But the union told the U.S. Labor Department in its most recent federal filing — dated a month after the press release and signed under penalty of perjury — that it had 88,458 members.

Most states require fiscal notes on all or substantially all bills, according to a 2015 study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. But in Illinois, state law allows a bill’s sponsor to determine whether it needs a fiscal note; a lawmaker who disagrees must gain the support of a majority of members to generate the price tag.

The governor introduced an election‑year budget that adds roughly $879 million in new spending, financed in part by some $589 million in what he likely considers politically safe tax hikes. His proposal lacks serious spending reform, and the claimed savings largely involve the federal government and technical adjustments doing the heavy lifting, not genuine cost discipline.

“There is one candidate whose particular identity, politics, and prominence put him above all the others on this issue: Illinois Governor JB Pritzker.”

JB Pritzker, for his part, launched a series of campaign ads to reinforce that he is standing up to Donald Trump, and advocating for Illinois. He is running unopposed for the Democratic nomination.

“When the state reduces shared revenue, costs do not disappear,” said Illinois Municipal League President Sheila Chalmers-Currin, also village president of Matteson. “Costs shift. They shift to property taxes, local sales taxes, and service reduction.” She said it flies in the face of lawmakers’ affordability message.