How the Illinois Governor’s Race Turned Into One of the Most Expensive in the Country

CHICAGO — In a political climate where invective and vitriol have become the norm, the race to become governor of Illinois still sticks out for its rancor. But the bitter tenor and record-shattering money being spent here by two ultrawealthy men have little to do with the political turbulence in Washington.

It has more to do with toilets.

In the Democratic corner is J.B. Pritzker, an entrepreneur and billionaire heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune, who has contributed eye-popping amounts of his own money to the race. On the Republican side, the incumbent, Bruce Rauner, a multimillionaire former private equity executive, is seeking a second term. In all, about $244 million has flowed into their campaigns — and counting.

Rauner, who ran four years ago on a business-world, outsider platform, has struggled to make a mark as governor of a blue-leaning state and is seen as perhaps the nation’s most vulnerable incumbent governor. Illinois went without a budget for more than two years, as Rauner clashed with a Democratic Legislature over taxes, term limits, workers’ compensation and pretty much everything else.

Pritzker has other problems, too. That’s where plumbing comes in: This month, Pritzker paid $330,000 to county government after a leaked inspector general report found that tax break claims on a mansion he owned had been part of a “scheme to defraud.” The report included emails indicating that Pritzker’s wife, M.K. Pritzker, had instructed contractors to disconnect toilets in one of the family’s side-by-side mansions in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood while it was under renovation so that it could be declared uninhabitable. This way, it avoided steep taxes. Galia Slayen, a spokeswoman for J.B. Pritzker, said no laws were broken regarding the tax breaks.

The toilet revelations were only among the latest in a series of battering claims — over taxes, race, wealth, labor unions, and oversight of a state-run veterans home — in a bruising campaign. The race has packed the airwaves with ads and has left some voters, even in a place that’s accustomed to political rough and tumble, in something of a daze.

“I’ve never seen this, at all, in any race,” Ewell Wallace, a Chicago resident, said on a recent day. Wallace, who is 53 and works in information technology, said he preferred Pritzker — by a very slim margin. “I would look to the governor’s race and think the campaign should be a little more classy, but it’s all really rotten right now.”

The sheer size of spending on the race is enormous, though so far it remains shy of the record set in the 2010 campaign for governor of California. Of Pritzker’s approximately $165 million campaign war chest, about $162 million has come from his own pocket, according to public filings with the Illinois state Board of Elections. That puts Pritzker’s self-funding among the highest for a governor’s race, approaching Meg Whitman’s record, adjusted for inflation, in that 2010 California governor’s race, which she lost. Without adjusting for inflation, Pritzker’s self-funding tops Whitman’s.

Rauner’s total is approximately $80 million, of which about $58 million is his own money.

How does all this campaign cash actually get spent? Primarily on ads: Pritzker has spent more than $77 million on advertising, dwarfing the more than $36 million spent by Rauner. (There were also more esoteric expenses, like the $600 Rauner paid for an event featuring a petting zoo from a vendor called Wild Times Exotics.)

Rauner has trailed significantly in several polls, in a state that Hillary Clinton won in 2016 by 17 percentage points. Among the attacks on Rauner: His critics question his administration’s handling of an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease at a state-run home for veterans in Quincy, a small city on the western edge of Illinois.

This month, the state attorney general opened an investigation into the administration’s handling of the problem, which left about a dozen people dead over a matter of years. Lisa Madigan, the outgoing Democratic attorney general, is looking into whether the administration’s handling of the outbreak violated any laws or contributed to the deaths.

In public statements, Rauner has denied there was any slowdown in the response.

The various scandals crested earlier this month in a debate on stage at the Quincy Community Theatre, where Rauner and Pritzker faced off in tones that would not have seemed out of place on a late-night sketch show.

“Simple fact, four of my nine predecessors as governor went to jail,” Rauner said at one point. “Mr. Pritzker has a very good chance of being No. 5.” Pritzker responded by accusing the governor of a “cover-up” concerning the veterans home outbreak. As Election Day has neared, new accusations have emerged, along with punches and counterpunches.

Last week, 10 current and former members of Pritzker’s campaign staff filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Latino and black staff members had been treated differently from their white counterparts. The suit said black workers had been “herded into race-specific positions where they are expected to interact with the public, offered no meaningful chance for advancement, and receive less favorable treatment than their white counterparts.”

Pritzker’s campaign denied the allegations, saying that they were part of an extortion attempt; the campaign shared a letter the workers sent seeking $7.5 million in punitive damages before filing the suit. “The incidents listed in this complaint are baseless and make offensive claims,” Juliana Stratton, the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor and Pritzker’s running-mate, said in a statement.

On another day last week, Rauner stood before news cameras not far from the Chicago River for a news conference billed this way: “Pritzker’s Union Hypocrisy.” At issue was a report that said Pritzker, who has secured the endorsement of almost every major labor union, used nonunion workers on a $25 million renovation on one of his mansions, as well as union workers. A spokeswoman for Pritzker acknowledged the nonunion labor, and said he had minimal involvement on his home renovations.

“He’s clearly a phony, clearly a fraud on this,” Rauner said. “He doesn’t care about union workers. He cares about himself and protecting a few hundred thousand dollars of his inheritance.”

Yet Rauner has long waged war against unions: Early in his first term in office, Rauner clashed with them by issuing an executive order barring unions from requiring all state workers to pay the equivalent of dues. Plus, the governor has acknowledged, he has used nonunion labor on his own mansion.

President Donald Trump has said little about the governor’s race here, even as Chicago — in particular the intractable problem of its gun violence — has been a regular subject of his public conversation.

In the past, Rauner criticized Trump for his stances on matters like the racially-charged clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, and he also expressed misgivings about the confirmation of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

But as distressing polling numbers have continued to arrive, Rauner has struck tones not unlike the president’s. In a debate hosted by the Chicago Sun-Times, Rauner appeared to link unauthorized immigrants with the city’s problems with violence. “One of the reasons we have such high unemployment in the city of Chicago and so much crime is the massive number of illegal immigrants here take jobs away from American citizens and Chicago citizens,” Rauner said.

The governor later said his words were misconstrued.