As the days slowly tick down toward next year’s epic gubernatorial showdown, a conventional strategy has emerged as to how Democrats can unseat Governor Rauner. Rally behind a Chicago-area personality—preferably one wealthy enough to match our billionaire governor buck for buck—who will coalesce all of the city’s animus toward Rauner and Trump. (Lord knows there’s a lot of that!) Then use the massive resistance to overwhelm Rauner’s downstate support.
“I’m probably the only shop teacher who’s ever run for governor,” he says. “I’ve always been good with my hands. I can run any kind of machine you see on the face of the earth. My biggest influence was Anton Yakos—he was my shop teacher at Triad. I idolized him. He was a World War II veteran and a coal miner. He’s one of those teachers who taught you a lot more than the subject matter.”
As he sees it, downstate Illinois is far more progressive on economic issues than people think. Take Madison County, for instance. Yes, Trump won roughly 55 percent of the vote over Clinton last November. But in 2014, while Rauner racked up 58 percent over former governor Pat Quinn, almost 59 percent of Madison County went for a nonbinding referendum to raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour. And 60 percent voted for another referendum to raise taxes on millionaires to finance the state’s public schools.
On economic issues, he’s an unabashed pro-union progressive. “We have a revenue problem,” he says. “I would support a progressive income tax. There’s only one solution. The debt has to be bonded out. And we have to pay down that debt with the principal of new tax revenue. I want to become governor to stabilize Illinois. Education is my passion. No one needs to tell me how important education is to kids—I taught for 28 years. And no one needs to tell me about living in poverty—I was raised with solid New Deal Democratic values. This is who I am and who I’ve always been.”
