By BEN SZALINSKI
Capitol News Illinois
[email protected]
SPRINGFIELD — Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker made a “special announcement” on Friday: Illinois is renaming Lake Michigan to “Lake Illinois” and annexing Green Bay, Wisconsin, “to protect itself against” the Green Bay Packers.
The video shared by his campaign “was intended to inject some humor at a moment when I think people don’t find much that’s going on humorous,” Pritzker told reporters Monday. It poked fun at President Donald Trump for renaming the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America and pledging the U.S. will acquire Greenland.
Pritzker never referenced Trump in that video, but it was the governor’s latest method to drum up attention toward his criticism of the president. Pritzker has emerged as one of the most vocal Democrats speaking out against Trump since the Jan. 20 inauguration.
Pritzker told reporters in Springfield at the end of January he’s pushing Illinois’ Democratic members of Congress to be “persistent” about communicating the effects of Trump’s policies because he believes national media organizations don’t prioritize governors and state leaders the same as D.C. politicians.
National media attention hasn’t been a big issue for Pritzker, however. Since Trump was sworn in, Pritzker has done two CNN interviews, an MSNBC Sunday show and a profile in Puck — a national political newsletter. He’s often asked in the interviews how Democrats can infiltrate a Trump-driven news cycle.
“We need to make sure that we’re communicating properly,” Pritzker said in a CNN interview on Jan. 26. “I think that’s one of the big challenges that we had in the last election: our message wasn’t right.”
Pritzker helped organize a call at the end of January between some Democratic governors and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York to encourage Senate Democrats to more forcefully push back on Trump, according to The New York Times.
Stephen Maynard Caliendo, a political science professor at North Central College in Naperville, said while Pritzker has always been a vocal leader, it seems to have “ramped up” in Trump’s second term.
“It appears to me that he sees an opportunity to capture the American imagination a bit,” Caliendo said in an interview.
Another vocal Democratic voice, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, has been responding to wildfires near Los Angeles, which has forced him to tamp down on criticizing Trump to ensure federal disaster aid gets directed to his state, Caliendo said.
Asked Monday how he has sets himself apart from other Democrats in responding to Trump, Pritzker said he sees negative impacts already coming from Trump’s policies.
“People have been promised something by this Trump administration that he is not delivering,” Pritzker said this week. “They’ve been promised lower prices. They’ve been promised lower grocery prices. They’ve been promised lower gas prices. They’ve been promised more affordability and that is precisely the opposite of what’s happening.”
Weighing in on the issues
Just about every major story coming out of the Trump White House has been fair game for Pritzker. That includes the president’s reaction to a crash between an American Airlines plane and Black Hawk helicopter in Washington, D.C.
“While times of tragedy should be focused on mourning the victims and getting answers to their loved ones, we face the unfortunate reality that we must be honest with the nation about: Donald Trump is unfit to lead during moments of crisis like this,” Pritzker said in a statement.
Trump blamed the crash on efforts to hire a more diverse workforce, including people with disabilities, in the federal government.
Pritzker noted that he is governor of one of the busiest airspaces in the country around O’Hare and Midway airports and listed eight questions he wants the federal government to answer, including about staffing at the Federal Aviation Administration, Elon Musk’s role in personnel changes at federal agencies and if top Trump administration officials plan to cooperate in the investigation.
“There’s no way to read that other than it’s an attempt to sort of gain national prominence,” Caliendo said, adding Trump gave Pritzker an opening to position himself as a progressive alternative to Trump.
Other issues Pritzker has focused on directly affect Illinois. He’s defended the state’s “sanctuary” laws for immigrants, slammed Trump for proposing tariffs that would likely raise prices for Illinois consumers and quickly organized a news conference to explain the effects of a proposed federal spending freeze on Illinois.
“I have to say that the last 48 hours have been among the most bizarre and terrible since I took office back in the middle of Trump’s first term,” Pritzker told CNN’s Anderson Cooper after the federal spending freeze was announced then rescinded.
The governor has also often criticized the role of “President Musk” in Trump’s administration. The billionaire was put in charge of an advisory organization, the “Department of Government Efficiency,” which has played key roles in shutting off federal funding sources and controversially sought records with sensitive data about Americans.
Amid all the criticism, Pritzker has said there’s been no communication between Illinois and Trump or the White House.
“I’m looking forward to that call; certainly have a lot of things I’d like to say directly to him,” Pritzker said last week in Springfield.
Looking to 2028
Pritzker, who turned 60 in January, was vetted as a possible running mate for former Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 campaign, but he wasn’t a well-known or popular choice among Democratic voters. A NPR/PBS News/Marist poll last July found just 7% of Democrats thought Pritzker should be Harris’ running mate.
Pritzker has downplayed any interest in running for president when asked by reporters but admitted last August he was “torn” about leaving Illinois to become vice president should he have been selected by Harris and won the election.
“You don’t get on that list unless they think you actually could be president of the United States and do the job if you had to,” Pritzker told reporters in August.
Governors have good paths to the presidency because of their executive experience overseeing a state government, Caliendo said. If Pritzker is interested in running for president in 2028, there will be more obvious signs than him criticizing Trump, he added.
“If he starts heading out to a lot of visits to South Carolina and Iowa and New Hampshire, that’s when you really start to get tipped off,” Caliendo said. “Right now, this could be laying the groundwork for that, but it isn’t that out of the ordinary that somebody who feels as protected, I think, as he does to make himself one of the chief critics of the president.”
Forbes estimates Pritzker to be worth around $3.7 billion, making him one of the wealthiest politicians in U.S. history. He self-funded his way through both of his campaigns for governor with hundreds of millions of dollars. But if he runs for national office, he will need more help, Caliendo said.
“What we need to be looking for besides these very sort of public things over the next two years is how that’s going,” Caliendo said. “In other words, what kind of money is Pritzker raising? What kind of coalitions is he putting together that can be fundraising? Because as wealthy as he is, it’s hard to fund a presidential campaign out of his own pocket.”
While Pritzker hasn’t solicited any big donations to his state campaign organization, in 2023 he launched an abortion rights advocacy group that has funded ballot measure campaigns in Nevada, Ohio and Arizona. The organization, Think Big America, is sometimes called a “dark money” group because it isn’t required to report its donors – though Pritzker himself is its main financial backer.
Pritzker hasn’t made any decisions about running for a third term as governor in 2026, though he didn’t announce his 2022 reelection campaign until July 2021.
Being an incumbent isn’t as important as it used to be for a presidential candidate to be successful, Caliendo said.
“Trump has changed a lot about American politics and I think one of the things he changed is that you don’t have to have any governmental experience,” Caliendo said. “But JB Pritzker has lots of it so simply being out of position or spending all his time running for president as opposed to running a state while he’s running for president, I don’t think that’s going to be as much of a disadvantage as it would have been prior to 2015.”
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
