By BEN SZALINSKI
Capitol News Illinois
[email protected] 

SPRINGFIELD – When Gov. JB Pritzker tells audiences how he became interested in politics, it often starts with stories about his mother. 

As a child growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, Pritzker often shares, he’d attend marches, rallies and protests with his mother in support of abortion, women’s rights and LGBTQ issues. Those experiences, Pritzker says, set the foundation for many of his progressive beliefs. 

“I’m living proof that introducing your kids to the gay agenda might result in them growing up to be governor,” Pritzker told a crowd at a Human Rights Campaign event in Los Angeles in March. 

Pritzker has made supporting LGBTQ rights a regular part of his platform as governor, including speaking at dinner events for the HRC and Equality Illinois in recent months. He’s set to speak to the New Hampshire Democratic Party on Sunday – one of the first Democratic presidential primary states. 

But some Democrats, who are often named as possible 2028 Democratic presidential candidates alongside Pritzker, think the party needs to talk less about LGBTQ issues such as transgender athletes. 

“We weren’t good on the kitchen table issues; we weren’t really good on the family room — the only room we really did well on in the house was the bathroom,” former ambassador to Japan and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said on a podcast with California Gov. Gavin Newsom last week. “We not only look like we were on the cultural periphery, we look like that’s what was front and center for us.” 

Newsom, who is also a second term governor like Pritzker, ignited a controversy among Democrats earlier this year when, in a separate podcast interview with far-right activist Charlie Kirk, broke from his party and voiced opposition to transgender women competing in women’s sports.

“I think it’s an issue of fairness. I completely agree with you on that … It’s deeply unfair,” Newsom told Kirk. 

Speaking in Newsom’s state last month at the HRC event, Pritzker avoided criticizing the California governor, instead focusing on what he describes as the Trump administration’s attack on individual rights. He warned Trump’s executive actions targeting transgender people in the military and in sports could one day lead to orders targeting marriage licenses for same-sex couples.

“I won’t let hope be a blindfold and I won’t continue to advocate that we wage conventional political fights when what we really need is to become street fighters,” Pritzker said in L.A.

The HRC dinner was another example of Pritzker introducing himself to audiences outside Illinois, but he told reporters at a recent news conference in Springfield that people shouldn’t draw conclusions about his remarks. 

“I gave a speech about what I believe,” Pritzker said. “It wasn’t aimed at anybody. It wasn’t about creating a lane. These are things that I’ve said here in the state of Illinois. I repeated them in another venue. I’m perfectly happy about that. To the extent that people see it as a lane, that’s their view.”

Pritzker’s views are mainstream in the Democrat Party, University of Illinois Springfield political science professor Jason Pierceson said, who specializes on the politics of gender and sexuality. He said it’s Newsom and Emanuel who are trying to carve a more contrarian lane. 

“I think it’s less that Pritzker is carving out a lane than about embracing trans rights and LGBTQ rights,” he said in an interview. 

While Pritzker has not joined Newsom and Emanuel’s calls to avoid focusing on transgender issues, he has also suggested that Democrats make economic issues their top priority. 

“Here’s where Democrats have to be honest with ourselves: Donald Trump didn’t just ride into power on the backs of oligarchs who wanted tax cuts so badly they were willing to throw a record stock market into the toilet for them,” Pritzker said at an event last month at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. “No, a number of Americans, 49.8%, went to the ballot box agreeing with Democrat positions on the issues most important to their lives, and they picked the other guy.”

Gallup polling from September 2024 shows the economy was the top issue for voters going into the election, with 52% calling it “extremely important.” At the bottom of the 22 issues polled: transgender rights, with 18% of voters calling it “extremely important” and 36% saying it was “not important.” 

“There’s a lot of intensity by activists, particularly on the right against trans rights, but I’m not sure that translates into votes for the median voter or the independent voter,” Pierceson said. 

Pierceson said transgender rights get a lot of attention in campaigns, but voters aren’t making final decisions based only on the issue. That could mean Newsom and Emanuel are calling for an overcorrection to the Democrat platform.

“There’s a tendency I think in the professional political class to overestimate the conservatism of voters and to always argue that the most conversative position will be the most politically potent and powerful position,” Pierceson said. 

Pritzker was confronted with polling data on LGBTQ issues during his first FOX News interview as governor earlier this month. The March FOX News poll showed 68% of respondents favor President Donald Trump’s executive order attempting to ban transgender women from women’s sports, and 54% support federal policy that recognizes only two genders. Pritzker brushed aside the poll.

“You can go issue by issue and you can ask a question whether people support this issue or that,” he told the FOX News host. “Here’s what people really care about: They care about their health care, they care about their affordability, they care about the kitchen table issues that really matter every day.”

Asked by a reporter last week about his response on FOX News, Pritzker said, “We’ve got to stand up for people’s civil rights. It is vile and inhumane to go after the smallest minority and attack them as if it’s something that is OK in this country.” But he pivoted back to Trump’s tariff policy and said affordability issues “are the ones that affect them in their homes every day.”

Pierceson said it’s too soon to know what the top issues in the next two election cycles will be, but the economy will likely be one of them. He also said rather than abandon LGBTQ issues in campaigns, Democrats should reframe the issue of transgender rights, adding he doesn’t expect most of the party to follow Newsom’s and Emanuel’s position.

“I think one of the things moving forward to think about is can Democrats move away from the athletic issue to a broader narrative about discrimination and maltreatment that maybe ties into some immigration issues and other arbitrary decisions made by the Trump administration,” Pierceson said.
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.