IL-Gov: Monday brought us our first candidate filing deadline of the 2018 election cycle, as campaigns in Illinois were required to submit petitions in order to appear on ballot for next year’s primary, which will take place on March 20. We've put together a calendar of every state’s filing deadlines, primaries, and (where applicable) runoffs, which you’ll want to bookmark and keep handy. You can find a list of candidates who have filed in Illinois for each race here.
At Daily Kos Elections we spend a good deal of time writing about who might or might not run for office, and filing deadlines give us a chance to take stock of where each important race stands now that their fields are set. As the deadline passes in each state, we'll review every notable Senate, gubernatorial, and House contest and give our take on the lay of the land.
However, there are a few caveats to take into account. Most importantly, a race isn't necessarily set in stone after the deadline. Illinois, in fact, regularly offers good examples of this. Because candidates have to collect a certain number of signatures from voters to qualify for the ballot, they can and do get thrown off if they don’t file enough valid petitions (and often, these petitions are challenged by opponents). We regularly see this sort of thing happen in Pennsylvania, New York, and Colorado, among other states, but many others don’t require signatures to get on the ballot, so these kinds of issues don’t arise in most places.
Sometimes we face a very different problem: Candidates will file properly and on time, but their names won’t appear on official candidate lists provided by election officials for days after the deadline. It’s therefore important to recognize that bureaucratic slowness might explain the absence of a particular candidate’s name on a particular state’s list, rather than a shock last-minute retirement. Two of the most problematic states in this regard are New Jersey and West Virginia, but this issue can crop up anywhere.
And even after a deadline passes, candidate fields can change. Candidates can drop out, or be removed from the ballot for other reasons, such as a failure to meet residency requirements. Sometimes, a new candidate can even get swapped in after a deadline, if a nominee quits and state law provides a mechanism for substituting a replacement. We’ll continue to provide updates on all such fluctuations.
There's one other thing we want to highlight before we start. At this point in the cycle, we usually have a good sense for which primary and general election candidates are serious and which aren't. However, there always are a few people who seemingly come out of nowhere to win their party's nomination, or emerge from a primary unheralded but go on to wage an unexpectedly tough general election campaign. For instance, when Ohio's filing deadline passed last cycle, we analyzed the Republican primary to succeed former Speaker John Boehner in the 8th District and identified three credible candidates. One person we did not mention at the time was veteran Warren Davidson, who picked up some influential endorsements the next month and went on to win the seat. So while filing deadlines provide us with a good opportunity to take stock of a race, we're always on the lookout for upsets.
With that, let's dive into the race for governor of Illinois. GOP Gov. Bruce Rauner unseated Democratic incumbent Pat Quinn 50-46 during the GOP wave, and he'll be a top Democratic target in this very blue state. Rauner has feuded with the Democratic-led state legislature for his entire term, and the state went two years without a budget until July, when the legislature overrode Rauner's veto. Rauner is hoping to convince voters that powerful state House Speaker Mike Madigan is the real source of the state's problems, though the governor may have gone overboard on Monday when he declared that Madigan is really the person in charge of the state and "I am not in charge. I’m trying to get to be in charge." (Apparently, he’s the reverse Al Haig.)
Before Rauner can concentrate on the general election, he has to fend off a primary challenge from the right. After Rauner signed a law allowing public funding for abortions, several prominent state Republicans unendorsed him and state Rep. Jeanne Ives announced that she would challenge the governor. However, the only poll we've seen from the primary gave Rauner a 64-19 edge. And while Rauner has taken his lumps, the ultra-wealthy incumbent is almost certainly a stronger general election candidate than the ultra-conservative Ives. Notably, Ives called for challenging "this whole idea that transgenders have rights, which is a, something that is made up from the media," and said she was "not interested in providing child care to people where you don’t even know the paternity."
One politician who considered running in the GOP primary but decided not to is state Sen. Sam McCann, who is close to labor. However, McCann announced he was ditching the GOP altogether because he thinks it's become too liberal. When he was asked if he was interested in running as an independent just said he was "abstaining from any further statement at this point."
Democrats have a primary to watch as well. Venture capitalist J.B. Pritzker, a billionaire who comes from a well-known Chicago family and considerably wealthier than even Rauner, has been running ad after ad for months, and shows no sign of stopping. Developer Chris Kennedy, the son of the late Robert F. Kennedy, and state Sen. Daniel Biss are also in. Neither of them has anything close to the resources to match Pritzker, and they've been waiting until closer to the primary to air ads, though Kennedy recently began spending. A few minor candidates are running, including Madison County Superintendent of Schools Bob Daiber, but none of them look like they have the resources to be competitive in a primary.