Gov. JB Pritzker on Thursday sought to assure Illinois residents that he would fight to preserve the state’s protections on fronts including reproductive health, immigration and LGBTQ+ rights during Donald Trump’s second term in the White House.
“To anyone who intends to come take away the freedom, and opportunity, and dignity of Illinoisans, I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior. You come for my people, you come through me,” Pritzker said Thursday at a news conference in Chicago, where he made his first public appearance since the election.
Pritzker declined to speculate about what went wrong for Democrats this year, when Trump did far better in blue states, including Illinois, where he cut his losing margin roughly in half from the previous two elections. The governor did say that a longer campaign might have benefited Vice President Kamala Harris, who didn’t enter the race until President Joe Biden dropped out on July 21.
“Look, 107 days, I think that’s how many days that Kamala Harris had to run that campaign, and so that’s an extraordinarily short amount of time. She did an extraordinary job of making it as competitive as she could,” Pritzker said. “But more time would have been better.”
Questions about what Democrats could have done differently, and why the election went badly for Harris, will be examined over the next several months, Pritzker said.
“And I think it would be premature for all of us to draw conclusions today. You have to look at the data,” he said.
The governor is widely viewed as a possible future contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, a spot that is now wide open for 2028. He has not said if he’ll run for a third term in 2026, and declined to answer questions about that on Thursday.
He noted Trump was president during his first two years as governor, and said he spent a lot of time working “to defend Illinois against an awful lot of policies that the Trump administration was imposing.”
“So I think that work is going to continue,” Pritzker said. “And I don’t have anything to announce today.”
Another possible 2028 Democratic presidential contender, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, on Thursday said he was calling a special December session of that state’s Legislature to resist Trump’s policies. In Illinois, lawmakers are scheduled to return to Springfield next week for their annual fall veto session, which now could include addressing concerns over Trump’s next term.
Pritzker has long had a fraught relationship with Trump, blasting him from the stage at this summer’s Democratic National Convention as “rich in only one thing: stupidity.”
But the billionaire governor, who was passed over after being considered to join Harris on the Democratic ticket, said he accepted Trump’s win and was willing to work with the new president.
“Donald Trump will be our next president. He won the election and we must all be willing to work together for the common good. In months ahead, we should all be focused on the peaceful transition of power, even if Donald Trump didn’t afford that to his successor,” Pritzker, referring to Trump’s refusal to acknowledge losing the 2020 election to Biden and fomenting an attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Early in his first campaign for governor in 2018, Pritzker similarly vowed to make Illinois “a firewall against Donald Trump’s destructive and bigoted agenda.”
Pritzker kept up the criticism, lambasting the Trump administration’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic from the lectern at his daily press briefings and calling him out personally on a conference call with other governors during the unrest following George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer.
The attacks on Trump only intensified during the 2024 campaign, with Pritzker making frequent references to the former president’s criminal conviction and other legal troubles.
Pritzker, a surrogate for Harris’ presidential campaign, repeatedly used words and phrases such as “racist,” “misogynist,” “homophobe,” “congenital liar,” “adjudicated rapist” and “convicted felon” to describe the Republican nominee, much to the delight of many in his party’s liberal base.
Trump appears to have taken notice, telling tech mogul Elon Musk on a livestream this summer: “Illinois’ badly run with Pritzker. He’s a real loser.”
Pritzker also has taken his fight for abortion rights to the national stage, creating and funding the dark money group Think Big America. The group, which is not required to disclose its donors but is largely supported by Pritzker, was involved in abortion rights ballot measures in eight states.
Seven of those measures won voter approval. But a Florida measure failed to reach the 60% support needed to pass, while Nebraska voters rejected protections in favor of a ban on abortions beginning at 12 weeks of pregnancy.
“We know the fight for reproductive freedom is just beginning and we will not stop until abortion access is guaranteed for every woman, regardless of zip code,” Think Big spokeswoman Christina Amestoy said in a statement Wednesday.
While Pritzker signed a measure in 2019 enshrining abortion rights into state law in Illinois, there are no protections in the state constitution, and supporters opted not to seek an amendment this year.
The governor on Thursday recalled, as he often does, his political origin story of stuffing political mailers into envelopes with his mother, “back when it must have seemed like the pace of change was heartbreakingly slow.”
“I know that there are a lot of women out there this week, especially young women, asking themselves if they will ever get to see a female president,” Pritzker said, with Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton standing behind him. “And to them I want to say, I too am tired of having to explain to my daughter and to my son too that eventually the time will come, but not now. Yet here we are again.”
Jeremy Gorner contributed to this report.
