At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the importance of money in national politics was clear, from the appeals made at fancy fundraisers to the unrelenting streams of video ads and text messages.
But in Illinois, big money is inundating politics at a pace that virtually puts government offices in the Land of Lincoln up for sale.
Few states invite politicians to raise and spend so aggressively as Illinois, where large infusions of cash led by billionaire Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker and his billionaire Republican enemies are enabled by loose rules and feeble enforcement standards that tempt politicians to push the limits of campaign finance boundaries.
As part of the ongoing series “Culture of Corruption,” which explores how Illinois’ voracious politics, structural flaws and tepid oversight set the state apart, the lack of meaningful campaign finance reform has repeatedly been identified as a key factor.
In this state:
- Campaign contribution limits, approved only 15 years ago, are easily circumvented by a common maneuver political insiders call “the money bomb,” meaning the restrictions are essentially ignored.
- Politicians use their campaign funds to legally launder cash so donors can obscure their identities and get around contribution limits to send more money to their allies.
- Legislative measures to control campaign spending — often announced with great fanfare — are repeatedly buried or watered down by the very lawmakers who would be bound by them.
- Election laws banning political action committees from coordinating with the candidates they support fail to define “coordination.”
- The state agency charged with enforcing election laws has little authority to launch its own investigations or levy tangible penalties that might deter violators.
The flood of money pouring into the state’s pliable political system has created a raucous campaign environment where the last two races for Illinois governor have become the most and third-most expensive governor’s races in the nation, and, in 2022, allowed the incumbent governor to spend as much as he wanted to help pick the Republican rival he correctly thought would be easiest to defeat.
It has permitted legislative leaders in Springfield to consolidate their power and protect incumbents by weaponizing political donation rules meant to ensure fair play and directing the flow of cash to preferred candidates.
It allows indicted politicians, including two of the longest-serving elected officials in state history, to pay for their criminal lawyers with campaign cash and, if they are convicted of public corruption, to use those same funds to pay heavy fines.
And it’s allowed super PACs backing both Republicans and Democrats in races from governor to the state Supreme Court to run wild with almost no accountability.
“I think we’re losing our touch with our democracy, where voters matter and voters determine the outcome of an election,” said Chris Kennedy, a scion from the famous political family who spent more than $1.2 million of his own money in the 2018 Democratic primary race for Illinois governor but was overwhelmed by Pritzker’s personal spending. “And instead we’re converting ourselves, let’s say, from a democracy to something like a cashocracy, where money matters. And whoever has access to the most money wins.”
Today’s confluence of money and politics is creating an atmosphere last seen during the Gilded Age in the late 19th century, said Stephen Nelson, a Northwestern University associate professor of political science who has studied the influence of the super rich on politics.
“It’s the only time in American history where you saw a similar fusion of wealth and power,” Nelson said.
Campaign cash has long been associated with the state’s history of public corruption, with politicians trading official actions for donations or spending the money on themselves. Most sensationally, former Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Chicago schemed about trading campaign contributions for several official acts, from naming Barack Obama’s replacement in the U.S. Senate to deciding whether to implement an increase in children’s hospital reimbursement rates.
Blagojevich’s predecessor, Republican Gov. George Ryan of Kankakee, was pinched in a widespread corruption probe rooted in state workers selling driver’s licenses to raise money for Ryan’s campaign fund, which became the nation’s first political committee to be indicted for racketeering.
Just this summer, former downstate Republican state Sen. Sam McCann, who made a quixotic third-party bid for governor in 2018, received a 42-month federal prison sentence for misusing campaign funds for purely personal items, including making payments on two pickup trucks and a family vacation to Colorado.
“Because we do have this problem of rampant big money in our elections, we do have this history of corruption, those are all good reasons to have strong campaign finance rules, and we don’t,” said Alisa Kaplan, executive director of Reform for Illinois, a nonprofit that tracks money in politics and advocates for transparency in Illinois government.
“I work with a lot of people who work on these issues in a lot of jurisdictions or on the national level, and Illinois … is considered one of the most problematic states for campaign finance regulation.”
The battling billionaires
Midway through March 2017, the man who would become the nation’s wealthiest major elected public official — richer than even then-President Donald Trump — created an exploratory committee to run for Illinois governor.
Less than a month later, having decided to move forward as a candidate, JB Pritzker wrote his campaign fund a check for $7 million. Two months later he wrote another $7 million check, followed by more that August, October, November, December, and more in January, February and March 2018. A week before the Democratic primary was to be held, he wrote one more check, for $6.3 million.
By the time he won the primary, Pritzker had given his campaign fund $69.5 million and in the process helped push a state already awash in political cash into unheard-of territory.
An heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune worth an estimated $3.5 billion, according to Forbes, Pritzker had long been a donor to Democratic causes and candidates even before a failed 1998 congressional primary campaign where he spent $500,000 to finish third.
But with his victory in the 2018 race for governor, Pritzker has given a rolling seminar on how to turn private wealth into political prominence. Over the years, Pritzker’s political spending has moved close to half a billion dollars as he’s doled out cash for his own campaigns, those of allied Democrats in Illinois and beyond, for Chicago’s Democratic National Convention and for causes such as abortion rights — all helping increase his national profile for the future.
Self-funding helps inoculate candidates from donor scandals and allows public officials to make the case they can’t be bought by special interests. But candidates opening up their wallets so readily can challenge the average voter’s sense of fair play.
Nelson, who at Northwestern has studied billionaire spending on politics across the world, said billionaires who choose to put their own names on the ballot tend to win.
“They have all this unlimited capacity to spend on their campaigns,” Nelson said. “So they can get their names out there. They can pick their spots. They can choose an election cycle. They don’t have to work through the more traditional party-driven mechanisms where you get … selected by party elites and pushed up through the different kind of levels of party leadership.
“They can … leapfrog right to the front of the line,” Nelson said.
Pritzker did not create the situation Illinois finds itself in with campaign finance, but his unmatched personal resources have put state politicians’ need for political cash into hyperdrive. As a result, a small group of millionaires and billionaires has amassed even more influence on the state’s most significant elections.
Even Pritzker has acknowledged it is far from a perfect situation, saying he supports campaign finance reform in Illinois and nationwide.
“Do I think that self-funding campaigns are the answer to politics? No,” Pritzker said during an event at Harvard University after his 2022 victory. “And I believe we ought to change it. I don’t know in the current environment how we change that because the Supreme Court of the United States essentially has said that it’s free speech to spend as much money as you want.”
In the 2010 Citizens United decision, the court ruled that corporations and other outside groups such as Super PACs can spend as much as they like on elections because limiting “independent political spending” violates the First Amendment right to free speech. The court held that independent spending wasn’t a major threat to corruption as long as it wasn’t coordinated with a candidate’s campaign.
In his first race for governor alone, Pritzker set what was then a national self-funding record by putting $171.5 million into his successful 2018 campaign against one-term Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, himself a wealthy venture capitalist who spent $79 million, including $50 million of his own money and $22.5 million from Ken Griffin, the founder and CEO of the once-Chicago-based Citadel hedge fund.
The previous overall record for spending on an Illinois governor’s race was $112 million, set four years earlier when Rauner spent $65.3 million, including $37.5 million of his own money, to defeat Blagojevich’s successor, Democrat Pat Quinn.
In winning a second term in 2022, Pritzker spent more than $130 million to defeat Republican Darren Bailey, a downstate farmer and legislator. The race became a battle of billionaires as ultraconservative national megadonor Richard Uihlein, the owner of Uline office supply, funneled more than $42 million into the race through a political action committee backing Bailey. He also gave $12 million directly to Bailey’s campaign fund.
The billionaire battle had escalated during the GOP primary as Uihlein’s cash faced off against $50 million from Griffin, who backed Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin’s campaign. Irvin came in third in the race.
Pritzker’s money also played a big role in the GOP primary. During the 2022 primary season, Pritzker donated $24 million to the Democratic Governors Association, which then used it to attack Irvin — the candidate Democrats saw as their greatest threat in the general election. The group also gave a backhanded boost to Bailey’s candidacy by funding TV ads that made Bailey simultaneously more attractive to conservative Republican primary voters and less attractive to the more moderate general Illinois electorate.
Overall, Pritzker has given himself and other Democrats, organizations and PACs more than $400 million since 1994, including $58 million on a failed effort to replace Illinois’ flat-rate income tax with a graduated rate, Illinois State Board of Elections records show. He’s given millions of dollars more on the federal level backing Democratic candidates and special interest PACs, records show.
With Pritzker proving more than willing to spend from his bank account, major Republicans, led by Griffin and Uihlein, have fought back.
Griffin was Illinois’ wealthiest person at $37.5 billion, according to Forbes, until he left the state in 2022 as Irvin was headed to his primary defeat.
Since 2002 Griffin has spent $179 million on various Illinois campaigns, state election finance records show. Aside from the more than $103 million he spent fighting the income tax amendment and on the GOP governor primary, he also gave $36 million to Rauner, $12 million to the former head of the Illinois House Republicans and millions more to defeat a Democratic state Supreme Court justice seeking retention, the first time that’s ever happened.
Uihlein, the Lake Forest scion of a founder of Schlitz beer who has become one of the nation’s top conservative GOP donors, has spent more than $91 million on Illinois candidates and causes alone since 1998, nearly $80 million in the last 10 years, state campaign finance records show.
In recent years, Uihlein’s conduit has been Dan Proft of Naples, Florida, a failed candidate for Illinois governor, right-wing radio talk show host, political operative and self-identified partner in publications and websites that are designed to resemble legitimate news sites but feature conservative political advocacy.
Two Proft independent expenditure PACs have been given nearly $60 million. In recent years, the state elections board received several complaints that alleged improper coordination between the Proft PACs and political candidates but were dismissed due to the vague language in Illinois’ laws. The state board did find last year that one of the political action committees, the People Who Play By The Rules PAC, failed to disclose its spending in the 2022 governor’s race in a timely manner, but the fine was just $25,500, a pittance compared with its holdings.
Directed donations
One factor in Illinois’ out-of-control campaign spending began more than 40 years ago as a good-government effort to reduce wasteful state expenditures.
Backed by Quinn, a citizen activist who later became governor, the “Cutback Amendment” of 1980 changed the makeup of the Illinois House from 177 legislators elected in 59 three-member districts to 118 representatives from 118 districts. While the change initially achieved some cost savings, it also contributed mightily to concentrating cash and power into the hands of Illinois’ legislative leaders.
With smaller, single-member districts, many rank-and-file lawmakers came to depend on leadership from party heads in the House and Senate for money and assistance in exchange for their loyalty. Those dynamics were a key factor in the extended reign of Michael J. Madigan, the nation’s longest-serving statehouse leader and the former head of the state Democratic Party.
Madigan, 82, is now awaiting trial on federal corruption charges. Accused of participating in a wide variety of bribery and racketeering schemes from 2011 to 2019 aimed at using the power of his public office for personal and political gain, he has pleaded not guilty.
Madigan was a master of the state’s campaign finance laws and knew how to obscure the original source of donations. A former top Madigan lieutenant explained one such tactic, called “directed money,” in detail last summer in federal court.
Former state Rep. Lou Lang, a deputy Democratic majority leader when Madigan was speaker, explained that donors would send money to certain campaign funds with the expectation that Lang and others would pass that cash to another candidate in a competitive race.
“Directed money is a phrase referring to campaign donations procured by a third party, in this case likely the speaker, to go to a legislator or some other public official that has a campaign account for the purpose of re-donating it to other folks,” Lang testified.
Viewed in Springfield as legal money laundering, the activity not only allows donations to be masked, but it could allow politicians to keep getting cash from contributors who have given them the maximum amount allowed by law.
Lang said he would receive a list of which candidates needed a financial boost and then be told to “send the money out.”
The funds sent to the lawmaker would be directed by Madigan or the Madigan-controlled Democratic Party of Illinois, said Lang, who testified at the federal perjury-related trial that led to the conviction of Madigan’s chief of staff, Tim Mapes, who was also the state party’s longtime executive director.
Matt Dietrich, the state election board’s spokesperson, said the process meets statutory requirements. “From a legal standpoint, it’s all been disclosed,” he said.
Illinois law on donations tracks only individual transactions, leaving it unclear whether a particular contribution might have originated with another donor.
“You’d have to be able to conclude on your own that the intent” of the first donor is to give to a third person by going through a middle donor, Dietrich said. “You’d have to infer the cause and effect.”
While every system has questionable workarounds, candidates running for federal office are required to be more transparent. An actual notation is required by the Federal Election Commission when the original donor is explicit about the ultimate recipient, said Derek Willis, a University of Maryland data journalism teacher who specializes in campaign finance.
“If a donor wants to give money to a candidate via a third party, that third party is required by law to submit to the FEC the name and information about the donor and the recipient — even if the amount is under $200, which is the threshold for reporting individual contributions,” Willis said. “That additional layer is important because, without it, we know less about donors and what they might want from the people they give to.”
Cynthia Canary, a longtime reform advocate who worked on post-Blagojevich changes to campaign finance laws, said the Illinois process Lang described “makes a mockery out of disclosure.”
“I don’t know any reason why you would have directed campaign contributions if not for trying to obscure the path of the funds,” she said.
Christine Radogno, a former state Senate GOP leader from Lemont, acknowledged the move is “common practice” and a problem with the system overall.
“It’s another way around the cap,” she said.
The money bomb
In the post-Blagojevich era, public pressure pushed lawmakers and then-Gov. Quinn to cap the size of political contributions. But they also wanted to protect incumbents against free-spending millionaires and billionaires who might materialize as challengers.
With a clause called the “millionaires amendment,” the lawmakers in 2009 decided the caps on contributions would be lifted if any candidate in a race reported reaching a “self-funding threshold” of $250,000 in statewide races and $100,000 elsewhere. A few years later, super PAC spending of the same amounts in races could also lift the caps.
Soon the clause had a new nickname, “the money bomb,” as Illinois politicians from both parties turned the clause into an offensive weapon that allowed them to raise unlimited cash if they could scrape together enough cash to trigger the amendment.
For example, Madigan donated $100,001 to his personal campaign fund in the 2018 election cycle even though he was running unopposed. That allowed him to raise well over $11 million that he could distribute to others.
This kind of maneuver has become increasingly popular. In the 2012 election, the cap was broken in only four races, including a north suburban race for state representative and the state’s attorney’s race in Peoria County. By 2022, the cap was broken in 49 general election races across the state, including most of the statewide races, 26 legislative races and 50 judicial races, State Board of Elections records show.
In all, the amendment has been triggered in 358 primary and general election races since 2012, allowing 865 candidates to raise as much political cash as they could, according to an analysis of state records. Nearly 160 were candidates for the Illinois General Assembly.
Don Harmon of Oak Park, the current Senate president, sponsored both the 2009 campaign finance legislation and the super PAC modification in 2012, when he argued: “It’s only fair that the candidates competing with that super PAC be able to raise enough money to run a campaign and to defend themselves.”
But all of these exceptions helped make rank-and-file candidates more dependent on legislative leaders, including Harmon, who could contribute money to the incumbents’ reelection campaigns.
And though Harmon was not the first to deploy the cap-lifting provision as a weapon, he may be the most creative. At least three times in recent years, Harmon personally loaned precisely $100,001 to his Friends of Don Harmon for State Senate campaign committee. Each time he repaid himself.
The first time Harmon did this was on Dec. 4, 2019, after John Cullerton, a Democrat from Chicago, announced he would step down as Senate president. As Democrats looked for a new leader, Harmon’s move boosted his fund-raising credibility.
At first, election authorities told Harmon he could not invoke the self-funding clause because his seat wasn’t immediately up for reelection. But Harmon successfully argued the law states the maneuver can be used 12 months before “an election,” not specifically one in which he is a candidate, a board spokesman said.
Six months later, having won the Senate president position, Harmon retrieved his money from his campaign fund, only to lend it back again within two days — a move that triggered the removal of contribution limits through the end of 2020, records showed. He executed similar maneuvers in 2021. In 2023, records show, he moved to lift the caps into this year.
A Harmon spokesperson maintained the legislative leader has made moves necessary to respond to a political environment that can be altered overnight by wealthy donors.
“Elections have consequences, and Senate President Harmon will always use every tool at his disposal to defend and expand the Democratic majority in the Senate so that no billionaire, corporate special interest, or wealthy group of individuals can use money to overwhelm the will of the people,” the spokesperson said.
Illinois’ millionaires amendment is a rarity among state campaign laws. The city of Philadelphia set up a similar system to lift campaign fundraising caps, but there, the rules don’t open the doors as widely as in Illinois.
Canary, the longtime reform advocate, recalled that any bill limiting campaign contributions was not going to move forward in Illinois’ General Assembly without the millionaires amendment supported by Harmon and other ranking lawmakers.
“There was absolutely no way to get anything passed without that amendment,” Canary said. “I think candidates were seeing a millionaire behind every tree, but very quickly it is something that is manipulated. It is being manipulated to open up — lift — all the limits.”
“I get why it was put into place — to equalize the playing field, but that’s not the way it works in reality,” said Sarah Bryner, the Chicago-based research director of OpenSecrets, a national campaign finance watchdog. “I just think it’s kind of silly to operate as though we have limits in Illinois when, in actuality, they very quickly go out the window – certainly in all of the important races.”
Kent Redfield, a campaign finance expert who advised reformers on the Illinois law setting contribution limits, called the way the amendment is being used a “pretty significant distortion” of the original intent and spirit of the law.
“It just reinforces the narrative that it’s all rigged for the people in power, that the rules don’t apply to them,” said Redfield, a retired professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Springfield.
Super PACs running wild
As cash surges into political races nationwide, one of the few restrictions in both federal and state law is a ban on “coordination” between candidate campaigns and super PACs that support a politician or aid in opposing a competitor.
For example, the state elections board in 2016 found complaints “justifiable” that a Dan Proft PAC funding the fake newspapers with political content had coordinated with candidates. The Liberty Principles PAC was ordered to identify itself in future publications, but Proft simply closed it down in January 2020 with nearly $39,000 unaccounted for.
Unlike federal law, however, Illinois statutes do not specifically define what activities amount to coordination — a difference vividly amplified this summer when state election officials rejected a Democratic complaint about activities of a different Proft super PAC, People Who Play By The Rules, during the 2022 race for governor.
According to testimony in the state elections board case, Bailey and his campaign manager flew to a Chicago-area country club to meet with Proft the day after Bailey won the Republican primary in June 2022.
In a private room, Proft placed an envelope on a table and told Bailey it contained $20 million from Uihlein, the Lake Forest billionaire, according to the testimony. If Bailey fired his staff and hired Proft, the money would go directly to the campaign. If Bailey refused, the money would go to Proft’s PAC. Bailey ultimately declined Proft’s offer, and his campaign never got Uihlein’s $20 million, though Proft’s PAC ran TV ads supporting Bailey’s candidacy.
Democrats contended the meeting proved coordination between Proft and his super PAC and the candidate, Bailey. They also noted the PAC’s TV ads used footage from Bailey’s campaign website and mirrored Bailey’s talking points, including ones Bailey made on regular visits to Proft’s radio show.
But the board dismissed the complaint in June, citing in part the lack of a definition for coordination. Board Vice Chair Laura Kent Donahue, who served 22 years as a Republican member of the Illinois Senate until 2003, suggested it was up to the legislature, not the board, to clarify the law.
Illinois lawmakers aren’t expected to return to session until after the November general election. Even then, Redfield, the campaign finance expert, said he is doubtful any action will be taken.
While the Proft case highlights the limitations of the rules about super PACs, another situation shows the state board’s inability to fully enforce even the rules it does have on the books.
In 2020, Republican billionaires combined with dark money groups and other donors to dislodge Madigan-backed Democrat Thomas Kilbride from the Supreme Court — the first high court justice to lose his seat on a one-person ballot asking voters whether he should be retained for another term. Kilbride broke the self-funding cap with a $110,000 loan and repaid himself once he lost.
For nearly six decades, Democrats had held the majority on the Illinois Supreme Court. But two of seven seats came open in the November 2022 election, giving Republicans a rare chance to take over. Instead, Democrats won both races and increased their majority to 5-2 from 4-3. But their victories were tainted by a friendly super PAC’s clear violations of campaign disclosure laws.
All for Justice, an independent expenditure committee supported by Harmon and run by a close ally that backed the Democratic winners, failed to report how it spent most of its $7.3 million on the races until after the two new justices — Mary Kay O’Brien and Elizabeth Rochford — took their oaths of office.
Under state law, All for Justice should have begun reporting its spending by September 2022 — two months before Election Day and leaving enough time for Republicans to react.
The $7.3 million accounted for 40% of all the money spent on behalf of the Democratic candidates and funded commercials that painted the Republican candidates as virulently anti-abortion just months after the U.S Supreme Court’s decision to send the abortion rights issue back to the states.
All for Justice’s sole listed officer was attorney Luke Casson, who has served as political director for the Democratic Party of Oak Park, Harmon’s political base, and as an outside counsel to Harmon in his role as Senate president.
After the Tribune first reported about All for Justice’s failure to file timely spending reports, the State Board of Elections unanimously agreed to fine the PAC $108,500 — likely the highest amount in the agency’s history.
The PAC responded not by paying the fine but by emptying its bank account, transferring nearly $150,000 into another PAC that shares the address of the law firm headed by Casson.
Casson sought to settle the case for $30,000, but the bipartisan board rejected his offer. All for Justice then officially shut down on April 12. If the committee remains closed for two full years, the fines will go away, an election official said.
There is a provision in the board’s administrative rules that makes the officers of a PAC “personally liable” for civil penalties if the PAC “lends or donates funds to a second political committee” while it owes fines to the State Board of Elections. But there is no evidence the board has taken any enforcement action against Casson, the only officer of the All for Justice PAC.
Attorney Terry Ekl — a key fund-raiser and strategist for Michael Burke, one of the Republican Supreme Court candidates — called the super PAC’s spending “staggering” and said he feared fines under $100,000 for such violations would embolden others to violate the law. The other GOP candidate, former Lake County Sheriff Mark Curran, suggested a task force should be formed to recommend how to make laws tougher.
Harmon’s team pointed to prior statements that noted he has previously said he would “gladly” work on any additional tools the legislature, governor or state agencies feel are “necessary to create greater trust in the political system.”
The two new Democratic justices have more than eight years left on their terms.
Legal bills
Illinois’ liberal rules on how politicians can use their campaign cash have been a boon to public officials in trouble with the law, allowing them to fund their defense with other people’s donations.
One of the most recent examples is also one of the most stark — Mike Madigan.
Since January 2018, Madigan’s campaign fund has spent nearly $8.5 million on legal fees to Katten Muchin Rosenman, the primary law firm handling the defense in his racketeering case set for trial in October, according to campaign disclosure reports.
Former Ald. Ed Burke, 14th, spent nearly $3.8 million on legal fees tied to his federal shakedown case before he was sentenced to two years in federal prison. That amount included covering hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills for a longtime aide who won an acquittal in the same trial.
Quarterly campaign disclosure reports this spring showed Madigan still had almost $6.3 million in his personal campaign fund; Burke had about $8 million.
The Illinois Supreme Court has stood behind the use of campaign cash for criminal defense lawyers, though the court noted it should be allowed for “customary and reasonable expenses” tied to an elected official’s performance of his public duties.
“You can make a case that you shouldn’t use campaign dollars to cover yourself in a criminal case, but we have to remember that you’re innocent until proven guilty,” said Susan Garrett, a former state senator who chairs the Center for Illinois Politics, a nonpartisan government watchdog group. But she urged exploring whether politicians should reimburse their campaign funds if they ultimately are found guilty of crimes.
In New York, a bill has been introduced repeatedly in the Albany statehouse to ban campaign funds from being used to cover a public official’s bills for criminal lawyers. Examples of such spending include the corruption cases of convicted former New York House Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, and former New York Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, a Republican.
“Contributors make donations to support the political campaigns of candidates, not their criminal legal defense,” said New York state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, the measure’s sponsor. “It’s a bait and switch. Not only is it disingenuous on the part of the candidate, but you’re putting contributors in the awkward position of taking sides on a criminal prosecution by repurposing their contribution toward legal costs.”
In Illinois, House Republican leader Tony McCombie of Savanna recently pushed similar legislation but watched it stall in a chamber ruled by a Democratic supermajority.
Obstacles to reform
Some Springfield lawmakers have tried to address the problems with campaign financing that have plagued Illinois for generations. Many of those legislative efforts simply died or were riddled with loopholes that weakened their effectiveness, showing how difficult it is for even sincere reform efforts to succeed.
In 1998, for instance, the legislature enacted a ban on purely personal spending from campaign funds — but the new restrictions affected only future politicians. Veteran public officials were grandfathered out.
And the post-Blagojevich reform package that led to the state’s first contribution caps fell drastically short of the far-reaching recommendations from a commission appointed by then-Gov. Quinn and led by former assistant U.S. attorney Patrick Collins, who successfully prosecuted former governor Ryan.
The initial legislative package got so watered down Collins complained it would perpetuate Blagojevich-style “fundraising on steroids,” and Quinn, who initially supported the compromise, ultimately vetoed it.
The next version passed, but it kept carve-outs allowing legislative leaders to transfer significant amounts of money and the millionaires amendment that weakened contribution caps.
Still, even reformers such as Canary testified in favor of the bill, explaining she’d worked on reform efforts for a decade and she’d “really like to take a step” toward taming the state’s notorious campaign system.
Quinn signed the legislation into law on Dec. 9, 2009 — the first anniversary of Blagojevich’s arrest.
Ten years later, as federal investigations flared up in Chicago and Springfield, a bipartisan panel of lawmakers was tasked with proposing new ethics laws, including measures to control campaign fundraising. But the panel never released a report as the effort fizzled when COVID-19 took hold.
After a growing federal investigation led to Madigan’s ouster as speaker and his resignation from the House in early 2021, a few smaller-bore pieces of reform legislation won approval, including a slightly broader ban on raising money around days when the Illinois General Assembly was in session.
Reform advocates wanted more, but Harmon played down their criticism, saying on WLS-AM, “I don’t know that we should be listening to the indignation profiteers as to what is or is not adequate ethics reform.”
Kaplan’s Reform for Illinois has pushed legislation on disclosure of the original donors of campaign funds to super PACs to shine light on dark money and to flesh out a definition for what constitutes coordination between a super PAC and a campaign.
Kaplan also has pressed for public financing as a possible way to reel in campaign spending, but the idea has failed to gain traction in Springfield.
A task force set up two years ago to study public financing for judicial elections was supposed to file a report by June 30. But the panel hasn’t even met, and several slots on the task force are vacant. The panel’s existence has been extended to July 1, 2025.
One of the boldest experiments in Illinois to address political spending inequities is a system tied to small donor matching for Evanston mayoral races. The limited public-financing plan is set to begin in the spring of 2025 and is supported by Mayor Daniel Biss, a former state senator who unsuccessfully ran for governor in the 2018 Democratic primary against Kennedy and Pritzker.
“What I thought was that people should be able to run for mayor of Evanston and serve in that capacity not because of their wealth or their fundraising connections but because of what they had to offer the community,” Biss said. “I think the role that money plays in politics is to limit who can serve. And that’s a shame.”
Biss noted that public financing has been used in New York and elsewhere around the country, and he would like to see it catch on throughout Illinois.
“I think it absolutely improves competition,” Biss said. “It lowers barriers for participating in politics and serving in government.”
In Chicago, a proposal that sprouted over the summer would give City Council candidates as much as $200,000 in public funds as a way to dampen the influence of wealthy donors. Most of the public money would go only to campaigns that collect small-dollar donations, which would then be multiplied with public dollars. The campaigns would have to abide by contribution limits and rules on how the cash would be spent.
“Our current campaign finance system is broken,” said Ald. Matt Martin, 47th, chair of the council’s ethics committee. “Too often it forces candidates to rely heavily on a few big special interest donors to fund their campaigns.”
But the proposal faces long odds, just as similar efforts in Springfield do.
The General Assembly’s spring session wrapped up without any movement on closing the self-funding loopholes or strengthening the lax enforcement in Illinois.
Instead, an extensive election bill recently signed by Pritzker gives legislative leaders even more financial power to protect their incumbents and ensure loyalty.
Under the old law, political party transfers to candidates during primaries were not unlimited but were still exceptionally high — $200,000 for statewide races, $125,000 for state Senate races and $75,000 for state House races.
The new law removed those limits, a significant move that reflects party leaders’ intent to gain more control over primary elections — often the only meaningful contests in a state where many districts are “safe” for one party or the other to win easily.
Canary, who once ran a reform committee for former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, said campaign finance is an issue “to be vigilant about and stay on top of because there are some powerful motivations for working around the system.”
But Canary also delivered a warning: The political desire must be in place to rectify the deficiencies in laws that are exploited over and over.
“You need to have the will to shut it down,” Canary said, “and we just haven’t had that will in this state.”
