Early voting hours and locations greatly expanded across the state this week as the campaign season entered its final two-week stretch. Polling places opened across the city of Chicago as well. Information on early voting for each local election authority can be found on the Illinois State Board of Elections website here, or by visiting elections.il.gov.
According to the state elections board, 265,937 of the 795,085 requested mail ballots had been returned as of Monday, while 66,934 early votes had been cast and 1,009 grace period votes cast. The candidates for governor, meanwhile, continued their final pushes to get out the voters that have not yet cast a ballot.
For Gov. JB Pritzker, the recent public appearances included a stop Tuesday in Rock Island County, where he appeared with Democratic 17th Congressional District candidate Eric Sorensen to support that candidate over his GOP rival, Esther Joy King. Sorensen and Pritzker emphasized their support for abortion rights.
On Monday, Oct. 24, the governor rallied with teacher unions in Peoria, then in Urbana, speaking to some of the Democratic Party’s most important backers. That was the governor’s latest labor union stop, following a Sunday appearance before the International Union of Electric Engineers Local 150 in suburban Countryside.
He contended Bailey is too extreme for Illinois, a message Pritzker has emphasized throughout the campaign. He has remained on the attack against his conservative rival even as recent polls have shown the incumbent with a double-digit lead. As of Oct. 26, the political handicapping website FiveThirtyEight, which aggregates data from multiple polls, estimated Pritzker’s average lead at 13.5 percentage points, 51.6 percent to 38.1 percent. It had the Libertarian candidate, Scott Schluter, at about 4.8 percent.
Bailey’s campaign released its own sponsored poll, which was logged by FiveThirtyEight, that showed him trailing Pritzker by about two percentage points – a drastic outlier from multiple nonpartisan polls. In his daily Facebook video Tuesday, Bailey contended he was in the lead. The Republican spent Monday morning greeting voters at the Belmont train station in Chicago while his Twitter account spent the early part of the week retweeting stories about shootings in the city that he has repeatedly described as a “hellhole.”
He spent the previous week on a “get out the vote” bus tour, stopping in 16 cities and towns across the state, including Anna, Belleville, Springfield, Champaign, Arthur, Joliet, Aurora and Naperville.
At the Springfield stop last week, Bailey once again mentioned a “zero based budget” as his plan for balancing state finances, although he has persistently refused to name any state spending cuts he would look to implement if elected. He has said that will be determined by the agency heads he hires to replace the current agency directors he plans to fire. He has said he will plan to name the replacement candidates after the election.
Pritzker, meanwhile, touted his first-term legislative wins to the union members in Urbana, highlighting the increased minimum wage to $15 hourly by 2025, protections for women seeking abortions in Illinois, the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act that increases investment in renewable energy, and the requirement that LGBTQ and Asian American history be taught in Illinois schools.
