False claims abound in state races

As usual, plenty of false claims have been made during
this state legislative election cycle.

But the campaign I keep going back to in my own mind is
the battle in the 97th House District.

The race features freshman incumbent Rep. Harry Benton, D-Plainfield,
a union ironworker and a former local elected official. The Republican
challenger is Gabriella Shanahan, an executive assistant with the Illinois
Policy Institute.

Organized labor is keen on this race because the Illinois
Policy Institute is known for its anti-union crusades and Benton is one of
their own.

The 97th District had been held by the Republican Party
before the 2021 remap, so the Republicans really want to win it back.

But the remap did a number on this district. Donald Trump
lost the old district by eight points in 2020 and three in 2016. Trump lost the
precincts that make up the newly redrawn district by more than 10 points in
2020 and six in 2016. Every statewide Democratic candidate has won the
precincts in the new district going back to 2016 except one, appointed Republican
Comptroller Leslie Munger won it by less than four points.

The freshman incumbent and the Democrats have been
playing some games there, despite having a huge fundraising advantage of close
to $2 million for Benton to $525,000 for the Republican Shanahan (including a
$100,000 loan from herself on Nov. 1) as I write this four days before the
election.

My associate, Isabel Miller, reported a while back that
Rep. Benton told WSPY Radio earlier this year he was “pretty happy to see
that the grocery tax is going away,” after the governor proposed
eliminating the tax during his State of the State message in February.

Some of Benton’s campaign mailers even claimed that the
incumbent “supported the elimination of the grocery tax.”

But when it came time to vote on eliminating the grocery
tax, Benton didn’t vote either way.

Benton told Isabel that some of his municipalities would
lose lots of money since the 1% grocery tax was solely collected for local
governments.

But when Isabel asked him why he was touting a position
that he didn’t officially take, Benton said, “Since I didn’t vote on HB 3144,
people wouldn’t have known my position. I wanted to let people know before
anyone could misrepresent my position that while there were parts of that bill
I didn’t agree with, I had spoken out about cutting taxes on groceries.”

Um, OK.

Last month, the Democrats ran a digital ad blasting
Shanahan for accepting contributions from politicians who “voted to block
funding for testing rape kits,” among other things.

That allegation was based on campaign contributions from
Republican state legislators who voted against the state budget, which included
funding for rape kit testing. Shanahan has indeed received money from several
of those GOP members.

However, wanna take a guess who also voted with those
very same Republicans against the omnibus appropriations bill (SB251)? If you
said, “Rep. Harry Benton,” you win a prize.

A person close to Rep. Benton said at the time that the
freshman incumbent had no veto power over the House Democratic ads.

Well, the incumbent’s personal campaign fund, Friends to
Elect Harry Benton, then began running a Chicago broadcast TV ad that made the
same exact hypocritical charge.

“Gabby Shanahan won’t protect women,” Rep. Benton himself
said in the voice-over. “She’s backed by extreme politicians who voted to block
funding for testing rape kits.”

In other words, he was personally, with his own voice,
blasting his opponent for taking money from Republican legislators who made the
same exact “No” vote that he did on the budget.

Rep. Benton also said this in the ad: “I voted against a
new tax on retirement savings for our seniors.” No bill number was flashed on
the screen as a reference, and I have no idea what the heck he was talking
about.

The almost comically lopsided imbalance in campaign money
this year means that Democratic candidates can basically say whatever the heck
they want without any sort of consequence. And the collapse of local news media
in the state means that almost nobody in the district will ever hear about this
and the incumbent won’t be called to account.

The Democrats know all this, of course, which is why they
do it.

This article appears in Best Of Springfield 2024.