Gov. JB Pritzker has fiscal gaps to fill after voters Tuesday rejected his signature graduated income tax proposal, which would have raised an estimated $3 billion or more by increasing income taxes on the wealthy while reducing or maintaining taxes on low and middle class incomes.
Pritzker, who contributed $56 million to the graduated income tax campaign, wasn’t the only Illinois Democrat who suffered on Tuesday. Betsy Dirksen Londrigan was trounced by U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis, R-Taylorville, in a repeat of the 2018 campaign for Congress, with few new issues raised since their contest two years ago. Last time, Londrigan lost by a whisker. This time, it wasn’t close.
Londrigan, again, campaigned largely on medical care, an issue that didn’t convince voters to elect her in 2018. Davis countered with attack ads tying the challenger to House Speaker Michael Madigan, as he did two years ago. It worked even better this time.
Democratic losses extended beyond central Illinois. The party’s majority in the state House has, pending absentee and mail-in ballots, dwindled by two seats, despite millions of dollars doled out by the state party, with Madigan as its head. With Madigan in charge, Democrats received and spent record amounts on state House races and still lost ground.
“Madigan, from top to bottom, he is the giant loser in all of this,” said Kent Redfield, a political science professor emeritus at University of Illinois Springfield. “The takeaway from the House is, they had an unbelievably huge amount of money. I suppose Bruce Rauner is smiling somewhere. … There was no blue wave.”
Beyond the state House, Democrats also lost a seat on the state Supreme Court, where incumbent Tom Kilbride, who received money tied to Madigan, became the first sitting state Supreme Court justice to lose a retention bid, failing to convince 60 percent of the electorate that he should sit on the state’s highest court.
In days leading up to the election, the internet and airwaves were filled with ads promoting and attacking Pritzker’s push to enact a graduated income tax. Ads aired in the Springfield area didn’t mention Madigan. Rather, television commercials against the tax proposal, which would have required an amendment to the state constitution, featured 30-ish women who noted that the proposal came with no guarantee that politicians in Springfield wouldn’t raise their taxes in the future.
Prior to the election, lieutenant governor Juliana Stratton said that across-the-board tax increases might be necessary if voters didn’t approve a graduated income tax that would hit the rich instead of the poor. Before the election, Pritzker in September warned that either tax increases or budget cuts would be needed if the measure didn’t pass.
Some opponents of the progressive tax plan pointed out that it wouldn’t raise sufficient money to plug budget holes, and they also noted that Illinois, unlike most states, doesn’t extend the sales tax to services, nor does the state tax retirement income, regardless of how much a retiree realizes from pensions, 401(k) accounts or other retirement income.
Proponents of the graduated income tax blamed Republicans for the measure’s defeat, blaming the GOP for budget deficits built up while Democrats controlled state government.
“Illinois is in a massive budget crisis due to years of a tax system that has protected millionaires and billionaires at the expense of our working families, a crisis that was only made worse by the coronavirus pandemic,” Quentin Fulks, chairman of the pro-progressive tax campaign, wrote in an emailed statement. “Republican legislators and their billionaire allies who brought us the dysfunction and pain of the Rauner years continue to stand in the way of common sense solutions, choosing instead to play partisan games and deceive the working families of our state.”
Todd Maisch, president of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, applauded voters in a written statement.
“It is clear that the majority of the electorate doesn’t trust their state government with their precious tax dollars,” Maisch wrote. “Illinois politicians arrogantly demanded a blank check from Illinois taxpayers and the voters rejected their plans.
Contact Bruce Rushton at brushton@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in The new Y.
