Here at Eye On Illinois, the preferred focus is government in favor of politics, but of course campaigns and elections are essential to determining who gets to do the actual governing.
As such, I’ve been enjoying Capitol News Illinois’ reporting on the two majority-party gubernatorial campaigns. Although the primary was settled in mid-March, things really get going around state fair time in August.
There are plenty of interesting issue conversations – I wrote Tuesday about how Republican Darren Bailey and Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker view public education – but today’s question is purely mathematical: Does Bailey have the votes to prevent Pritzker’s third term?
Elementally. Yes. None of the votes cast in the 2022 matchup between the two carry over to 2026. As of Monday, the State Board of Elections reported 8,285,475 active registered voters, so it’s a race to 4,142,738.
Leaving it there is like saying the White Sox (73-65 on Tuesday) can finish the season with 97 wins, or the Cubs’ Pete Crow-Armstrong can hit 36 more home runs to reach 74. It’s mathematically possible, but we have more than a century of data showing the statistical improbability of either outcome.
Elections – as Bailey repeatedly told downstate supporters – are a turnout game. In 2022, when Pritzker topped Bailey 2,253,748-1,739,095, turnout was only 51.06% overall. Of those 4,144,125 voters, almost 39,500 didn’t cast a vote for Pritzker, Bailey or minority party candidates.
Modern campaigns have plenty of tools to make highly educated guesses about what number of votes they’re actually chasing, the rest of us just have history, such as knowing GOP Gov. Jim Thompson cleared 3 million votes in 1976, or that more Illinoisans voted for President Donald Trump in 2024 and 2020 than for Pritzker in 2022 … and also that Pritzker’s 2018 total was larger than any Republican running for president scored in Illinois since Ronald Reagan in 1984.
Clearly those raw totals need to be understood in the context of population, turnout and contemporaneous political climate. But still they offer some perspective about what’s possible. Bailey’s campaign knows it needs to buck historical trends and is publicly pragmatic about what it might take to accomplish a lofty goal.
Professional pollsters ideally isolate “likely” voters from the general population of anyone with a viewpoint. Yet it’s tough to get a real handle on how many people truly would consider either option at this point, especially with both parties running the same candidates.
If you’re one of those voters, I’d love to discuss your thought process and decision timeline, and whether you feel alone in the middle or potentially one of thousands. It’s frankly far more compelling than continued insistence from partisan diehards – perhaps because of rarity.
• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Local News Network. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.
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September 3, 2026 at 10:43AM
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