The Powerbroker

Good profile of J.B. Pritzker, one of the few billionaires without scummy politics and someone willing to spend that money big time to defeat Republicans.

Those who know him best occasionally posit that this sense of responsibility explains his lack of preciousness when it comes to using his abundant resources for political causes. He is unapologetic about the political headway his donations and suggestions can make — electing Democrats is important, he says, so he’s doing what he can to help — and though he has yet to decide exactly what form his 2024 spending will take, he’s already been inundated with pitches from committees and super-PACs and from people suggesting he consider funding turnout-juicing projects like abortion referenda on swing-state ballots. Multiple people who’ve talked to him about the coming presidential election independently said that “he’ll do whatever it takes” to keep Trump (or a Trumpist) from winning. In last year’s midterms, that posture meant spreading donations to gubernatorial races such as his own (he spent more than any candidate ever has to boost a far-right opponent in Illinois’s GOP primary who he determined would be easy to beat) and to lower-profile but highly consequential contests like the election of a liberal judge to tip the Wisconsin Supreme Court to the left. “From a financial perspective, it would be hard to find a hard-core Democrat who J. B. hasn’t helped,” said former Illinois congresswoman Cheri Bustos, who got her own significant boost from Pritzker after finding herself in political trouble when running the House Democrats’ campaign wing in 2020. “When you have money, it really does help. Who does he owe?” asked Bustos. Pritzker, she explained, is beholden to no donors but himself, so he approaches his job differently. “I think it’s liberating that he doesn’t have to spend one second in the call-time room.”

His straight-ahead approach to his financial influence is a practical attitude for a man who’s been around politics his whole life and whose level of involvement has been steadily increasing. Early in his career, he worked as a staffer for Illinois senator Alan Dixon, whose chief of staff was Bustos’s father. Then Pritzker ran an investment firm and tech incubator for years, and his own failed congressional race in 1998, before he gained national recognition as a donor to watch in 2008. He backed Hillary Clinton when his sister, Penny Pritzker, supported Barack Obama and was rewarded with a post as Commerce secretary in Obama’s second term.

It’s a mistake to read Pritzker’s sway at home as solely coming from his wallet, but it’s lost on no one that if Biden were to step aside and Kamala Harris were to falter, Pritzker would be without peer in his ability to fund a last-second campaign. He has proved a surprisingly adroit pol with a loyal following, developing a penchant for creating mini-moments that captivate Twitter. Take, for example, the time he caught a lobbed Jell-O shot and downed it at a recent Pride parade or the fact that lefty shitposters have fun treating him like a conquering hero online because of their constant pleasant surprise with his aggressive progressivism. As one tweeted last summer, “He is enormous, doesn’t come off as particularly intellectual, and has good instincts.”

He has in recent months also leaned into trumpeting his own accomplishments in Illinois as a counterpoint to chaos in Republican-run states, especially DeSantis’s Florida and Greg Abbott’s Texas. This has, in part, meant engaging in the culture wars. After DeSantis, whom Pritzker had previously called “just Donald Trump with a mask on,” said he would ban AP African American Studies classes in his state, Pritzker wrote an open letter to the College Board insisting that Illinois wouldn’t stand for the body engaging in a “watering down of history” in his state to appease Florida. Figuring he has the business-world credibility that many other Democrats lack, he has since considered taking an even clearer message to industry leaders around the country: Companies will find moving to red states to be unsustainable as employees flee book bans and abortion restrictions.

There are few early frontrunners for the Democratic nomination in 2028 and Pritzker should be at the very top of that list, probably along with (gross) Newsom, Harris I guess, Whitmer, and (yuck) Buttigeg.