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Bruce Rauner — news, coverage & facts — IJR

2014 gubernatorial campaign

In March 2013, Rauner formed an exploratory committee to look at a run for Governor of Illinois as a Republican. Rauner said that his top priorities included streamlining government, improving education, and improving the state's business climate. He supported term limits and said he would serve no more than eight years (two terms) as governor. On June 5, 2013, Rauner officially announced his candidacy for governor, telling Chicago magazine's Carol Felsenthal that his platform would include overhauling tax policy and freezing property taxes.

In October 2013, Rauner announced that his running mate would be Wheaton City Councilwoman Evelyn Sanguinetti.

Rauner won the March 18, 2014, Republican primary with 328,934 votes (40.13 percent), defeating State Senator Kirk Dillard, who received 305,120 votes (37.22 percent), State Senator Bill Brady (123,708 votes, 15.09 percent) and Illinois Treasurer Dan Rutherford (61,848 votes, 7.55 percrent).

For the general election, Rauner was endorsed by the majority of Illinois newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, the Daily Herald, and the Chicago Sun-Times.

During the general election, television ads aired regarding Rauner's role in a chain of long-term care homes owned by his companies that faced lawsuits stemming from the death and alleged mistreatment of residents. Among the problems outlined in court cases, state records, and media reports were the deaths of developmentally disabled residents in bathtubs, "deplorable" living conditions, sexual assaults, and a failure by employees to stop residents from harming themselves.

Also during the election, the media reported on a controversy regarding Rauner's daughter being admitted to Walter Payton College Preparatory High School in Chicago in 2008 through the "principal picks" process. The family maintained several residences, including one in downtown Chicago that enabled her to apply to the Chicago-based school. Although she had top grades, she had missed several days of school and therefore did not qualify through the regular admissions process. It was later revealed that Rauner had sought information on this process from his personal friend Arne Duncan, then CEO of Chicago Public Schools. Rauner has said he had no recollection of speaking with Duncan directly. According to another source, she was not a "principal pick", but was let in following the phone call between Bruce Rauner and Arne Duncan. The Rauners donated $250,000 to the school during the subsequent school year; Rauner has a long history of contributing to Chicago Public Schools.

On October 22, 2014, Dave McKinney, a Chicago Sun-Times political reporter and bureau chief, resigned from the paper, citing pressure brought to bear on him by Sun-Times management with regard to his coverage of Rauner. McKinney had completed an investigative news story about a lawsuit filed by Christine Kirk, the CEO of LeapSource, a firm at which Rauner served as director. The piece, written by three reporters and approved by the newspaper's editors, described Rauner using "hardball tactics" to threaten Kirk and her family. According to McKinney's attorney, the Rauner campaign requested the story include that McKinney had a conflict of interest due to his marriage to Ann Liston, a Democratic media consultant; the campaign eventually published details about the Liston's LLC sharing office space with a legally separate, long-term Democratic strategist firm, of which Liston was part-owner. The LLC was employed by a pro-Quinn PAC. McKinney says any notion of conflict of interest was untrue, a position backed up publicly by Sun-Times management. Rauner is a former investor of the Sun-Times and received the newspaper's backing, marking the first time the media organization endorsed any candidate after imposing a moratorium on political endorsements three years earlier.

On November 4, 2014, Rauner was elected Governor of Illinois; Pat Quinn conceded defeat the next day. Rauner received 50.27 percent of the vote, while Quinn won 46.35 percent. Rauner carried every county in the state except for Cook, home to Chicago.

Rauner spent a then-record $26 million of his own money on his election.

Budget

In his first executive order, Rauner halted state hiring as well as discretionary spending and called for state agencies to sell surplus property. The conflict between Rauner's demand for budget cuts and Speaker of the House Mike Madigan's demand for tax increases resulted in the Illinois budget impasse, with major credit agencies downgrading the state's debt to the low investment grade of triple-B by the end of 2015.

On February 9, 2015, Rauner signed an executive order blocking so called "fair share" union fees from state employee paychecks. The same day, Rauner hired a legal team headed by former U.S. Attorney Dan Webb and his law firm Winston & Strawn to file a declaratory judgment action in Federal Court to affirm his action. In February 2015, Rauner proposed $4.1 billion in budget cuts affecting higher education, Medicaid, state employee pensions, public transit, and local government support. In April, Rauner also suspended funding for programs addressing domestic violence, homeless youth, autism, and immigrant integration. Critics called these moves "morally reprehensible" and harmful to the state economy.

On June 25, 2015, Rauner vetoed the Illinois state budget passed by the legislature, which would have created a deficit of nearly $4 billion but which covered what Illinois Democratic lawmakers called "vital services". He stated that he would not sign a budget until the Democratic state legislature passed his "Turnaround Agenda" to reduce trade union power and freeze property taxes. With no state budget, social service agencies cut back on services, state universities laid off staff, public transit service ceased in Monroe and Randolph Counties, and Child Care Assistance eligibility was cut by 90%.

On June 30, 2016, just before the beginning of the next fiscal year, Rauner signed a temporary bipartisan stopgap budget that would allow public schools to continue operating for an additional year and for necessary state services to continue for 6 months. However, the stopgap budget covered only 65% of social services agencies' normally allocated funds and provided $900,000 less for colleges and universities than FY15, while attempting to cover eighteen months' worth of expenses, all while continuing the uncertainty that Illinois nonprofits faced during FY16.

In July 2017, Rauner vetoed a budget that increased the state income tax from 3.75% to 4.95% and the corporate tax from 5.25% to 7%, an increase of $5 billion in additional tax revenue. However, the Illinois legislature, with the help of several Republicans, overrode his veto. Following this action, considered a political defeat for Rauner, he made major changes to his staff; among others, he fired his chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, and spokesperson, and replaced them with high-ranking officials from the Illinois Policy Institute along with a former spokesperson for Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. These moves were seen by the media as a shift to the right. In August 2017, Rauner fired several of those new officials after they issued a controversial statement related to race.