State Senator Bill Brady (R-Bloomington), the Republican nominee for governor, has a lot to learn about his state’s biggest metropolitan area.
And vice-versa.
As the Daily Herald reported Sunday,
More than 94 percent of Chicago area Republicans picked someone other than Brady in the seven-candidate Feb. 2 primary. He received just 23,579 votes in all of Chicago and the collar counties, where 406,655 of the state’s 767,485 Republican votes originated in the primary for governor.
The longtime Bloomington lawmaker secured a razor thin victory of 193 votes by dominating downstate, where he and his family operate a string of real estate, entertainment and investment companies.
If Brady is to have a real shot at unseating Quinn, Republican leaders make no secret that it is critical for him to get known in the most populace region of the state, and fast.
We like to tell our members, “Define yourself, or be defined by your opponents.” Brady is getting defined by his opponents right now, and it isn’t pretty.
Meanwhile, Democrats are taking advantage of the vacuum, rushing to paint down Brady as a cruel right-winger before he can cast himself as a businessman with the chops to root out corruption and stimulate jobs.
Quinn recently blasted Brady for briefly introducing legislation that would allow animal shelters to euthanize multiple dogs at once in gas chambers. On Friday, when Brady secured the party’s nod, Quinn’s campaign sent out a blistering statement describing the fresh opponent as “the extreme right wing of the party.”
The missive highlighted Brady’s votes against raising the minimum wage and equal pay legislation, among other proposals.
Then there was Brady’s news conference last week where he tried to go on offense by claiming that a recent murder was the work of someone who Gov. Quinn wrongly released from prison. As Carol Marin explains in the Sun-Times, it wasn’t true,
The released prisoner in question is 21-year-old Jonathan Phillips, who has recently been charged with a new crime — murder. The fact is that Phillips, a convicted carjacker, was by all accounts — except Brady’s — released back in November within established guidelines and — here’s the important point — not because of Quinn’s two controversial, discontinued prisoner release programs.
And
What Brady did not seem to know until reporters told him was that the Illinois Department of Corrections had already begun posting early release inmates on its Web site.
(Note to Brady: preparation, preparation, preparation.)
Brady stated after the primary that he would focus his campaign on those predisposed to his vision of Illinois: Slashing state spending across the board, including education and services for children, the sick and the elderly. He would deny future education employees and other state workers traditional pensions, forcing them to accept “defined contribution” benefits, like a 401K. Brady also is a staunch social conservative, the type Illinois voters have never embraced in a general election for a statewide office. Though former U.S. Senator Peter Fitzgerald was very conservative, he ran to the middle in the general election, something that Brady seems disinclined to do.
Those who agree with Brady’s fiscal and conservative social agenda can’t elect him governor; there just aren’t enough of them in Illinois.
Which is not to say he can’t be elected in November.
What if, on Election Day in November, voters who believe the state should continue to offer defined benefit pensions to educators, who believe the state should not cut spending for education and services to Illinois children and the elderly, decide to stay home or withhold their vote for Gov. Quinn?
Brady won the nomination thanks to voter apathy. Will it happen again?
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