By the numbers: Unions lead the way on funding state elections in Illinois

[October 31, 2024]  By Andrew Adams

This year in Illinois, there are no statewide elections. There are no fights over a Supreme Court seat. There are no constitutional amendments. At the Statehouse, more than half of general election races are uncontested.

And yet, political campaigns in Illinois raised about $600 million in itemized individual contributions, according to a Capitol News Illinois analysis of state campaign finance data. Accounting for loans, transfers between political committees and other contributions, more than $1 billion changed hands among Illinois’ political organizations between Nov. 9, 2022, and Oct. 15, 2024 – the final required disclosure deadline before the election.

In total, campaigns have spent at least $633 million in this election cycle, according to state board data. About two-thirds of that, or $418 million, was spent on direct campaign expenses like advertising, events and paying campaign staff, with the rest going to loans and to other campaigns.

State campaign committees for 2024 candidates – the organizations that pay for General Assembly and judicial campaigns – took in about $223.7 million between the previous election and Oct. 15 in the form of direct donations, transfers between committees and in-kind donations. The rest went to political parties and local campaigns.

Democratic candidates this cycle took in about $4.90 for every $1 that Republicans received in direct support, in-kind donations and transfers. About one-third of that support to candidates of both parties came from organized labor groups and unions.

Republicans share many of the same donors but receive less support from unions and have fewer large donors overall.

This campaign cycle represents a departure from what had become the norm in many Illinois elections over the past decade. A few wealthy donors have long dominated campaign finance, but this cycle, fewer billionaires are making major donations.

The independently wealthy former Gov. Bruce Rauner made waves in 2014 when he put millions of his own dollars into his run against Democratic incumbent Pat Quinn.

Rauner lost his reelection bid in 2018 to current Gov. JB Pritzker. Between the two of them, they raised more than $250 million that cycle, making the race one of the most expensive state elections in U.S. history.

Billionaires Ken Griffin and Dick and Elizabeth Uihlein supported Rauner in both of his campaigns and continued to put hundreds of millions of dollars into elections after Pritzker took office.

But the Uihlein family has only given about $1.3 million to state candidates this cycle. Griffin moved to Florida and has mostly stayed out of Illinois politics.

And Pritzker – still the largest individual contributor in state campaigns – has given about $25 million this cycle. That’s just under one-sixth of what he spent when he ran for governor in 2022 and just under one-third of what he spent in 2020 when he backed an ultimately doomed campaign to remove the flat income tax provision from the state constitution.

Who’s writing checks

Half of itemized contributions to state candidates this cycle passed through just 28 organizations via direct funding, transfers and in-kind donations. A total of $67.4 million came from 15 groups affiliated with organized labor through donations and transfers between political committees. Four political committees associated with the Democratic Party also transferred $25.2 million between themselves and to candidates in races around the state. Other major groups include advocacy organizations, trade groups and committees affiliated with Republican party leadership.

Unions generally raise political money through contributions from their members to dedicated funds, but tracking where the Democratic Party gets its funding is trickier.

House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch rose to power in 2021 after the ouster of Michael Madigan and oversees a 78-seat supermajority in the Illinois House. While Welch doesn’t chair the Democratic Party of Illinois – a key funding source that his now-indicted predecessor used to exert control over his caucus – the current speaker does control three political committees. The two highest funded of those are his personal campaign committee and “Democrats for the Illinois House.”

Using these two committees, Welch has moved $11 million around through transfers and contributions to allies in his party in this election cycle.

The party itself, chaired by Rep. Elizabeth “Lisa” Hernandez, is the largest single funder of state campaigns outside of labor organizations, having distributed $7.4 million to candidates and other committees at the state level.

Senate President Don Harmon, who presides over a 40-member supermajority, similarly chairs several political organizations – including his personal committee and “ISDF,” the Illinois Senate Democratic Fund. His personal campaign committee moved $2 million into ISDF in November, ahead of the primaries earlier this year. Other committees have reported $5.4 million coming from ISDF.

These five committees – which represent one-fifth of all itemized contributions to other state-level Democrats and collectively raised more than $120 million – are tightly associated with organized labor.

Of the money that doesn’t come from labor, the largest single donor in Democratic politics is Pritzker – who contributes through his personal campaign committee.

Behind him are a cadre of special interest groups and trade associations. Among the largest single donors are trade associations affiliated with nursing homes, assisted living businesses, Realtors, trial lawyers and alcohol distributors.

Republicans’ funding problem

At this year’s Republican National Convention, the newly seated chair of the Illinois GOP, Kathy Salvi, and House Minority Leader Tony McCombie both discussed the need to “outwork” Democrats who, even then, had a clear fundraising advantage.

Senate Minority Leader John Curran, House Minority Leader Tony McCombie, Gov. JB Pritzker, House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch and Senate President Don Harmon. (Capitol News Illinois illustration by Andrew Adams)

But Republican state-level candidate committees still managed to raise $37 million of itemized contributions this cycle.

Despite stepping back their support, the Uihleins – who live in Wisconsin and built their fortune through the industrial supplier ULINE – are still among largest single donors to state-level Republican candidates.

Together, they donated around $1.3 million to state-level candidates this cycle, putting them as the sixth-largest funding source for Republican candidates – behind three party-affiliated committees and two committees affiliated with organized labor.

Those party-affiliated committees – the Illinois Republican Party, House Republican Organization and Senate Republican Victory Fund – represent about 16.5% of the itemized funding sources for state-level Republican candidates.

In turn, they get most of their funding from individual campaign committees – more than 55% of these three committees’ itemized contributions come from current, former or hopeful Republican lawmakers.

Senate Minority Leader John Curran also maintains his own campaign committee while McCombie has a campaign committee and is also affiliated with a PAC.

Excluding those already mentioned, Illinois Republicans’ top donors include many of the same groups as Democrats: trade associations representing nursing homes, Realtors and several organizations affiliated with organized labor.

Many advocacy organizations and companies donate to both parties. But they represent a larger share of the Republican fundraising pool than they do for Democrats. The Chicago police union, Ameren and its affiliated political committees, and the committee associated with the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association all split political contributions about evenly. Those three groups are all in the top 15 donors for Republicans, despite not breaking the top 40 for Democrats.

Republicans have far fewer large donors that send money exclusively to their side of the aisle. Among organizations and people that donated more than $1 million to candidates up for election in 2024, 83.9% of them gave at least 80% of their money to Democrats.

Democrats’ advantage

In this year’s Illinois House races, there are 60 contested seats. In 34 of those races, a Democrat holds at least a 10-to-1 advantage in itemized contributions over their Republican opponents this election cycle – with one incumbent Democrat holding a roughly 105-to-1 advantage. A Democrat also holds a significant advantage over an independent candidate in the 87th District.

In 14 House races, Democrats hold a smaller fundraising advantage, while Republicans hold the advantage in 11 of them. Republicans have a 10-to-1 advantage in five of the races in which they hold the fundraising lead.

Incumbents of both parties have the fundraising advantage in all but four House races. In all four of those, the Democratic challenger has the fundraising advantage. In the one open House race to replace Democratic Rep. Lance Yednock, the Democrat has just under a 2-to-1 lead in itemized contributions.

On the Senate side, there are 13 contested the incumbent leading in 12 of them. The other contested seat is an open one, in which the Democratic candidate now holds a large fundraising advantage after beating out a better funded incumbent during the primary.

How we reported this

These figures are based on data reported by political campaigns to the Illinois State Board of Elections. We found at least two errors that resulted in fundraising totals being off by millions of dollars. Both of those were corrected by the committees, but the state board’s underlying data was never updated. It’s possible, and perhaps likely, that other errors exist within the state’s data that no one caught. Some candidates who file disclosures on paper also face a possible undercount of their expenses due to how the board reports data. This likely only affects a few thousand dollars’ worth of fundraising but is still important to remember.

On top of that, committees report donations with a wide variety of names for their donors. One committee reported receiving funds from “J.B. FOR GOVERNO” and another reported a donation from “JB for Gov.” In order to count these contributions as both coming from the committee called “JB for Governor,” we used natural language processing and clustering algorithms to do a first pass at sorting the names into groups and hand-reviewed every name to make sure the changes we made make sense.

Because there were 350,000 individual donations this cycle from over 36,000 entities, we checked a random sampling of our data and found that 99.5% of the changes we made were correct with a 3% margin of error and 99% confidence. We also hand-checked that all the committees named in the story were correctly coded.

We stand by our approach, but you should keep in mind that for Illinois races, even the best campaign finance data can be messy and imperfect.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.