It wasn’t covered much in the news. Billionaire Illinois Gov. and presidential hopeful, JB Pritzker, came to Maine the Friday before to participate in a rally in Portland for Maine Democrats. The other guest speakers? Well, the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, Malcom Kenyatta, and Harry Dunn, a Capitol Police officer who was present on Jan. 6 and ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Maryland, losing in the primary. Clearly, and with all due respect to Dunn for his service, Pritzker was the big draw here. Pritzker is an interesting figure. He’s a big-state governor who’s made national news by resisting President Trump at every turn. In some ways, he’s similar to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who’s also clearly running for president in 2028, and who’s also made a name for himself opposing Trump. Both of them run solidly Democratic states, neither of them ever even try to work with Republicans in the legislature, and now they’re part of the hashtag resistance. In that, they’re somewhat similar to our own Gov. Janet Mills, who achieved national notoriety by opposing Trump and who’s pushed through multiple partisan budgets. Pritzker has some key differences from Newsom, though. He’s older, not quite as attractive or eloquent and he hasn’t reached out to the other side like Newsom has. He’s also, as mentioned above, a billionaire, with an estimated net worth of almost $4 billion. His extended family owned the Hyatt hotel group. Like Trump, Pritzker expanded his inherited wealth, starting a private venture capital firm. Before entering politics, he was a Democratic donor. In other words, he’s exactly the kind of guy Sen. Bernie Sanders has been railing about in his “Fight the Oligarchy” tour: a billionaire who benefited from inherited wealth. He’s not exactly an oyster farmer or a logger, to be sure; instead, Pritzker has spent his life behind a desk, growing the money with which he started. In a capitalist society, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Some people will be born with more advantages than others. That’s actually true in pretty much all societies thus far, in fact. In the Soviet Union, there were apparatchiks, loyal members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union who got special privileges. Both parties in the United States have their own versions of this today. One example is the megadonor. We saw the influence of megadonors in last year’s presidential election, when their pressure led to Joe Biden withdrawing from the race after his disastrous debate performance. These donors quietly exert influence behind the scenes, in exchange for either favors for their industry or corporations or some plumb job, like an ambassadorship. One would expect that, with all of their anti-establishment rhetoric, Democrats these days would be pivoting away from these people, but the fact is that money still talks. They’re still more than willing to accept the help of billionaires, regardless of whatever populist slogans might spill out of their mouths to placate the masses these days. This is not just a hypocrisy of Donald Trump and the populist Republicans, nor is it solely contained to establishment Democrats, either. Go ahead and ask Graham Platner and Troy Jackson if they were at the Pritzker fundraiser or outside it, protesting. There’s plenty of hypocrisy to go around in politics, on both sides. As a make-believe populist, though, JB Pritzker, offers one of the most galling recent examples. Until the very moment that he decided to make the switch from giving money to running for office, he’d done nothing but make and spend money his whole career. Then, when he decided he’d rather be in office than write checks to candidates, Pritzker started financing his own campaigns. Now, suddenly, he’s potentially presidential material all because he started out with financial advantages. Whether it’s Mitt Romney or Donald Trump, Republicans have often embraced wealthy presidential candidates. That’s nothing new. What’s new here is a Democratic Party torn between diametrically opposed factions, the populists on one side and the insiders on the other, facing the prospect of one of their own billionaires running for president. If Pritzker falls flat in the primaries, it will probably be a sign of his own ineptitude, not of populists rejecting billionaires. If he succeeds, it will be an instance of immense hypocrisy from a party that criticized President Trump (and President Bush, for that matter) for his wealth. Regardless, I think it will be gloriously entertaining.
https://www.sunjournal.com/2025/11/21/jb-pritzker-could-be-a-nuisance-for-democrats-jim-fossel/
