When Gov. J.B. Pritzker took office, the biggest task before him was getting the state’s deeply troubled finances onto more stable ground.
But just more than a year into his tenure, he is navigating a public health crisis that’s growing exponentially every day — forcing the rookie politician to confront an unexpected challenge that threatens lives while also piling onto the state’s fiscal distress.
Pritzker has taken on President Donald Trump and been among the nation’s first state leaders to impose severe restrictions on businesses and residents in an effort to curb the spread of the new coronavirus. His response has raised his national profile and is sure to become part of his legacy.
He has faced criticism from some Republicans for his daily admonishments of the federal government, and from local election authorities for allowing the March 17 primaries to go ahead as scheduled. But he’s also been widely praised by political observers, public health experts and leaders in both parties for his efforts to mitigate the COVID-19 crisis.
Bob Griffin, the dean of the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity at the State University of New York at Albany, said Pritzker has gotten Trump’s attention, and some of his early decisions, such as closing schools and bars and restaurants, have influenced other governors.
“If this hadn’t spread the way it had, and they had taken those actions, they would have been accused of fearmongering,” Griffin said. “In this situation, Pritzker, among others, really decided to be bold, and thank goodness he did.”
Every day since issuing a statewide disaster declaration March 9, when there were only 11 known coronavirus cases in Illinois, Pritzker has delivered briefings to the press and the public, usually from a lectern at the Thompson Center in Chicago.
Flanked by aides including Illinois Department of Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike, and sometimes by business leaders and other elected officials, Pritzker has used the venue to bolster the case for his decisions.
Two days after his disaster proclamation, with the tally of cases reaching 25, he joined Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot as she called off the city’s St. Patrick’s Day festivities. By March 12, with 32 cases, he canceled all events with 1,000 people or more.
Heading into that weekend, with the number of cases hitting 46, Pritzker announced that schools statewide would be closed from March 17 to 30. That Sunday, after throngs gathered at bars to celebrate St. Patrick’s weekend, he shut down bars and restaurants for dine-in service. The number of known cases was approaching 100.
By the time Pritzker’s statewide stay-at-home order took effect at 5 p.m. Saturday, there were 753 known cases in 26 of Illinois’ 102 counties. Illinois followed California by a day in issuing a stay-at-home order, while several other states, including Washington, which saw one of the country’s earliest outbreaks, have issued stay-at-home advisories since Pritzker’s.
Pritzker said in an interview Tuesday with the Chicago Tribune that he isn’t spending much time looking backward at what he might have done differently but rather “course-correcting as we go.”
“When you’re early doing this, there aren’t a lot of other people to back you up or say, ‘Well, gee, look at what everybody else is doing,'” Pritzker said. “People ask a lot of questions when you’re early making these decisions … and I had to answer those questions for myself before I would make those decisions.”
Along the way, he’s been guided by recommendations from epidemiologists and other experts, he said.
“Their views are evolving as they’re analyzing what’s going on in other countries and they see what the spread looks like in the United States, and so I’m trying to stay on top of that,” Pritzker said.
Pritzker has appeared to weigh, and sometimes wrestle “very publicly,” with some of his major calls on how to deal with the crisis, said Kent Redfield, emeritus professor of political science at the University of Illinois Springfield.
Illinois has “certainly been within the states that have reacted the most strongly, the most quickly,” Redfield said.
Pritzker and Lightfoot have both publicly said they’ve been working collaboratively as the coronavirus has continued to spread, but disagreement was on display earlier this month when Lightfoot held a news conference and asserted that Chicago Public Schools needed to remain open. Hours later, Pritzker announced he was ordering schools statewide shuttered through March 30 — an order that has since been extended through April 7.
“I think he’s been at the forefront of the nation’s governors in responding to this national crisis in such a way that is putting the population of the state first, is fact-based, science-based, and is doing his best to calm the population,” Northwestern University political science professor Alvin Tillery said.
While the stay-at-home order was lauded by some business groups, including organizations representing many of the state’s retailers and manufacturers, the Illinois Chamber of Commerce questioned whether Pritzker moved too hastily in shutting down “nonessential” businesses and services.
“The chamber hoped the order would be a last resort with more time to evaluate the effectiveness of the previous unprecedented measures that would have had less impact on Illinois’ economy,” Illinois Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Todd Maisch said in a statement on the day of the announcement.
Pritzker on Wednesday announced more than $90 million in state aid spread across three programs to provide grants and emergency loans to small businesses, and a hospitality emergency grant program.
Pritzker was criticized for not delaying the March 17 primary. Several other states have postponed their elections, but Illinois law precludes the governor from unilaterally suspending elections, said Matt Dietrich, a spokesman for the Illinois State Board of Elections.
It would have taken a court order or an act of the General Assembly to change the date of the election, which is set by state statute, Dietrich said.
Multiple polling locations in Chicago reported confusion and equipment problems after more than 200 voting sites changed because of COVID-19 precautions. In a conference call with reporters, Chicago Board of Election Commissioners spokesman Jim Allen complained of “extremely low turnout” in the morning and said that the governor had rejected the board’s request to postpone the election and have constituents vote by mail instead.
Pritzker responded forcefully at that day’s briefing, saying that the board’s request had been outside his legal authority and that he was limited by the state constitution.
“If people want to criticize me for that, well, go ahead,” he said. “I’ll wear it like a badge of honor. Every step that we’ve taken during this crisis, my legal team has understood and laid out our legal authority to do it.”
Had Pritzker tried to delay in-person voting, as Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine did last week, Illinois would have been in the same sort of legal limbo Ohio has found itself in, Redfield said.
“It was on, it was off, it was on, it was off,” Redfield said of the Ohio primary. “(Pritzker) would have gotten in exactly the same problem in Illinois. There’s no statutory authority to do that.”
Karla Satchell, a microbiologist and principal investigator for the Center for Structural Genomics of Infectious Diseases at Northwestern University, said Pritzker’s closure announcements were neither premature nor overdue from a medical standpoint.
But Satchell, whose research team has been studying COVID-19 since January, said she was unsure whether the state’s purported precautions were enough to prevent spread of the coronavirus at the polls.
“I have a hard time understanding how they managed elections with nobody getting within 6 feet of each other, and sterilizing every screen, every surface, every pen between people,” she said.
Senate Republican Leader Bill Brady said this week that he can understand criticisms about the primary, but that now “it’s about moving on and making good decisions from here forward.”
“Obviously, this isn’t what anyone signed up for, it’s a very challenging circumstance, decisions that he didn’t think he would probably ever have to make, he’s had to make,” Brady said. “And I think he’s trying his best.”
House Republican Leader Jim Durkin issued a statement earlier this week calling the response to the pandemic “neither a Republican nor Democrat issue.”
“We share a common enemy and share the same goal of working together to eradicate COVID-19,” Durkin said. “As in all emergencies, time spent on blame or fault provides little or no merit nor solutions.”
Pritzker has gotten Trump’s attention with his pleas for more equipment, while also clashing with the president over the federal government’s coronavirus response.
The two sparred last weekend on Twitter, with Trump telling Pritzker that he and “a very small group of certain other governors” shouldn’t be blaming the federal government “for their own shortcomings.”
Pritzker shot back that Trump should “be leading a national response instead of throwing tantrums from the back seat.”
The day after the Twitter flare-up, Pritzker said he spoke to Trump directly about Illinois’ need for masks and ventilators. The governor later got word from the White House that the federal government would be sending 300 ventilators and 300,000 more N95 masks to Illinois, he said.
Pritzker on Monday said Trump seemed “very responsive” to his request. But the governor said he’s also “very concerned” about Trump’s remarks this week that he wants the country reopened by Easter, and that the president is relying more on the stock market than science to guide his decision-making.
Pritzker has made several appearances on national television programs in recent weeks, which he said was driven by ensuring “that the federal government understood that they were not delivering on their promises and that they needed to deliver.”
“I thought it was important for me at least to be vocal on behalf of the people of Illinois to get what we wanted,” Pritzker said. “And I must say, I’m proud to say that that was very effective. And I give the president credit for that. He didn’t need to take my call, and he didn’t need to be as responsive as he was, but I’m glad that I reached out to him and that all of what I had hoped might happen to get attention is beginning to work.”
Tillery said in this case there appears to be “a lot less politics here than meets the eye with (Pritzker’s) national media entree.”
“I think that the governor has joined other visible governors who are trying to move their states forward in pressing for what’s needed, and I don’t think in our overwhelmingly blue state that it’s going to matter one bit that he criticized Donald Trump right now,” Tillery said.
If Trump continues to push for the country to reopen at the same time as governors are considering extending stay-at-home orders, “that’s when they’re really going to be tested,” Tillery said.
Pritzker has faced many challenges throughout his career as a philanthropist and venture capitalist, but he can’t remember anything in his lifetime that compares with the coronavirus pandemic, he said.
“’08-’09 was a financial crisis,” he said in an interview. “This is a crisis that’s threatening people’s lives.”
Still, Pritzker said he draws on what he learned from dealing with personal difficulties at a young age — the death of his father when he was 7 years old and his mother’s struggle with alcoholism — to manage through trying times.
“A switch gets flipped when crises develop,” and he says to himself: “‘We need to make logical decisions. We need to make sure we’re getting things done that need to get done,'” he said.
“I feel an enormous responsibility that people have put their faith in me, and I want to make sure that I am delivering for them,” Pritzker said.
