J.B. Pritzker has been serving as the 43rd Governor of Illinois since January of 2019, and began his second term in 2023. A member of an affluent family of businesspeople and philanthropists, Pritzker has been a longtime supporter of the Democratic Party, though he did not hold elected office prior to his first run for governor. During his career in business, he founded a nonprofit digital startup incubator called 1871, and co-founded Pritzker Group Private Capital with his brother.
Since taking office, Pritzker has had numerous legislative accomplishments, including passing the Rebuild Illinois Act in 2019 and the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act in 2021. He has been a longtime advocate for progressive issues such as gun control: This January, Pritzker signed the Protect Illinois Communities Act, banning assault weapons, high capacity magazines, and switches in the state. Alongside his legislative ambitions, Pritzker has been committed to correcting Illinois’ finances by eliminating the state’s bill backlog via the passage of balanced budgets.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
HPR: This January, you signed the Protect Illinois Communities Act which banned assault rifles and high capacity magazines in the state of Illinois. Yet, there is still a major gun crisis both in your state and across the country. What more needs to be done in order to ensure that both Illinoisans and all Americans are safe from the gun crisis?
J.B. Pritzker: Well, let’s start with we should make that national. We should have a national ban on assault weapons. We should have a national ban on switches — that’s something we also banned in Illinois — and high capacity magazines. Switches are what turns your non-automatic weapon into an automatic weapon. So these are things that ought to happen at a federal level. Obviously, the politics of that are more difficult nationally than they are in Illinois. But there’s much more that needs to be done.
Remember that if you want to address gun violence, and you want to address crime, you’ve got to look at the issues of how you prevent crime. The underlying causes of crime, like poverty, for example, have to be addressed. You can’t just say, “We’re going to ban this type of weapon, and therefore that’s going to answer all the problems of the world.” But you do have to address both. We’ve seen it very recently, the issue of mass murders in schools. And so there’s a lot more for us to address here. But you’ve got to start with some basics like: do we think that a weapon that you can fire 90 bullets from in less than 60 seconds is something that should be in the hands of anybody who wants one? And the answer clearly is no.
HPR: As a Democrat in Illinois, and as the governor of Illinois, you know it’s a very politically diverse state. How do you balance progressive issues, economic stability, and bipartisanship?
Pritzker: I actually don’t find that a difficult balancing act. I mean, number one, Republicans have good ideas just like Democrats do. I obviously think Democrats have better ideas on balance than the Republicans do, but I think it’s worthwhile listening to Republicans and working with Republicans. So that’s on the bipartisanship side of things. It’s very important to me to take their ideas into account and try to work them in with Democratic ideas. We obviously have a supermajority Democratic legislature, so it’s not required, I guess some might say, but to me it is. And so bipartisanship is hugely important.
The state is a diverse state, and so you’ve got maybe more Democratic folks who are in and around the urban and suburban areas of the state and more Republicans in rural areas of the state. The issues are somewhat different, certainly geographically, and as a result sometimes between the parties. But it’s important for me anyway to work with all of them as best I can. Sometimes the Republicans don’t want to work together, and certainly that was true in the midst of the worst parts of the pandemic. It got very political. And so at least that’s bipartisanship.
On economic stability, let me be clear, we’re a, you know, I guess we used to call it a rust belt state with a manufacturing base and agriculture base, and those are two hugely important industries in our state. So the economy of the state is very important to stoke and grow and help evolve into some of the faster growing industries. So, biotech, infotech, making sure that we’re on the leading edge of some of the new technology that’s taking over the nation and the world. And we have some of the greatest universities in the world in Illinois between the University of Illinois, Northwestern, and the University of Chicago.
And then look, I believe in the values of the Democratic Party, I’m a Democrat through and through. I’m solidly pro-choice and I think we’ve established Illinois as an island and an oasis for women and protecting their reproductive rights, where all the states around us are anti-choice. And standing up for progressive values, like lifting up working people. When I came into office, we had a minimum wage that was at $8.25, one dollar over the federal minimum wage, which is not enough to survive or pay for a family of four for goodness sake. And so I immediately, in fact the first big bill that I got passed and then I signed in office, was raising the minimum wage to $15.
So how do you get those things done in a state like Illinois? The answer is you run on them and explain to people why it’s so important that we lift up people that have been left out, and why that’s important for everybody in the state. And I ran on that and I won, and lots of other issues obviously in there, but I legalized cannabis and made sure that we protected labor rights. And so those are all things that I kind of ran on, told people I was going to do, and then I did them. And I think I’m a pragmatic person, as some people would say I’m a pragmatic progressive, meaning I think we should be advancing the ball for working class and middle class families while at the same time balancing budgets and paying off our debt.
This interview was conducted by Naomi Corlette and Jonah Simon for the Harvard Political Review.
