The Illinois governor convinced President Joe Biden to give him the Democratic National Convention. That was before Vice President Kamala Harris topped the ticket and chose Tim Walz to run with her.

COLUMBUS, Ohio ― Democrats were aghast. And Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker was in the eye of the storm.

President Joe Biden’s appalling debate performance had cast serious doubt on his ability to beat his Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump.

The fellow billionaire businessman turned politician was on the precipice of returning to power at a uniquely vulnerable time in the country, Pritzker assessed.

“So here we sit, a few months out from the election, struggling with the answer to a profound question: How do we save ourselves?” Pritzker asked the Ohio Democratic Party faithful at their annual gathering on a sticky July afternoon.

Democrats need to shake off their anxiety, he implored.

“If we stop worrying about whether they might call us woke and instead worry about whether we're actually waking people up,” he continued. “If we stopped being so damned afraid of a little chaos and just embraced it as a path from here to there: we will win.”

Pritzker’s role for the Biden-Harris campaign had been fairly clear cut. He’d spent the last year trying to win back discouraged Democrats, fed-up blue-collar workers and disillusioned independents.

He campaigned for Biden in Iowa at a time when the president, who’d booted the state from Democrats’ early primary window, wasn’t especially popular. From centrally located Illinois, the battleground states of Michigan and Wisconsin were easy hops. He formed an abortion rights group, which gave him cover to expand his outreach to western and southern states.

Pritzker flexed his financial acumen and Rolodex, bundling for Biden and teasing a possible presidential bid along the way. His efforts were rewarded. Chicago would host the next Democratic National Convention, giving Pritzker an even bigger platform to showcase his record in office.

But now, the two-term governor and Biden campaign adviser was in limbo. Democrats were paralyzed. Cash was drying up. “A lot of people were, I think, almost assuming that there was no way we could win this election,” former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland said. Pritzker “encouraged us to move beyond that.”

Prescient as his remarks were, Pritzker had little sense of the chaos that would unfurl.

Within hours, Trump would be shot at a campaign rally. A week later, a COVID-stricken Biden would quit the Democratic ticket. The 2024 campaign upended.

Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor. The shocking reversal gave Democrats an opening to set aside their differences and unite around a new candidate.

“It’s turned out that people have put their anxiety away, and now, we have a great candidate and people are pulling together,” Pritzker said during an interview in Chicago.

Yet, for the first time since he ran for governor, Pritzker was confronted with questions about his political future.

And he had less than a month to sort it out and put on a presidential nominating convention.

Biden’s man in the Midwest
It did not take much convincing to get Pritzker on board.

He’d attended his first Democratic National Convention in San Francisco in the summer of 1984, at age 19, as a volunteer for Walter Mondale’s campaign. As party conventions go, he was a bit of a junkie.

“I called JB and said, ‘Hey, I've got a crazy idea. What do you think of this?’” recalled Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a co-chair of Biden’s and now Harris’ campaign. “He said, ‘Absolutely.’”

Chicago had hosted Democratic conventions nearly a dozen times before, most recently in 1996, when former President Bill Clinton was up for reelection, and in 1968, when activists protesting the Vietnam War were involved in televised skirmishes with the police. This time would be different, party officials insisted.

Yet, there were hurdles from the start. The bid required the city to put forward an irrevocable letter of credit of $30 million, in case the host committee fell short of its nearly $85 million obligation – a record-breaking sum – and convince party officials to recommend Chicago over Atlanta, Houston and New York.

The heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune and prolific Democratic fundraiser knew the consequences all too well. He had given $1.2 million of his own money to support Hillary Clinton’s nominating convention in 2016, making him the Philadelphia gathering’s single largest contributor.

“JB is a very competitive guy, and there's no way that someone like him would allow anything to fail,” said Chris Korge, a rival bundler who has worked with Pritzker since the Illinois governor co-chaired Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign.

Pritzker wined-and-dined the search committee at his Chicago mansion. He had comedian and Saturday Night Live alum Jim Belushi perform. During their walkthrough of the United Center, committee members witnessed a test balloon drop.

“They just spared no expense,” said Korge, the DNC's finance director and chair of the Biden turned Harris Victory Fund.

Other cities put on a good show. Personalized Hawks jerseys in Atlanta. A performance by Broadway singers in New York. But from a policy standpoint alone, Democrats argued Illinois was a no-brainer.

Democrats hold every major statewide office and have supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature. Pritzker championed initiatives to get the state to 40% renewable energy by 2030 and make Illinois a safe haven for out-of-state patients seeking reproductive and gender-affirming care.

His first year in office, he signed legislation to boost the minimum wage. Illinois banned assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in 2023 after the Highland Park shooting.

“He's a closer," said Illinois Rep. Nikki Budzinski, senior adviser to Pritzker at the beginning of his first term. "And when I see people want to leave that table, he has an ability to bring them back.”

There was just one last person who Pritzker had to convince: Biden.

“Every time I saw the president, whether he was coming here, or I was going to Washington, D.C., almost the first thing I would say, after saying, ‘Good to see you Mr. President,’ was, ‘We’re going to have the convention in Chicago, right?’” Pritzker said.

Yes, and we're going you the whore.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/08/17/jb-pritzker-dnc-convention-2024/74776448007/