- Former Republican state legislator Darren Bailey is trying to improve on his 2022 campaign for governor by taking a new approach to voters in the Chicago area.
- Bailey is leaning heavily on his running mate from Cook County, Aaron Del Mar, to strike a different tone about issues facing Chicago — a city he called a “hellhole” in 2022.
- Bailey has echoed President Donald Trump’s calls for Gov. JB Pritzker to be arrested and remains a Trump-aligned candidate.
- Bailey’s policy theme for 2026 is lower taxes and auditing government spending, which he says is filled with wasteful spending and potential fraud.
This summary was written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
(Capitol News Illinois) – The verdict on Darren Bailey’s 2022 campaign for governor was decisive. The race was called in Gov. JB Pritzker’s favor nearly immediately after polls closed, and Pritzker won a 12-point victory.
Less than two years later, Bailey lost a 2024 Republican primary race for the U.S. House to incumbent Rep. Mike Bost, of Murphysboro, by about three points.
But with a new running mate and new strategy, Bailey, the wealthy farmer from Clay County who served in both the Illinois state Senate and House and rose to prominence by challenging pandemic mitigations, insists the results will be different this year.
“Our messaging needed tweaked, no doubt,” Bailey told Capitol News Illinois in an interview. “I think that’s what’s different about this time.”
That means talking about Chicago in a different way. He referred to the state’s largest city as a “hellhole” in 2022 but said this time there will be “more listening and less talking,” especially to the voters in Chicago and the suburbs who helped deliver Pritzker an easy victory four years ago.
But Bailey said he also thinks many of the same issues he campaigned on in 2022 — crime in Chicago and high taxes across the state — will resonate with voters more in 2026.
He’s the second GOP candidate for governor to sit for Capitol News Illinois’ election podcast series. Capitol News Illinois will publish a feature and full interview with each of the four GOP governor candidates in the coming weeks.
Read more: Conservative policy wonk Ted Dabrowski gets off sidelines with run for governor
Still the favorite
A recent poll by WGN and Emerson College found 34% of GOP primary voters planned to support Bailey. While 46% of voters were undecided, no other candidate cracked 10%. Bailey received 57% of the vote in the primary four years ago.
Bailey isn’t the fundraising leader, however, as researcher Ted Dabrowski and video gambling mogul Rick Heidner ended 2025 each with more than $1 million on hand. Bailey had about $35,000 in his coffers to end the year but has raised $81,500 from contributions of at least $1,000 since Jan. 1, financial disclosure reports showed.
His GOP opponents have also expressed doubts that he can beat Pritzker on the second try. Dabrowski told the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board last month he is a better candidate than Bailey because he is from Cook County and Bailey is a downstate farmer who struggled to resonate in the Chicago area.
Bailey argued he has an advantage as the only candidate in the race from outside Chicago.
“These other candidates aren’t connected at all, don’t know the problems of rural Illinois, and so that’s where I come in,” Bailey said. “So you take this partnership of someone who stood for rural Illinois for going on almost eight years now, and someone who knows the business and the politics of Chicago and Cook County, merge that together and I think we’re going to make a wonderful team and actually represent everyone.”
Chicago strategy
Bailey is banking heavily on his running mate, Cook County Republican Party Chair Aaron Del Mar, who hails from northwest suburban Palatine, to help the campaign take a new approach in the Chicago area.
“He is a Cook County businessperson; he has been immersed in that environment,” Bailey said. “So what he’s already lent to me, as far as advice and what I would call expertise, I think, is amazing.”
Bailey received just 15.5% of the vote in Chicago and 32% in the Cook County suburbs in 2022. He wasn’t absent from Chicago, as he frequently held news conferences highlighting public safety issues in the city and even lived in one of the city’s most prominent skyscrapers.
This time around, he said he has a gameplan to campaign in each ward throughout the city and other areas that were “overlooked, missed, didn’t know about in 2022.”
Conservative credentials
While Bailey is softening his tone in northeast Illinois, he isn’t moderating his positions in a primary where each candidate has sought to position themselves as the most conservative candidate.
Bailey was endorsed in 2022 at a rally in Adams County by former President Donald Trump, whose first term had ended by then, and has said this year he still welcomes the president’s endorsement. He’s even proposed establishing an Illinois Department of Government Efficiency — a spinoff from Trump’s idea that fizzled out by the end of 2025.
Read more: Bailey proposes ‘Illinois DOGE’ as Republican governor’s race focuses on spending
He’s also mirrored some of Trump’s rhetoric, saying at a recent event that he “would love to see JB Pritzker arrested because of tyranny or a constitutional felony.” Trump himself suggested in October that Pritzker “should be in jail.”
Bailey told Capitol News Illinois that “Pritzker has certainly crossed the line with his rhetoric” and “who knows where this is going to go if JB continues to stand in defiance and harm the people of Illinois.”
There are some small areas where Bailey has staked out an opinion different than Trump’s. During an August interview with KSDK, the NBC affiliate in St. Louis, Bailey said immigration agents wearing masks was “concerning” and if he were governor, “there would be no one wearing masks.”
Bailey also said he “will not waiver” in his support for gun rights after Trump said, “You can’t have guns; you can’t walk in with guns” in response to the Border Patrol shooting and killing protestor Alex Pretti, a lawful gun owner in Minneapolis.
“There’s always a lot to unpack and understand in a comment and in a statement,” Bailey said. “And sometimes we see President Trump walk back those statements. Maybe he says something that he doesn’t understand the full context of but, you know, I’m a very principled person with my beliefs, and especially with the Second Amendment.”
Illinois issues
This time around, Bailey’s campaign is placing a tighter focus on state spending. He wants to audit all areas of state finances to find money that he believes is being wasted to cut state spending.
He’s also called for capping annual property tax rates to not exceed a person’s mortgage rate. The state doesn’t levy property taxes — a function of local governments. Property taxes are a primary funding source for schools, but Bailey said he expects the audits will free up enough money to boost funding from the state for schools. Bailey also said reducing unfunded mandates for schools will lower education costs.
Bailey said the state’s current evidence-based funding model for K-12 schools is also not working. While many schools remain inadequately funded under the formula, Bailey said test scores that show many students fail to master subjects at their grade level are further proof the state needs to rethink its approach to education.
“We need to empower local school boards, local communities,” he said. “We need to allow them to educate their children as they believe that they should in local communities.”
More broadly, Bailey is pledging to lower taxes but has not specified how. He also said the state must first give people tax relief and then look at what priorities should be funded and how.
Should Bailey find his way to the governor’s office, he will almost certainly have to work with a supermajority of Democrats in the legislature. He argued he can find success in that environment because of relationships he had during his four years in the General Assembly.
“My door’s always open … that table in the governor’s office will be available,” Bailey said. “There will be seats.”
(Reporting by Ben Szalinski, Capitol News Illinois. Brenden Moore contributed.)
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.
This article first appeared on Capitol News Illinois and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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