Rick Heidner casts himself as ‘Trump Republican’ in bid to unseat Pritzker

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (Capitol News Illinois) – A businessman-turned-politician who made his name in real estate before trying his luck in the gambling industry.

No, it’s not President Donald Trump. It’s Rick Heidner — a Barrington Hills real estate developer and video gambling mogul who is one of four Republicans seeking to unseat Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker this fall.

Since launching his campaign in earnest last month, Heidner has worked to position himself as the MAGA candidate in the race. His first campaign ad even branded himself a “Trump Republican for governor.”

“I think it would be a major plus, rather than every single word that comes out of a governor’s mouth to be demeaning to our president, I think would be helpful to have someone that we could have a good relationship with them,” Heidner told Capitol News Illinois in an interview earlier this month.

He’s the third GOP candidate for governor to sit for CNI’s election podcast series. Capitol News Illinois will publish a feature and full interview with each of the four GOP governor candidates in the coming days.

Read more: ‘More listening and less talking’: Darren Bailey insists results will be different in 2^nd run for governor | Conservative policy wonk Ted Dabrowski gets off sidelines with run for governor

Heidner is betting that his alignment with Trump, business background and outsider status will persuade enough Republican primary voters to make him their standard-bearer against Pritzker.

Gambling mogul

Heidner, 65, has been a player in the state’s business community for decades. His real estate firm manages more than 280 properties across the country. He also owns the gas station chain Ricky Rockets Fuel Center and wholesale fuel supplier Prairie State Energy.

He founded Gold Rush Gaming with his wife, Alisa, in 2012, and it is now the third-largest video gambling terminal operator in Illinois. The company’s machines are in nearly 800 bars, restaurants and gas stations across the state, according to Illinois Gaming Board records.

Heidner’s plans to expand his gambling empire with a proposed racetrack and casino in south suburban Tinley Park were axed in 2019 when the Pritzker administration refused to sell the state-owned site he and his business partner — Hawthorne Race Course President Tim Carey — had been eyeing.

It came around the same time that the Chicago Tribune reported that Heidner partnered in some real estate deals with a banking family that had alleged mob ties that helped sink a proposed casino project in Rosemont in the early 2000s.

The newspaper also found that Heidner had a similar partnership with a suburban strip club owner convicted of an illegal bookmaking and money skimming operation.

Heidner’s name also surfaced around this time in a federal search warrant executed on now-former state Sen. Martin Sandoval’s Springfield office as part of a sweeping public corruption probe. Federal prosecutors later confirmed Heidner wasn’t a target of the investigation.

During a candidate forum last month, Heidner blamed the Tinley Park project’s derailment on “optics.”

In an interview with CNI weeks later, he lamented the project’s failure and the money he lost as a result. But he said settling a score with Pritzker wasn’t a motivating factor in his decision to run.

Heidner also denied any association with organized crime. He blamed the news media for wanting “to play their own narratives.”

“Nobody ever wants to be wrong,” Heidner said. “Even when you’re 100% vindicated of something, they still want to keep regurgitating and regurgitating the same stuff that’s just ridiculous. I have no ties to the mob, I could tell you that for sure.”

Why he’s running

A few weeks before the filing deadline in October, the GOP field for governor appeared set with the party’s 2022 nominee Darren Bailey running it back and conservative policy wonk Ted Dabrowski and DuPage County Sheriff James Mendrick placing their hats into the ring.

Then Heidner filed paperwork forming a campaign committee, poured $1 million of his own money into it and spent two weeks in a mad dash to collect at least 5,000 signatures needed to secure a place on the ballot. Despite the truncated timeline, Heidner got the requisite signatures, and no objections were filed.

Heidner said he did not want to see Pritzker win a third term. But once he sized up the Republican field, he came away with the belief that none of Bailey, Dabrowski or Mendrick could defeat Illinois’ billionaire chief executive.

“So, my heart and my soul just kept dragging me into it and saying, ‘Rick, you have to do this. Rick, you have to do this,’” Heidner said. “And that’s when I decided to run.”

Alignment with Trump

In the weeks that followed, Heidner’s campaign existed in name only. There was no campaign website, and the businessman did not return reporters’ inquiries.

But Heidner emerged in mid-January, with his inaugural campaign ad touting his record in business while promising to pass term limits, end wasteful spending and cut taxes.

Beyond the parallels in their professional backgrounds, Heider has sought to tie himself politically to Trump. On social media, Heidner portrays himself as a staunch supporter of the president, echoing his positions while bashing Pritzker’s resistance.

Like Trump, Heidner has shared unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud on social media. He posted on X on Jan. 26 that former Vice President Kamala Harris won Illinois’ electoral votes in 2024 by about the same number of new voters who registered online. Though he provided no evidence of fraud or noncitizen voting, Heidner wrote, “suspicious, isn’t it? Makes you wonder what’s really going on in our state.”

Pressed to explain his claim, Heidner ducked the question.

“I don’t even remember posting that, so I apologize, but I could tell you this, I’m 100% for in-person voting,” he said. “I’m 1,000% for voting ID. I don’t like mail-in ballots.”

Though he’s tried to win over voters by siding with Trump, Heidner said he isn’t always in lockstep with the president.

“I can’t say I’ve agreed 1,000% with everything, no single thing, he’s ever said,” Heidner said.

Heidner said he supports creating a path to citizenship for immigrants, particularly those who have been in the country for many years and contribute to the economy. However, he said he supports Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s work.

Positioning himself as the Trump candidate could help in the short run as he competes for votes from a GOP primary electorate in which the president remains deeply popular. But it could result in long-term blowback in a state Trump lost three times by wide margins and, as of last month, registered just a 39% overall approval rating.

While largely in alignment behind Trump’s positions, Heidner said it’s also transactional. He argued that Pritzker’s adversarial tone with the president hasn’t been good for Illinois and that he can be the one who smooths things over.

“It seems like Illinois got favor when we had a Democratic president,” Heidner said. “It certainly seemed that way to me, and hopefully having a Republican president, I think I could have good conversations with the president about our state of Illinois. I think that would be a positive thing.”

Trump backed Bailey in the 2022 election. He has not formally endorsed in the 2026 race, though he encouraged Bailey to “keep fighting” and stay in the race following a helicopter crash that killed his son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren.

Policy vision

Heidner leans heavily on his business background to guide the policy focuses of his campaign. Asked how his governorship would benefit farmers and rural residents, Heidner talked about horse racing.

“I was the hero for the southern Illinois people, okay?” Heidner said, pointing to business investments he made in horse racing, particularly in Chicago’s south suburbs. He went on to lament the decline in horse racing in Illinois, arguing he “was revitalizing the entire horse racing industry.”

Heidner added he also respects corn farmers after briefly owning the Field of Dreams movie site in Iowa alongside White Sox hall of famer Frank Thomas. He did not say what sort of agricultural policies he would push as governor.

Like other candidates in the race, Heidner has also voiced support for lowering taxes and auditing the state budget. He said repealing Illinois’ immigration policies would save the state money.

“We turn over all those illegal criminal aliens to the federal police and get them out of our state — we’re probably going to save the state some money there,” he said.

He added that Illinois also needs to focus on growing its tax base to allow the state to bring in more revenue without raising taxes.

On education, Heidner said his solution to funding problems at public schools is to provide vouchers “so that a parent and a child can have a choice in case they’re not happy the way that their children are being taught so that they could move their child.”

On energy, Heidner worried that data centers are straining the state’s grid. He suggested they should pay more for the energy they use, which Pritzker also supports.

“They need to pay more for the energy, then we divide it up into our residents and our other businesses,” Heidner said. “They’re really creating a problem with energy and, you know, they should have to step up and pay a higher rate.”

Political donations under scrutiny

Heidner has also faced scrutiny for the Democrats he’s donated campaign cash to.

That list includes Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, former Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Illinois Senate President Don Harmon.

Heidner’s $25,000 donation to Johnson came shortly after the mayor’s election win over Paul Vallas. Heidner said he supported Vallas but agreed to help the new mayor pay down his campaign debt at the as a favor to a friend.

Heidner, who has business interests in Chicago, said he thought he’d “have the opportunity to get an appointment with” Johnson as he’d “love to have a conversation with him about gaming.” But, that meeting never happened, Heidner said.

He similarly chalked up his donation to Johnson as the action of a pragmatic businessman when pressed by Dabrowski during a candidate forum last month. But on his $2,500 donation to Foxx, who was one of the major proponents of ending cash bail, he called it “a mistake” and apologized.

Pressed on his long history of bipartisan campaign donations, Heidner said he’s “never asked anybody to do anything for a donation.” He cited, for example, a $5,000 donation he made in 2015 to then-Chicago Ald. Deb Mell as a favor to her father, retired Ald. Dick Mell. It turned out that Deb Mell opposed permitting video gambling in city limits.

“I never even asked her,” Heidner said.

(Reporting by Ben Szalinski and Brenden Moore, Capitol News Illinois)

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.