The Scene
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker told New Hampshire Democrats to “stop apologizing” and “stop surrendering” as the party battles the Trump administration, blaming a “culture of timidity” for its losses last year.
“We will never join so many Republicans in the special place in hell reserved for quislings and cowards,” Pritzker said at the party’s annual McIntyre-Shaheen fundraising dinner here. “We will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.”
Pritzker, a billionaire first elected governor in the 2018 midterm election, did not criticize other Democrats by name. His targets — along with Trump, his cabinet, and the “tech bros” of DOGE — were the “do-nothing Democrats” who’d hoped that “a simple defense of norms and decorum” would convince Republicans to change.
“They spent years watching Republicans illegitimately pack the Supreme Court, take away voting rights from people of color, systematically chip away at the constitutional order,” he said. “Those same do-nothing Democrats want to blame our losses on our defense of Black people and trans kids and immigrants, instead of their own lack of guts and gumption.”
The crowd of Democratic donors and elected officials cheered when Pritzker criticized “incrementalism,” and applauded at the references to “pundits” who had given bad advice. It rose for a standing ovation when he talked about the deportation of Kilmar Ábrego García: “It’s wrong to snatch a person off the street and ship them to a foreign gulag with no chance to defend themselves in a court of law.”
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Democratic governors and attorneys general have been locked in battle with the Trump administration for its first 100 days. Few have picked more fights than Pritzker, who in February said that Trump was copying the “authoritarian playbook” of European fascists.
That was appreciated in the DoubleTree conference center where Democrats met on Sunday — and where they were already sizing up Pritzker as a presidential candidate. Ray Buckley, who’s led the New Hampshire Democratic Party for 18 years, cheerfully called it “the first event held in an early state by a potential 2028 candidate.” The governor, who has not said whether he’ll run for reelection next year, described it more carefully.
“We just finished a presidential election,” Pritzker told Semafor before the dinner. “Could we take a breath and talk about the congressional elections coming up in 2026?” He was in Manchester, he said, because it was an “opportunity to talk about what’s happening in the country right now and what Democrats need to be doing to stand up and fight back.”
Pritzker, who has spent more than $350 million on his campaigns for governor and an unsuccessful campaign to pass a progressive state income tax, said he agreed with the anti-“oligarchy” campaigning of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“Oligarchy is a group of the most powerful people in society who are trying to impose their will on everyone else, and make them pay for what the oligarchs are unwilling to pay for,” said Pritzker. “There’s a big difference between the people that Bernie Sanders is talking about and what I believe in.” He was opposing Trump’s agenda of “the largest tax increase, with the tariffs on working-class people, and the largest tax cut for wealthy people. That is exactly the opposite of what people thought they were voting for in November.”
The Trump administration and congressional Republicans have taken on Illinois and some of its educational institutions over immigration and campus protests. That’s meant taking on Pritzker, who has defended the state’s law restricting local law enforcement from cooperating on some work with ICE, and whose $100 million donation (after graduating, before running for governor) put his name on Northwestern’s Law School.
House Republicans are now investigating that school for whether its work on behalf of Gaza protesters advanced “antisemitism,” and they have invited Pritzker, who is Jewish, to testify at a hearing on “sanctuary cities” next month.
“They have about 800 different ways of defining a sanctuary state or sanctuary city,” he told Semafor. “Every violent criminal who’s undocumented — a violent criminal who is convicted — needs to be removed from my state and the country. And I think every Democrat should be saying that from the rafters. What we also want is comprehensive immigration reform.” It was wrong, he said, for the administration to go after universities over political causes in the guise of fighting “antisemitism.”
Onstage, he put it another way.
“Stop tearing down the constitution in the name of my ancestors,” he said, to his second standing ovation.
The View From Republicans
New Hampshire Republicans mocked their counterparts for bringing Pritzker to Manchester, saying that he represented the sort of progressivism that couldn’t win here.
“It’s truly fitting for the New Hampshire Democrats to bring Gov. Pritzker to the Granite State,” state GOP chair Jim MacEachern told NHJournal. “Both he and [Rep.] Chris Pappas want to place a tax on everything that moves. Both want to let violent criminals back on the streets, and both are pushing to appease the far left of their party.”
David’s view
When I talked to local Democrats before the dinner, they tended to know two things about Pritzker: that he had given that February speech about Trump and authoritarianism, and that he is a billionaire. He gets single digits in the early national primary polling that’s excited the sort of pundits the governor made fun of in Manchester.
But there’s no “national” primary. There is, right now, an invisible primary of unofficial candidates giving speeches and talking to potential donors and staff. And the extent that any Democrat’s gained in these polls, it’s because they did something high-profile that looked like fighting.
That was Ocasio-Cortez talking to crowds of 20,000 people; that was Cory Booker breaking the Senate’s record for longest speech. It was not Gavin Newsom working through his worries about the language progressives use with each other, or Gretchen Whitmer giving a speech about bipartisan infrastructure projects and then trying to obscure her face with a folder to avoid a Trump Oval Office photo op. (That photo was brought up to me, without prompting, several times tonight.)
“The fire he had in his belly tonight is what Democrats need,” said Richard Faulconer, 65, on his way out of the dinner.
Nobody, especially not Pritzker, was criticizing Joe Biden or Barack Obama for how they’d run the party and opposed Trump. I doubt they would. But Pritzker’s description of Democrats who had talked about restoring norms, and who’d hoped that Republicans would change, reminded me of the Obama/Biden hope that the “fever” among Republicans would break, or that they’d have an “epiphany” if Trump lost in 2020. The next Democratic nominee won’t talk like that.
Notable
- For New Hampshire’s WMUR, Adam Sexton reports that the open 2028 could help restore New Hampshire’s first-in-nation primary for Democrats; the party officially pushed it down the calendar last year, but Biden won it as a write-in candidate.
- In The Washington Post, Maeve Reston surveys all the buzz Pritzker got by agreeing to speak in the state so early.