In Illinois the name Michael Madigan is synonymous with political power. He’s been in office 45 years representing a district on Chicago’s Southwest side. And for 31 of the last 33 years he’s also served as the Speaker of the Illinois House. Madigan is up for re-election next week.
He has three challengers in the Democratic primary but only one of them is actually doing any campaigning. Illinois Public Radio’s Michael Puente reports.
On a recent afternoon, Jason Gonzales goes to work knocking on doors in the West Elsdon neighborhood in the shadow of Midway Airport. It’s within the 22nd House District, a difficult place to get a vote if you’re name isn’t Mike Madigan.
If signs could vote, Madigan would be a shoo-in because they are all over the district.
GONZALES:Admittedly, in the beginning, I was intimidated by the sheer number of signs but when we actually went to talk to people at those doors, what we found is that many said they were undecided. That they weren’t just going to vote for Madigan simply because a sign was in the yard.
As he walks down the block, nearly every house Gonzales passes has a Madigan sign. Including the one he’s walking up to. He goes past the Madigan sign and up to the front porch and knocks on the door. Gonzales is counting on him being Latino and speaking Spanish to make the difference in this House district.
In 2000 the district was majority white and 40 percent Latino. Today it’s 70 percent Latino. Though so far the district’s ethnic makeup hasn’t hampered Madigan from getting re-elected over and over. Gonzales finishes up his conversation and leaves the front porch.
GONZALES: So he’s going to let me put a sign up, which is nice. So I’ll mark him as a strong supporter.
There are two other candidates in this race but they seem invisible… Graciela Rodriguez and Joe Barboza. There’s no indication that either are campaigning. In fact, I haven’t seen a single sign for either candidate in the entire district. And I went to each of their homes and neither of them even had a sign in their own front yards. Neither of them would sit for an interview or even return our phone calls. The closest I got was running into Barboza’s wife outside their home.
The final candidate is of course Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan. The 73-year-old seems to spend most of his time in Springfield. He hasn’t participated in any public forums or debates… not a single one. What he has done is send out a mailer attacking Gonzales as a criminal.
When he was 17 years old in the early 90s, Gonzales was convicted of six charges involving forgery, theft and misuse of credit cards. He dropped out of high school but eventually earned his diploma when he was 21. In the years following, he’s gotten degrees from Duke, MIT and Harvard. And just last year, then Governor Pat Quinn pardoned Gonzales’ convictions. Madigan refused our requests for an interview but his spokesman Steve Brown says the mailer on the convictions that are more than 20 years old are fair game.
BROWN: These what, seven, eight or nine arrests, it seems like it’s part of a person’s resume. You have to define the candidate. I think right along the lines of what the facts show of the situation.
PUENTE: But he got pardoned last year. And he’s also, since his teenage years, he’s gone on to earn degrees from Harvard, MIT and Duke, is it a little misleading?
BROWN: Not really because those events happened. It all seems like a complete part of the story.
Brown also calls Gonzales a plant for Illinois’ Republican Governor Bruce Rauner.
BROWN: All the money comes from either Rauner contributors or people who are close allies of the governor. It’s very little non-Rauner involvement that I’ve been able to find.
Campaign finance reports show Gonzales has raised about 250-thousand dollars, with much of that coming from Republican donors. Gonzales admits to accepting donations from Republicans but denies being a Rauner plant. He says he’s an independent Democrat. He says he simply wants to end Madigan’s dominance and says the speaker has been in office way too long. But it’s that experience that Gonzales is up against.