ICYMI: WCIA Profiles On-Going GOP Feud Between Rauner and Ives
Ives: “We’ve got a fight going on”
Yesterday, WCIA reported on the Illinois GOP Party Chairman fight that’s serving as a continuation of the feud between Governor Bruce Rauner and state Representative Jeanne Ives. In the report, Ives said that the Illinois Republican Party is far from unified and claimed Rauner and his allies “dismissed the conservative voters who came out in droves to vote for me.” Ives promised to take the fight to court, ensuring that the feud will continue even longer.
See below for excerpts from the story, or read online HERE:
Jeanne Ives may have lost her insurgent March primary battle against incumbent first term Governor Bruce Rauner, but she doesn’t intend to go down quietly — not without waging a war over the future of the state party apparatus first.
“We’ve got a fight going on,” Ives (R-Wheaton) said buoyantly on Wednesday, as she spoke about her plans to oust Rauner’s pick for the state party chairmanship, Tim Schneider.
“They want all controversy to go away, which would make sense from their standpoint,” Ives said with an air of defiance. “They are trying to pretend like there is a unified party and the truth is that they have dismissed the conservative voters who came out in droves to vote for me in the primary. They essentially want to have what looks like a unified party and not any controversy, but the truth is that we will not, our voices will be heard one way or the other.”
[…]
If Ives gets her way, party unity will have to wait for a judge’s gavel.
“I think it is going to be up to the courts to determine this in the end,” she said. “From what we were told, there was some inappropriate voting going on.”
[…]
Sources close to Ives believe Rauner’s general election loss to billionaire Democrat J.B. Pritzker is inevitable. They are seeking a statewide reset at the party level, which includes a plan to purge Rauner’s allies from the controls over the upcoming four-year term and realign the party closer to the nationalist themes from President Trump’s 2016 campaign.
[…]
National election analysts, pollsters, the DGA, and the Pritzker campaign have all dubbed Rauner the most vulnerable incumbent governor in the nation.