On August 31, a lawyer named Tom DeVore wrote a public letter to Darren Bailey telling him how this was going to end.
The Illinois Republican Party, he wrote, was not sitting out the governor’s race. It was running out the clock. And when the party finally made a show of supporting its own nominee, DeVore said, everyone should understand what they were looking at:
“So when the gesture finally comes, and it will, small and late and well publicized, everybody should know exactly what they are looking at. A receipt for the alibi.”
That was five weeks ago.
On October 5, the former Republican leader of the Illinois House appeared in a campaign video released by JB Pritzker — endorsing the Democratic governor over the Republican nominee. Within hours, the Illinois Republican Party issued a blistering statement condemning him.
Both halves of that day were on DeVore’s calendar in August.
What Durkin said
Jim Durkin did not quietly withhold his vote. He went on camera for the other side and made the case.
“It’s unfortunate, but I cannot cast my vote for my party’s nominee,” he said in the Pritzker video. He called Bailey “not cut out for the job,” said Bailey “stands for exclusion over inclusion,” and told voters that the Republican nominee for governor of Illinois “cannot be trusted to lead our state.”
Of the Democrat raising their taxes, Durkin offered this: “He’s a good person, and he has delivered on matters important to me and to this state.”
Durkin led House Republicans in Springfield for nearly a decade before stepping down in 2023. He has been a long-standing critic of President Trump, whom he blames for driving moderate suburban voters away from the party. None of that is secret, and none of it is new.
What is new is that a Democratic campaign now owns the footage.
The condemnation, on schedule
ILGOP Chairman Bob Grogan answered fast and hard. He called Pritzker’s two terms “a complete and total failure,” citing repeated tax increases, the governor’s posture on illegal immigration, and what he called the most bloated budget in state history. Then:
“This is who opportunists in search of relevance like Jim Durkin have aligned themselves with.”
He closed by backing Bailey outright.
Taken alone, that is the right response, and I said so when it landed. A state party watching its former leader cut footage for the Democrat ought to say something, and Grogan said it without hedging.
Then you read DeVore’s August letter and the timing starts to itch.
The letter
DeVore is not a bystander. He and Bailey went at Pritzker together through the lockdowns — the school closures, the padlocked businesses, the mandates — and his letter is addressed to Bailey as a friend who was in it with him.
His central charge is that the people who are supposed to be the opposition in Illinois were never in that fight. He lists them by name. Bob Grogan is the first name on the list.
“The leadership of the Illinois Republican Party was not fighting the governor during COVID,” DeVore wrote. “They were lined up with him.”
From there he makes a set of specific accusations about this cycle: that the party spent sixty dollars and fifty-five cents on advertising in a governor’s year, that there was a recorded vote to send the ticket nothing, that the vice chairman answered a question about funding Bailey with “Yeah I was a big no on that,” and that from the March 17 primary to the end of August nobody from the party made a single call.
Those are DeVore’s claims and his alone. We have not independently confirmed the sixty-dollar figure, the vote, or the quote, and the party has not addressed them publicly. Readers should weigh them as what they are: an allegation from a man with a side in this.
But his argument does not rest on any of those numbers, and that is what makes it hard to dismiss.
The part that is a matter of record
In 2022, Richard Uihlein put twelve million dollars behind Darren Bailey.
This cycle there is no comparable donor. Bailey has raised roughly $2.17 million, the bulk of it in small unitemized contributions, and holds about $1.5 million — most of that traceable to a $2 million loan he made to his own campaign. Reporting on the race has noted the absence of interest from major Republican donors.
Whatever the party did or did not vote on, the money that showed up in 2022 did not show up in 2026. That is not an allegation. That is a filing.
And it is the premise of DeVore’s whole letter, which turns on the calendar rather than on motive. The primary was March 17. Ballots were going out within weeks of his writing. His point was that by the time anyone made a show of helping, helping would be arithmetically impossible — that the delay was the decision, and the calendar would do the work so nobody ever had to say out loud what they wanted.
“They did not have to say no forever,” he wrote. “They only had to say no long enough.”
Our Take
Before I go further, you should know where I am standing, because I am not a neutral party and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
I have interviewed Tom DeVore on this channel. I have interviewed Darren Bailey on this channel. I covered Bailey’s official campaign announcement at the Drake in Oak Brook. And during his first run, Bailey and his wife sat in my home — not a green room, not a rope line, my house.
So when I tell you Darren Bailey is the real deal, understand that I am not reading it off a polling memo. I have spent time with the man. He is exactly who he appears to be, which in Illinois politics is rarer than it ought to be. DeVore puts the rest more bluntly than I would: a Republican governor they cannot control, he wrote, is worse for them than four more years of Pritzker.
That is my disclosure and my position. Weigh everything that follows against it.
I am not going to tell you Bob Grogan is lying. I do not know that, and neither does anyone else reading this.
Here is what I know. A man wrote down in August exactly what would happen in October, including the shape of it — late, public, loud — and then it happened. He also wrote down what comes next, and that part has not been tested yet:
“On the morning of November 4, before the coffee is cold, these same people will be in every newspaper and on every television station in Illinois explaining that Darren Bailey was too extreme.”
Mark the date. If that is what the Illinois Republican Party sounds like on November 4, then DeVore described a plan rather than a prediction, and every Republican in this state should want to know who made it.
If it is not — if the party spends the next four weeks doing the unglamorous work of trying to win — then the condemnation was real and I will say so plainly.
What I am not willing to do is pretend the question is impolite.
Three hundred four thousand Republicans voted for this nominee in March. County organizations in places most people in Chicago could not find on a map passed the hat at Lincoln Day dinners to put something behind the ticket. Those people are entitled to ask where the twelve million went, why the man who used to lead the caucus is in the governor’s commercial, and whether the outrage they are being shown is a position or a performance.
Durkin made his choice and he is free to defend it. He thinks Bailey cannot win the suburbs. Fine. There is an argument there and he is entitled to make it — but there is a long distance between our nominee has a problem and let me help the Democrat close, and Durkin covered that distance on camera.
And electability is the one argument that never has to be right. It is never the correct year, the nominee is always too something, and the people making the case carry no responsibility when their own approach delivers nothing either. Durkin ran that caucus for nearly ten years. Illinois Republicans did not exactly surge.
Illinois does not need Republicans making a careful case for why change is unrealistic. It needs Republicans fighting Pritzker’s agenda, not helping keep him in office.
We will be watching on November 4.
