Gov. Pritzker: ‘The Prices at the Grocery Store Are Going Up Because Democracy Is Being Taken Away’

Wallace: “I like to always stipulate that it is not the Democratic Party’s fault that we are here, but my old party has collapsed onto itself. You have former doctors like Senator Cassidy voting for RFK Jr.. You have former prosecutors voting for folks who are not coy about their disdain for the rule of law. So, I just want to put that out as pretext. But I went back and I watched your speech and a bunch of other addresses from the Democratic convention, including Adam Kinzinger’s, and all of the things that that you and Republicans warned would come to pass have come to pass. Why do you think those warnings didn’t sink in in the time frame of an election?”

PRITZKER: “You know, you got to remember that the things that I’m speaking out about now about, you know, the threat to our democracy, this is not a message to win elections on. It’s something people need to know. They need to know that that’s happening. But, you know, if you talk to 100 people, knock on 100 doors, and I’ve knocked on an awful lot of doors running for office, and you say to people, you know, democracy is at risk. Nobody knows what that looks like. They’ve never experienced it before. And the reality is, what people need to hear about is what the effects of that are. The prices at the grocery store are going up because democracy is being taken away. The impact on you in terms of your healthcare, 770,000 people in Illinois will lose healthcare as a result of what Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the Republican Congress are doing right now. It’s a danger to your way of life and that’s what people need to understand. It’s all about affordability, it’s all about how you can, you know, make it just a little bit easier for people every single day to live their lives and they’re taking that away from you. That is what it’s like to have democracy taken away. So, those are, you know, we need to bifurcate between educating people about democracy being taken away and talking to people about what the message ought to be about why they need to vote for Democrats.”