J. B. Pritzker Is a New Democratic Power Broker

One afternoon in late July, J. B. Pritzker reclined in a conference room high above Chicago and considered the curious case of Ron DeSantis. Pritzker, the 58-year-old governor of Illinois, was in light-blue shirtsleeves and a neatly knotted bright-pink tie — “My Barbie tie,” he quipped to business leaders earlier, revealing he’d watched the movie with his wife and daughter. He was slightly bewildered by the Florida governor’s misfortunes in the GOP presidential primary, which had recently led DeSantis to lay off a huge chunk of his staff amid cratering poll numbers. “I had never really paid a lot of attention to his manner and his personality so much, only to his policies and his hype and the extremist positions,” Pritzker told me, speaking carefully as he settled into pundit mode. “But the point is that is not what’s killing him.”

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