Good Wednesday morning, Illinois. About Tuesday’s primary: Trump’s candidates keep chalking up wins, but the headwinds facing Democrats appear to have eased, via POLITICO.
PROGRAMMING NOTE: Illinois Playbook won’t publish Monday, Aug. 29, to Monday, Sept. 5. We’ll be back on our normal schedule Tuesday, Sept. 6.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is calling a conservative super PAC’s TV ad an example of “dog whistle politics.”
“It darkens my skin. I don’t think there’s any dispute that I’m African American. I’m black and proud of that, so why do you need to blacken it and send it out to suburban communities? It’s fear-mongering,” said Lightfoot, who first saw the TV ad in an item in Playbook. “It’s the ultimate dog whistle.”
Who’s behind the ad: The spot was pulled together by the People Who Play By the Rules super PAC, run by conservative political operative Dan Proft and largely funded by billionaire GOP donor Richard Uihlein. The target of the ad wasn’t Lightfoot, exactly, but Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker and how the state is handling crime. Uihlein most recently has been giving money to the PAC in an effort to boost Republican Darren Bailey’s campaign for governor. Bailey doesn’t have anything to do with the ad.
Proft denied Lightfoot’s charge of racism. “That is insane — and par for the course from inveterate race hustlers like Lightfoot and Pritzker trying to misdirect attention away from the fact that she has turned the city over to repeat, violent predators and he aims to do the same statewide with his elimination of cash bail,” Proft said in an email to NBC News’ Natasha Korecki.
“Their contention is completely untrue and patently absurd. We did nothing to her pigmentation just as we did nothing to pigmentation of…