The famous “Buckley Rule,” named after conservative giant William F. Buckley, dictates that the best course in primary elections is to choose the most conservative candidate who can win.
The rule is usually invoked to discourage those on the Right from going overboard on ideological purity. But on March 20, nearly 49 percent of Illinois Republican voters observed the Buckley rule in its other, rarer-but-equally-important sense. They refused to vote for a Republican governor who, based on his record after four years in office, was not conservative enough to be worth keeping around.
With his 55 percent disapproval rating, Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner is likely doomed in November anyway, so the part about voting for a candidate “who can win” was already sufficient ground for voting against him. The conservative challenger who nearly knocked him off, Jeanne Ives, would have been putting him out of his misery.
But Rauner’s deviations from conservatism are not the typical ones that reasonable conservatives expect and grudgingly tolerate. There are limits.
For example, it is true that some Republican officeholders support legal abortion. That’s the kind of politician I thought Rauner was when he first ran. But when you hear about a governor signing one bill that actually requires public funding for abortions, and another bill that aggressively persecutes pregnancy centers that help mothers who would rather not abort their babies, you assume he must be a far-left Democrat.
But it turns out he might also be Rauner.
Rauner signed a “sanctuary state” law last year that will protect many illegal immigrants who are convicted of serious crimes in Illinois from deportation to their home countries. Note that the need to deport criminals is one of the very few things in the immigration debate that every reasonable person agrees with. It’s not clear what Rauner expects to accomplish by signing that law — these sorts of bills are usually signed by left-wing Democrats who hold, as a matter of faith, that all immigration law and perhaps even most criminal law is inherently racist.
That’s not to say that Rauner is all bad. He did veto a 32 percent tax hike. But then he couldn’t even keep his own legislative Republicans onside to prevent it from passing over his veto. So when he isn’t working against you, he is powerless to help.
Given Illinois’ insolvency, its looming pension crisis, its endemic corruption, and its high-tax, anti-business environment, you have to wonder where Rauner, who originally ran promising to fix these problems, can find the time to put himself so forcefully behind such leftist ideological causes. Just think, he has even promised money that his state government doesn’t have to abort babies that his state needs to replace its dwindling population. (By the way, do you suppose abortionists in Illinois take I.O.U.s, as other state vendors and even lottery winners are already forced to do when the Deadbeat State owes them money?)
Between 2010 and 2017, the number of Illinoisans who left the state exceeded the number of Americans moving into it from other states by a staggering 642,000 — the equivalent of the combined populations of Rockville, Joliet, Naperville, Springfield, and Evanston. And yes, Illinois has attracted some international immigrants during the same period, but not nearly enough to make up for those losses. Which is why Illinois is one of just three states — West Virginia is another — with a shrinking population. Illinois is also one of the few states that has actually lost jobs not only since 2007, but since 2000 as well.
Illinois needs a miracle. Despite the best efforts of 49 percent of the Republican primary voters who followed the Buckley rule, it isn’t going to get that miracle in 2018.
