The top-line race in the Illinois primary yesterday was the Republican contest for governor. The latest returns, as I write, have 99 percent of precincts reporting, with a clear but narrow winner in the Republican primary, businessman and self-financer Bruce Rauner over state legislator Kirk Dillard 40 percent to 37 percent (all these numbers are subject to slight revision when the final figures come in).

Rauner campaigned as a stern critic of Illinois’s public employee unions, which have connived with the legislature to give the state huge pension obligations, which in turn have given it the worst or second worst overhanging fiscal obligations of any state; Dillard campaigned as someone who was not blaming the public employee unions and was — surprise — the intended beneficiary of some late spending by the public employee unions. He served previously on the staffs of Republican Govs. James Thompson and Jim Edger — not exactly Tea Party credentials. The incumbent Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn has tried to scale back on the state’s obligations, with very limited success in the state’s Democratic-majority legislator; he was elected by just a 47-percent to 46-percent margin in 2010 over state Sen. Bill Brady, who finished in third place with 15 percent in Tuesday’s Republican primary.