The general election may be nearly a year away, but the Illinois primary election is coming up soon, only two months from now, on March 17, and Ted Dabrowski needs your support.

Take a look at Ted’s story at his website TedforIllinois.com.  He had a successful career in banking, including working for Citibank in Mexico and then working as part of the team building out the Citibank location in Poland (his father’s birthplace) and participating in that country’s post-communist economic transformation.  He then turned to public service, not through elected office but by 6 years at the Illinois Policy Institute and then as President of Wirepoints, an organization dedicated to producing the research and trying to get the word out about what’s going wrong in Illinois and how to fix it, in areas as diverse as crime and corruption, education, job stagnation and population loss, and pensions — which is how I first connected up with him.  During my time writing at Forbes, he and the Wirepoints team promoted my writing on Illinois and Chicago pensions, and I used their research, and back in 2021 Ted and I gave a talk on Illinois pensions, what had gone wrong, and what fixes were needed.

So the bottom line is, Ted knows the math and does the research.  He was working on “DOGE” before it ever had that name, though, as he says in his stump speech, for 15 years he was happy to stay in the background providing the data to others, until it became clear that he needed to take the next step of being a candidate himself.

Now he’s in a fight to win the primary.  Darren Bailey may have lost the election to Pritzker four years ago, but that gained him name recognition, so Ted first and foremost needs help getting his name out so that people know who he is and know that he is the Republican candidate who can successfully go up against Pritzker and reach independents who are concerned about jobs, taxes, and education.

Take a look at Ted’s platform.  It’s full of serious proposals by a man who has devoted years to these issues, not a political consultant ghost-writing in the background.

In contrast, Darren Bailey’s platform is vague.  Entirely separately (meaning that neither website links to the other, which speaks to lack of basic competence/attention to detail) he released a “Blueprint for Illinois” with a mix of vague plans (spend money on communities in need) and impractical simplistic proposals, such as demanding that property taxes may never exceed mortgage payments, which would benefit longtime residents with paid off homes at the cost of burdening young families with high mortgage interest rates and high monthly mortgage payments.  Locally, I’ve now been to two significant events in which all GOP candidates were invited to appear or have a proxy speak on their behalf and Bailey did neither — as if he intends to coast on name recognition alone.

Four years ago, Pritzker played dirty politics in the Republican primary, with TV ads with the message that “Darren Bailey is too conservative for Illinois” but with the true intention of driving GOP voters to support Bailey, solely because he knew that Bailey had no appeal to mainstream Illinois voters.  In the end, Pritzker won handily, 55% – 42%.

In 2026, we need a candidate who can appeal to conservatives and to moderates, true-blue Republicans and independents.  That’s Ted Dabrowski.

And Ted doesn’t just need your vote.  He needs your support.  I’ve signed up to do phone banking for Ted, and to knock on doors to support him, and encourage you to do the same.  You can go to his website and fill out the form and mark that you’re willing to be contacted with information on how to help.  You can also mark that you want a yard sign and the team will deliver one to you.  This is a primary election, so this effort focuses on getting the support of consistent Republican voters.