Several months ago, House Speaker Michael Madigan’s chief of staff Tim Mapes made copies of candidate nominating petitions for what appeared to be every single candidate in the state, regardle...

I’ve read, watched and heard a whole lot of commentary about the upcoming state budget negotiations during the past few weeks, and it pretty much all ignores recent history and focuses instead on on...

 J.B. Pritzker appears to have chosen a solid message for the fall campaign. The overall theme at the successful Democratic gubernatorial candidate’s press conference the day after he won the p...

 The oddest political couple in all of Illinois did pretty well in last Tuesday’s Democratic primary. Two years ago, progressive firebrand Cook County Commissioner Chuy Garcia helped lead Berni...

Gov. Bruce Rauner’s veto of a gun dealer licensing bill last week took a lot of folks by surprise. It probably shouldn’t have.We’ll get to the politics in a second, but, as with HB40, the govern...

House Speaker Michael Madigan cares most about three House votes: The votes every two years for both the next Speaker and the House rules; and the vote every ten years on the new state legislative dis...

Sources in both parties said last week that their tracking polls were showing a dip in support for Sen. Daniel Biss and a trending increase for Chris Kennedy in the Democratic primary race for governo...

 Every election cycle, House Democratic candidates have to pay what can be thought of as a “Madigan tax.”The “tax” is the amount of extra campaign money, labor and ingenuity required to o...