Pritzker spokesperson Edelstein on Vallas: ‘[Chicago] residents deserve to know if their next Mayor will listen to experts or instead to right-wing talk show hosts’

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker (D), through his campaign spokesperson Natalie Edelstein, made a veiled attack on Chicago mayoral candidate Paul Vallas in a statement provided to HuffPost, according to an article published by the outlet on Tuesday.

“Throughout the pandemic, Governor Pritzker spent every day fighting to save people’s lives and livelihoods,” Edelstein said. “He did it by following the advice of the nation’s best virologists and epidemiologists, many of whom are at Illinois’s world-class research institutions and hospitals. Leadership requires making tough choices and not pandering to the loudest voices driven by politics. The next mayor of Chicago may be called upon to lead in a similar type of emergency and residents deserve to know if their next Mayor will listen to experts or instead to right-wing talk show hosts when making decisions about people’s lives.”

While Vallas, the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, has yet to personally respond, campaign spokesperson Phil Swibinski provided a statement to HuffPost in response.

“Paul Vallas looks forward to working with state leaders in tackling all the issues facing Chicago, from making the city safer to improving education to confronting crisis situations whenever they emerge,” he said. “As a lifelong Democrat, Paul respects Governor Pritzker’s leadership and voted for him in the past election.”

Edelstein’s comments appeared to be in reference to Vallas’ tendency to appear on right-wing radio shows and associate with conservative politicians and personalities, according to the HuffPost article. The mayoral candidate has previously suggested that certain left-wing approaches to teaching Black history create an “excuse for bad behavior” and disparaged Democratic Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. 

Vallas has also been critical of many of Pritzker’s policies, such as an election-year tax cut that he called an attempt to “fool” voters, a reduction in a tax credit for low-income private school parents and his measured approach to reopening schools and ending mask mandates throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, while appearing on a conservative radio show, Vallas argued that Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) were heavily relying on executive orders to implement public health policy because it “gives them the ability to act like dictators” by bypassing their respective legislators.

Vallas, a centrist Democrat and charter-school supporter endorsed by Chicago’s main police union, is competing against progressive Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson in the city’s mayoral runoff set to end on April 4. Vallas has run on a platform of restoring public safety and has proposed filling Chicago’s police backlog of more than 1,000 people and reviving community policing without raising any taxes.