Today In Lifeboat News: Jim Durkin.

From the Chicago Tribune today:

Former Illinois House GOP leader Jim Durkin endorses Democrat JB Pritzker over Republican Darren Bailey

Wowsers.  Not an Onion headline.  This actually happened. But if you're from here, the more you know, the less surprising it is.  

The Trib continues:

Accentuating the schisms that have helped make Republicans the superminority political party in Illinois, former Illinois House GOP leader Jim Durkin said he is endorsing Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker for a third term over Republican nominee Darren Bailey in the Nov. 3 general election.

“His campaign is going nowhere, and he’s on a foolish escapade,” Durkin said of Bailey, adding that the Republican governor nominee has “a delusional egomaniacal view of the world.”

Durkin’s refusal to support Bailey’s second consecutive bid against Pritzker is not surprising. But his public endorsement of the Democrat, in a video the governor’s campaign is scheduled to release Monday, marks a major break for Durkin, who still considers himself a Republican.

“I’ve worked with Pritzker, and I don’t agree with JB on a lot of things. But the fact is, he and I have worked together,” Durkin said. He cited Pritzker’s investment in infrastructure, the credit upgrades to steady the state’s finances and the governor’s support for “commonsense gun reforms.”

“I look at something that he (Pritzker) has done and this is nothing that Darren Bailey could ever, in his wildest dreams, if he was governor, would he ever be able to accomplish,” Durkin said. “We’ve got to shed Darren Bailey from the party and, I’m speaking for myself, but I am not going to throw away or waste a vote for governor this November, and that’s why I’m voting for JB Pritzker.”

For the record, Durkin is not some relic from the Before Time, forgotten by history.  

He was the Minority Leader of the Illinois House of Representatives from 2013 to 2023.  He was appointed to the Illinois House of Representatives on January 6, 1995, and served until 2002.  In 2006, he was appointed to the Illinois Senate to replace Judy Baar Topinka.  In 2000 he was state chairman for John McCain's presidential campaign in Illinois, and in 2007 he was Illinois co-chair and national legislative co-chair for McCain's second presidential campaign.  

After Illinois Republicans got stomped (again) in 2022, Durkin announced he would not be running for re-election. 

And then...

From the Chicago Sun-Times, November 11, 2022:

Man in the middle: Departing state House GOP Leader Durkin says Trump so ‘harmful’ to nation that RINO tag is ‘badge of honor’

In a no-holds barred interview with the Sun-Times — the 13th interview he gave on Thursday — Durkin rated the state’s last five governors, bashed former President Donald Trump and railed on the current climate of the state’s Republican Party.

He’s part of a vanishing breed in Illinois — a moderate Republican more interested in reaching across the aisle than giving the ruling Democrats the back of his hand.

But Western Springs Republican Jim Durkin is relinquishing his role as House minority leader, a largely thankless job as his party moved further to the right and the state moved further to the left.

And he said being called a RINO is a “badge of honor.”

That stands for “Republican in name only,” a taunt conservatives spit at moderates — and an idea that Durkin argues is killing his party.

All in all, I don't have much sympathy for Mr. Durkin, but I don't have a lot of enmity for him either.  

On the one hand, it looks like he's trying to make amends.  

On the other hand, not endorsing a doomed tomato can like Bailey, and endorsing Pritzker, who is going to beat Bailey like the proverbial rented mule, is a very low-risk investment in future political/media viability for a former Republican who sees no place for himself in the current Illinois GOP.

On the other hand, he did bail on his party and correctly identify the rot within it that starts at the very top.  And so far he hasn't tried to tell Democrats how to run our party, or insist that the only path forward is to move further to the right.

On the other hand, he waited until it looked like Trump was safely headed for the ash heap of history before discovering his inner dissident, and the Illinois Republican Party began losing its mind long before that.

Exhibit A, from The Illinois Times,  August 12, 2004:

Keyes to victory?

The Illinois Republican Party goes to extremes to find a Senate candidate

The new Illinois Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, Maryland activist Alan Keyes, may be most famous for his most liberal act: jumping into a mosh pit while Rage Against the Machine performed, body-surfing the crowd, and exchanging body slams with a spiky-haired teen as a means of getting filmmaker Michael Moore’s endorsement for president in 2000. As Moore put it, “We knew Alan Keyes was insane. We just didn’t know how insane until that moment.”

“Insane” is an adjective that voters may be hearing a lot in association with Keyes before Nov. 2. The reason: The opinionated candidate has a long record of far-right statements that have been largely overlooked. In the 1996 and 2000 Republican presidential contests, no candidate saw Keyes as a threat or wanted to risk criticizing an African American. Since then, Keyes has been a little-noticed commentator favored by the extreme right wing. That will soon change, and many of Keyes’ comments may shock the Republican moderates who grudgingly accepted him as their candidate.

In 2002, Keyes argued that the abortion issue should determine the outcome of every election. “This issue alone, which I believe dominates our moral decline as a people, should decide this and every election cycle,” he said. During a campaign appearance in Bedford, N.H., in 2000, Keyes asked a class of fifth-graders, most of whom were 10 years old, “If I were to lose my mind right now and pick one of you up and dash your head against the floor and kill you, would that be right?” He then went on to tell the children that some courts and politicians think it’s OK to murder 6-month-old children...

And with that, I'm all out of hands.  

Burn The Lifeboats