223 MINUTES WITH ...J.B. Pritzker

The governor of Illinois is rich and powerful, making him both an ally to Joe Biden and his own center of influence

- GABRIEL DEBENEDETTI

ONE AFTERNOON IN late July, J. B. Pritzker reclined in a conference room high above Chicago and considered the curious case of Ron DeSantis. Pritzker, the 58-year-old governor of Illinois, was in light-blue shirtsleeves and a neatly knotted bright-pink tie— “My Barbie tie,” he quipped to business leaders earlier, revealing he’d watched the movie with his wife and daughter. He was slightly bewildered by the Florida governor’s misfortunes in the GOP presidential primary, which had recently led DeSantis to lay off a huge chunk of his staff amid cratering poll numbers. “I had never really paid a lot of attention to his manner and his personality so much, only to his policies and his hype and the extremist positions,” Pritzker told me, speaking carefully as he settled into pundit mode. “But the point is that is not what’s killing him.”

Pritzker, who, with his dark hair and broad face, looks a little like Oliver Platt playing an ’80s businessman, started to speed up, as if the topic were more exciting than he wanted to let on. “You get the sense of somebody who doesn’t actually care about people. He’s just got a shtick that he puts on for the purposes of a campaign,” he said. Pritzker, who has spent plenty of time with presidential candidates and thought plenty about what it takes to run for president, concluded, “You have to believe what you believe to your core in order to make it through a process like that.” And, he said of DeSantis, “it appears to me that he doesn’t actually have a core.”