Rich Miller: Dems deploy disinformation in southwest suburban state House race

As usual, plenty of false claims have been made during this state legislative election cycle.

But the campaign I keep going back to in my own mind is the battle in the 97th House District.

The race features freshman incumbent state Rep. Harry Benton, D-Plainfield, a union ironworker and a former local elected official. The Republican challenger is Gabriella Shanahan, an executive assistant with the Illinois Policy Institute.

Organized labor is keen on this race because the Illinois Policy Institute is known for its anti-union crusades and Benton is one of their own.

The 97th District had been held by the Republican Party before the 2021 remap, so the Republicans really want to win it back.

But the remap did a number on this district. Donald Trump lost the old district by 8 points in 2020 and 3 in 2016. Trump lost the precincts that make up the newly redrawn district by more than 10 points in 2020 and 6 in 2016. Every statewide Democratic candidate has won the precincts in the new district going back to 2016 except one, appointed Republican Comptroller Leslie Munger won it by less than 4 points.

The freshman incumbent and the Democrats have been playing some games there, despite having a huge fundraising advantage of close to $2 million for Benton to $525K for the Republican Shanahan (including a $100,000 loan from herself on Nov. 1) as I write this four days before the election.

My associate Isabel Miller reported a while back that Benton told WSPY Radio earlier this year he was “pretty happy to see that the grocery tax is going away,” after the governor proposed eliminating the tax during his State of the State message in February.

Some of Benton’s campaign mailers even claimed that the incumbent, “supported the elimination of the grocery tax.”

But when it came time to vote on eliminating the grocery tax, Benton didn’t vote either way.

Benton told Isabel that some of his municipalities would lose lots of money since the 1% grocery tax was solely collected for local governments.

But when Isabel asked him why he was touting a position that he didn’t officially take, Benton said, “Since I didn’t vote on HB 3144, people wouldn’t have known my position. I wanted to let people know before anyone could misrepresent my position that while there were parts of that bill I didn’t agree with, I had spoken out about cutting taxes on groceries.”

Um, OK.

Last month, the Democrats ran a digital ad blasting Shanahan for accepting contributions from politicians who “voted to block funding for testing rape kits,” among other things.

That allegation was based on campaign contributions from Republican state legislators who voted against the state budget, which included funding for rape kit testing. Shanahan has indeed received money from several of those GOP members.

However, wanna take a guess who also voted with those very same Republicans against the omnibus appropriations bill (SB251)? If you said, “Rep. Harry Benton,” you win a prize.

A person close to Benton said at the time that the freshman incumbent had no veto power over the House Democratic ads.

Well, the incumbent’s personal campaign fund, Friends to Elect Harry Benton, then began running a Chicago broadcast TV ad that made the same exact hypocritical charge.

“Gabby Shanahan won’t protect women,” Benton himself said in the voice-over. “She’s backed by extreme politicians who voted to block funding for testing rape kits.”

In other words, he was personally, with his own voice, blasting his opponent for taking money from Republican legislators who made the same exact “No” vote that he did on the budget.

Benton also said this in the ad: “I voted against a new tax on retirement savings for our seniors.” No bill number was flashed on the screen as a reference, and I have no idea what the heck he was talking about.

The almost comically lopsided imbalance in campaign money this year means that Democratic candidates can basically say whatever the heck they want without any sort of consequence. And the collapse of local news media in the state means that almost nobody in the district will ever hear about this and the incumbent won’t be called to account.

The Democrats know all this, of course, which is why they do it.

• Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter, and CapitolFax.com.