ALSIP, Ill. — At least his home state is one of the places where Barack Obama is still welcome on the campaign trail.
Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois has thrown open his arms to the president, who told a crowd of 6,000 recently, “I care about what happens here.”
Governor Quinn desperately needs black voters, who still adore President Obama, to turn out in force for him on Election Day. For his part, the president wants to avoid the embarrassment of losing deep-blue Illinois.
But despite Mr. Obama’s support and some positive economic news this year, Governor Quinn is running no better than neck-and-neck with a wealthy political novice, Bruce Rauner. Promising to use his business skills to tame state government, Mr. Rauner has poured $26 million of his fortune into tapping voter fatigue over high taxes and one-party rule in Springfield, the state capital.
In their final debate last week, both candidates reduced their messages to single words, numbingly repeated: The governor battered Mr. Rauner as a “billionaire,” and Mr. Rauner labeled Governor Quinn a “failure.”
The unexpectedly close race has become a battle over geography and demographics, with Mr. Rauner looking to maximize support in the suburbs north and west of Chicago, especially among white women, while Governor Quinn reaches out to blacks in the city and southern suburbs.
In visits to three African-American churches on Sunday, the governor harped on one issue to motivate voters: raising the state minimum wage to $10 an hour. He quoted the prophet Amos: “One of the things he said was, ‘Woe to those who afflict the poor,’ ” Governor Quinn said at the Lighthouse Church of All Nations. “And that is why I believe in raising the minimum wage in Illinois.”
The Quinn campaign points to tapes of Mr. Rauner advocating a position he no longer says he holds, that the state would be better off if its $8.25 minimum wage was $1 lower. It rarely misses a chance to highlight the Republican’s extreme wealth — his nine homes and ranches, a $140,000 membership in a wine club.
Still, Mr. Rauner, 58, has gained support by promising relief from Illinois’s sordid political history. He tells audiences of his teenage daughter who did not want him to become governor because then, she feared, he would go to prison. Two recent Illinois governors were convicted of corruption: George Ryan, a Republican, and Rod R. Blagojevich, a Democrat, whose 2009 impeachment ushered Mr. Quinn, the lieutenant governor, into office.
Governor Quinn was elected governor in his own right by a thin margin in 2010, but he continues to suffer from perceptions that he is in some ways an accidental governor, and not the true boss in Springfield, where entrenched Democratic lawmakers have held power for decades. The Chicago Tribune measured the governor’s job approval at only 34 percent last week.
At a restaurant that Mr. Rauner visited on the northern edge of Cook County on Saturday, diners, mostly white, complained of a state tax hike on personal and business incomes in 2011, originally meant to be temporary, which Governor Quinn now says should be permanent.
“I have never voted for a Republican anything in my life, but I voted for Rauner,” said Paulette Kirscher, 69, a school teacher-turned-business owner, who cast her ballot in early voting. “I am very unhappy about these Illinois politicians. I think things need to change.”
The Tribune poll suggests that Mr. Rauner has pulled essentially even with Governor Quinn because of voters like Ms. Kirscher, white suburban women who strongly favored the Republican.
Ms. Kirscher said she would not have broken her lifelong Democratic allegiance if not for assurances that Mr. Rauner would protect abortion rights. He says he has no “social agenda.” Asked on Saturday about a charge that Gloria Steinem, the women’s rights activist, made at a Quinn rally — that Mr. Rauner could not be trusted to protect abortion rights — he replied, “That’s baloney.”
“I have an agenda that is about jobs and schools and taxes and fighting corruption,” he said. “I don’t have a social agenda.”
Senator Mark S. Kirk of Illinois, the second Republican in the Senate to supportsame-sex marriage, said that being “a social moderate and fiscal conservative” was the key to a Republican winning statewide in Illinois. He praised Mr. Rauner’s choice to steer clear of recent Chicago appearances by two Republican firebrands, Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas.
Mr. Rauner promises to roll back the 67 percent personal income tax increase of 2011. The tax raise was originally sold as a way to fix Illinois’s budget crisis, including $100 billion owed to retired public employees, the worst pension mess in the nation. Governor Quinn forced through a separate pension rescue last year, which unions are fighting in court.
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The governor maintains that a tax rollback would cost the state $4 billion and lead to teacher layoffs and cuts to social services like child care.
Mr. Rauner’s pitch is simple: Democrats have had their chance and failed. But he has offered few details about how to balance the state’s books. In an interview, he said taxes could be lowered without cutting into schools by eliminating “wasteful spending.”
“Illinois has become the worst-run state in America,” he said. “I can really shake it up in a way that a standard politician can’t.”
The Quinn campaign has dug into Mr. Rauner’s career as a private equity investor to portray him as heartless.
Mr. Rauner, whose 2013 income was $60.1 million, was chairman of the private equity partnership GTCR, which bought and sold interests in hundreds of companies. He boasts of making millions of dollars for the Illinois teachers’ pension fund, but some investments ran into trouble. Three officials of one company went to prison for accounting fraud. At a trial now underway in Florida, GTCR is accused of selling a nursing home operator to avoid damages in wrongful death suits. Mr. Rauner has said he was unaware of such problems.
Over lunch at a McDonald’s — a choice in keeping with the governor’s portrayal of himself as more in touch with everyday people — he had harsh words for Mr. Rauner’s career.
“He calls himself a businessman,” the governor said as he opened the packaging of a second apple pie. “He’s not a businessman. He’s a profiteer. He’s had 12 bankruptcies, caused great harm to many people. He’s given himself a lot of money out of it. He’s using it now to have a hostile takeover of the government of Illinois.”
To counter this caricature, Mr. Rauner tells audiences about inheriting a work ethic and a desire to give back to the community from his family. He omits mention of his father, a senior executive at Motorola, and paints a portrait of a Swedish-speaking grandfather who milked dairy cows and lived in a double-wide trailer. “He always gave back in church,” Mr. Rauner told supporters on Saturday. “Even when it hurt to put $3 into the collection.”
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