67 Facts About Bruce Rauner

Bruce Vincent Rauner is an American businessman, philanthropist, and politician who served as the 42nd governor of Illinois from 2015 to 2019.

Bruce Rauner won the Republican nomination in March 2014 and defeated Democratic incumbent Pat Quinn in the general election.

Bruce Rauner was born in Chicago and grew up in Deerfield, Illinois, a suburb 10 miles north of Chicago city limits.

Bruce Rauner's mother, Ann Rauner, was a nurse, and his father, Vincent Rauner, was a lawyer and senior vice president for Motorola.

Bruce Rauner has three siblings, Christopher, Mark, and Paula, and is of half Swedish and half German descent.

Bruce Rauner's parents divorced and his father remarried to the former Carol Kopay in 1981.

Bruce Rauner was the chairman of private equity firm GTCR, where he had worked for more than 30 years, starting in 1981 after his graduation from Harvard through his retirement in October 2012.

In 2013, Bruce Rauner opened an office for a self-financed venture firm, R8 Capital Partners.

Bruce Rauner served as Chairman of Choose Chicago, the not-for-profit that is the city's convention and tourism bureau, resigning in May 2013, and as Chairman of the Chicago Public Education Fund.

Bruce Rauner has served as the Chairman of the Education Committee of the Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago.

Bruce Rauner was awarded the 2008 Distinguished Philanthropist award by the Chicago Association of Fundraising Professionals.

In 2003, Bruce Rauner received the Daley Medal from the Illinois Venture Capital Association for extraordinary support to the Illinois economy and was given the Association for Corporate Growth's Lifetime Achievement Award.

Bruce Rauner has been a financial supporter of projects including Chicago's Red Cross regional headquarters, the YMCA in the Little Village neighborhood, six new charter high schools, an AUSL turnaround campus, scholarship programs for disadvantaged Illinois public school students, and achievement-based compensation systems for teachers and principals in Chicago Public Schools.

Bruce Rauner provided major funding for the construction of the Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College, endowed full professor chairs at Dartmouth College, Morehouse College, University of Chicago, and Harvard Business School, and was the lead donor for the Stanley C Golder Center for Private Equity and Entrepreneurial Finance at the University of Illinois.

Bruce Rauner is a frequent donor to his fraternity at Dartmouth, Theta Delta Chi.

In March 2013, Bruce Rauner formed an exploratory committee to look at a run for Governor of Illinois as a Republican.

Bruce Rauner said that his top priorities included streamlining government, improving education, and improving the state's business climate.

Bruce Rauner supported term limits and said he would serve no more than eight years as governor.

On June 5,2013, Bruce Rauner officially announced his candidacy for governor, telling Chicago magazine's Carol Felsenthal that his platform would include overhauling tax policy and freezing property taxes.

In October 2013, Bruce Rauner announced that his running mate would be Wheaton City Councilwoman Evelyn Sanguinetti.

Bruce Rauner won the March 18,2014 Republican primary with 328,934 votes, defeating State Senator Kirk Dillard, who received 305,120 votes, State Senator Bill Brady and Illinois Treasurer Dan Rutherford's.

Also during the election, the media reported on a controversy regarding Bruce Rauner's daughter being admitted to Walter Payton Prep school in Chicago in 2008 through the "principal picks" process.

Bruce Rauner has said he had no recollection of speaking with Duncan directly.

McKinney had completed an investigative news story about a lawsuit filed by Christine Kirk, the CEO of LeapSource, a firm at which Bruce Rauner served as director.

The piece, written by three reporters and approved by the newspaper's editors, described Bruce Rauner using "hardball tactics" to threaten Kirk and her family.

Bruce Rauner is a former investor of the Sun-Times and received the newspaper's backing, marking the first time the media organization endorsed any candidate after imposing a moratorium on political endorsements three years earlier.

On November 4,2014, Bruce Rauner was elected Governor of Illinois; Pat Quinn conceded defeat the next day.

Bruce Rauner received 50.27 percent of the vote, while Quinn won 46.35 percent.

Bruce Rauner carried every county in the state except for Cook, home to Chicago.

Bruce Rauner spent a record $26 million of his own money on his election.

Bruce Rauner was sworn in as the 42nd governor of Illinois on January 12,2015.

Bruce Rauner governed Illinois as a moderate or liberal Republican, as evidenced by his stances on abortion, same-sex marriage, and immigration, among other issues.

Bruce Rauner had a 52 percent job approval rating after assuming the governorship in 2015, although it gradually declined during his term.

In January 2019, as Bruce Rauner was leaving office, his approval rating stood at only 25 percent.

On February 9,2015, Bruce Rauner signed an executive order blocking so called "fair share" union fees from state employee paychecks.

In February 2015, Bruce Rauner proposed $4.1 billion in budget cuts affecting higher education, Medicaid, state employee pensions, public transit, and local government support.

On June 25,2015, Bruce Rauner vetoed the Illinois state budget passed by the legislature, which would have created a deficit of nearly $4 billion but which covered what Illinois Democratic lawmakers called "vital services".

Bruce Rauner stated that he would not sign a budget until the Democratic state legislature passed his "Turnaround Agenda" to reduce trade union power and freeze property taxes.

On June 30,2016, just before the beginning of the next fiscal year, Bruce Rauner signed a temporary bipartisan stopgap budget that would allow public schools to continue operating for an additional year and for necessary state services to continue for 6 months.

In July 2017, Bruce Rauner vetoed a budget that increased the state income tax from 3.75 percent to 4.95 percent and the corporate tax from 5.25 percent to 7 percent, an increase of $5 billion in additional tax revenue.

Bruce Rauner made a priority to fully fund education for the first time in years, increasing K-12 education funding by nearly $1 billion, and increasing early childhood education funding to historic levels.

Bruce Rauner said that local governments should be allowed to pass right to work laws.

Additionally, Bruce Rauner said that the state should ban some political contributions by public unions, saying, "government unions should not be allowed to influence the public officials they are lobbying, and sitting across the bargaining table from, through campaign donations and expenditures".

Bruce Rauner supported Rauner's campaign promises to "cut spending and overhaul the state's pension system, impose term limits, and weaken public employee unions".

Griffin called for a show of financial support to Bruce Rauner that met with an increase in campaign donations representing tens of millions of dollars, or half the $65 million spent on Bruce Rauner's 2014 election campaign.

Bruce Rauner received media attention for his political stance on the minimum wage.

Bruce Rauner favored either raising the national minimum wage so Illinois employers were on the same level as those in neighboring states, or unilaterally raising Illinois' minimum wage, but pairing the change with pro-business reforms to the state's tax code, workers compensation reform, and tort reform.

At a candidate forum on December 11,2013, Bruce Rauner stated that he would favor reducing Illinois's minimum wage from $8.25 to the federal minimum wage of $7.25.

Bruce Rauner strongly opposed Governor Pat Quinn's proposal to make the 2011 temporary income tax increase permanent, instead calling for the Illinois' income tax rate to gradually be rolled back to 3 percent.

In July 2014, Bruce Rauner called for expanding Illinois' sales tax to dozens of services, such as legal services, accounting services, and computer programming, which were not subject to the sales tax in Illinois.

Bruce Rauner estimated the expanded sales tax would bring in an additional $600 million a year.

Bruce Rauner received a 92 percent approval from Taxpayers United for America, the first time a sitting Illinois governor received a score of more than 70 percent from that organization.

Bruce Rauner strongly favored term limits, and pledged to limit himself to no more than eight years as governor.

Bruce Rauner organized and funded a push to put a constitutional amendment imposing term limits on Illinois legislators on the November 2014 ballot, gathering 591,092 signatures.

Also during his campaign, Bruce Rauner declined to take a position on the controversial Illiana Expressway and Peotone Airport projects advanced by Quinn.

In February 2015, Bruce Rauner proposed raising highway funding and slashing transit funding, which he saw as inefficient spending.

Bruce Rauner stated that while he wanted laws and policies to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill, he would not go beyond that due to constitutional concerns.

The Bruce Rauner family has donated "thousands of dollars" to Planned Parenthood, and prior to his 2014 campaign, the Bruce Rauner Family Foundation donated $510,000 to the American Civil Liberties Union's Roger Baldwin Foundation.

Bruce Rauner said that he supported automatic voter registration, but that he vetoed the bill because he was worried that "the bill would inadvertently open the door to voter fraud and run afoul of federal election law".

Some Republicans criticized Bruce Rauner for his action, saying that the bill made Illinois a sanctuary state.

In 2015, Bruce Rauner signed legislation banning the use of conversion therapy on minors.

Bruce Rauner signed a bill making it easier for transgender people to change their birth certificates.

In 2018, Bruce Rauner officiated the wedding of a same-sex couple.

On June 20,2016, Bruce Rauner confirmed that he would run for a second term; he formally announced his re-election campaign on October 23,2017.

Bruce Rauner was endorsed by the Chicago Tribune, The Daily Herald, and the Chicago Sun-Times, and by 37 elected officials from DuPage County, part of which was represented by Ives.

Bruce Rauner has three children from his first marriage, to Elizabeth Konker Wessel, whom he married in 1980, separated from in 1990, and was legally divorced from in 1993.

Bruce Rauner made a $250,000 campaign donation to Ron DeSantis in March 2021.