After Illinois Democrats trounced Republicans in the last midterm election, political consultant Collin Corbett had a message for fellow members of the GOP.
Pointing to exit polling commissioned by his firm, Cor Strategies, Corbett argued his party’s latest drubbing wasn’t because Illinois had become an uber-liberal bastion. It was largely because Republicans had ceded the political center, home to almost 40% of Illinois voters who identified as “moderate,” a share similar to what Associated Press polling also found in 2022.
“The Republican strategy of screaming ‘the sky is falling’ and ‘all is lost’ is clearly not working,” Corbett wrote in a blog post that year. “The voters in this state aren’t hyper-partisans or (ideologues). They just want things to get done — they’re not interested in the drama and hyperbole.”
Four years later, Corbett has stopped trying to convince Republicans to tack to the center and instead is testing his theory himself with a long-shot independent bid for governor. The 40-year-old Palatine resident is the first independent candidate in 16 years to qualify for the general election ballot for governor, and only the third in the past century, according to state election records.
Despite his campaign slogan, “Hope for Illinois,” Corbett acknowledges he has little realistic hope of upsetting Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, a billionaire Hyatt Hotels heir who restocked his campaign fund with $65 million in August, or Republican nominee Darren Bailey, the conservative former lawmaker from southern Illinois who lost to Pritzker by almost 13 percentage points in 2022.
Reaching the high single digits would be an improvement over recent independent and third-party candidates, Corbett said in a recent Tribune interview. But calling himself “an overachiever,” Corbett said he’s “shooting for 15%.”
“I understand how unlikely that is, but what people need to realize is, if we’re going to change things in politics, we don’t need 50% to do so,” he said. “If we can get 10% to 15% of the vote, we are the middle. We are the swing vote in most of these battleground districts, and so with that 10% to 15%, we can have an outsized influence on politics moving forward.”
The last independent candidate for governor, Scott Lee Cohen, ran in 2010 after being pressured to step aside as the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor over a past domestic battery charge. Cohen garnered less than 4%. In 2006, Green Party candidate Rich Whitney received more than 10%, an outcome widely viewed as a backlash against then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich, the divisive Democratic incumbent.
With less than a month until Election Day, Corbett is battling not only Pritzker’s resources and eight-year record but also Bailey’s statewide name recognition that began when he opposed Pritzker’s pandemic-era mandates. Beyond the $500,000 he lent his own campaign, Corbett has reported raising less than $88,000.
He’s also fending off attacks from the right and left while trying to position himself as a centrist and distinguish his current positions from those of the mostly Republican candidates who campaign finance records show have paid his business more than $7.1 million since 2010, as well as previous comments he made on his podcast supporting some of President Donald Trump’s policies. At the same time, he faces a recently revived defamation lawsuit over campaign mailers sent on his firm’s advice in a 2019 suburban mayoral race.
The Pritzker camp has publicly ignored Corbett’s candidacy, sparing him from having to explain or defend the stances of candidates whose checks he cashed or the political takes he and his guests have shared during hundreds of hours on his “Smoke-Filled Room” podcast. But it also has denied him the free publicity the governor’s attention would almost certainly generate.
Bailey, for his part, acknowledged early on that Corbett could siphon votes away from him.
“I may not be a mathematician, but something isn’t adding up,” Bailey wrote in a May 26 fundraising email sent the day Corbett filed his nominating petitions. “A so-called ‘independent’ candidate has just entered the Illinois Governor’s race. No party infrastructure. No real grassroots. But most importantly, no path to victory with a very clear ability to split our vote in half.”
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Bailey’s team initially tried knocking Corbett out of the race, with Bailey’s running mate, Aaron Del Mar, co-filing an objection contending his onetime political ally hadn’t collected the 25,000 valid voter signatures to qualify for the ballot. But the Bailey campaign dropped the challenge in June and has tried to ignore Corbett since.
In a WGN-Ch. 9 interview last month, though, Bailey contended Corbett would take votes from him and Pritzker.
“It’s a real shame that a so-called Republican strategist would turn his back on the party and create … this divisiveness, to take away any vote from … the opportunity that we have to turn Illinois around,” Bailey said.
Middle of the road
Corbett’s core campaign strategy is to present himself and running mate Carolyn Schofield, a fellow former Republican who ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in the 2022 GOP primary, as the “commonsense” alternatives to candidates coming from increasingly polarized major parties.
“I’m center-right fiscally, center-left socially, and that means I don’t have a home,” Corbett said.
Two prime examples of Corbett’s personal views breaking with the prevailing positions of his former party are his support for abortion rights and same-sex marriage.
“Government shouldn’t be involved in people’s private decisions,” he said, calling abortion “a healthcare decision that should be between a woman and her doctor.”
A generation ago, prominent Illinois Republicans, including then-Gov. Jim Edgar and House Republican leader Tom Cross, supported abortion rights. Now, few, if any, Illinois Republican officeholders take that position, even though more than two-thirds of Illinois adults think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to a Pew Research Center survey last year.
As a result, Corbett has worked to elect Republicans whose views on abortion conflict with his own.
One of his last clients before leaving the party was the successful U.S. Senate primary campaign of Springfield Republican Don Tracy, who now faces Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton, the Democratic nominee.
In the general election campaign, Tracy has said he doesn’t “support nationalizing abortion law.” But he applauded the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned the federal constitutional right to the procedure.
“Today, millions of prayers have been answered,” Tracy said in a statement the day of the ruling, when he was chairman of the Illinois Republican Party. Tracy’s statement also reiterated his support for the state party platform “that values the dignity of all life, from conception to natural death.”
Tracy’s Senate campaign paid Corbett’s firm almost $112,000, federal campaign records show, including $10,000 for “strategic consulting” the day after Corbett filed his nominating petitions to run for governor and another $10,000 the following month.
Corbett took an unpaid leave of absence from the firm starting April 27, campaign spokesman Lane Davis, who also is the company’s communications manager, wrote in an email responding to questions about the payments. “Cor Strategies still provides services to campaigns and organizations, but Collin is not involved,” Davis wrote.
Separately, state and federal records show the Illinois GOP paid Cor Strategies more than $382,000 while Tracy was chairman.
Another top client has been former Orland Park Mayor Keith Pekau, who said during his unsuccessful 2022 race in Illinois’ 6th Congressional District that he opposed abortion “with exceptions for the mother’s life, rape and incest.”
Pekau’s congressional campaign paid Cor Strategies more than $468,000 in the losing effort against Democratic Rep. Sean Casten of Downers Grove, while Pekau’s local party, People Over Politics, paid the firm more than $268,000 for work in Orland Park village races from 2019 to 2025.
Corbett defended his past work for candidates who oppose abortion rights.
What mattered to him was whether a client was sincere in their positions and “genuinely wanted to serve the public,” he said.
“I’ve worked with people all across the spectrum on every issue, so I never really imposed my personal beliefs on those candidates,” he said. “Now I have a chance to actually impose my own beliefs on my race and on my candidacy.”
Credibility question
Corbett’s own sincerity, however, has been called into question in a defamation lawsuit regarding claims made against a client’s opponent in Burr Ridge’s 2019 mayoral race.
That year, attorney Gary Grasso was running to return as mayor of the western suburb after a seven-year hiatus. Grasso’s opponent was Zachary Mottl, who had been elected a village trustee two years earlier.
During the campaign, Mottl’s campaign, working with Cor Strategies, sent out mailers accusing Grasso of defrauding the government of $36,000. The series of three mailers read Grasso had claimed homestead exemptions — a property tax break reserved for a person’s primary residence — on both his Burr Ridge home and a Chicago condo, according to court records.
After winning the election, Grasso filed a defamation lawsuit against Mottl, to which Corbett and Cor Strategies were later added as defendants.
A research report from a firm Cor Strategies hired showed Grasso received annual $6,000 homestead exemptions on his DuPage County property tax bill for six years starting in 2013. In 2016 and 2017, he also received the exemption on his condo, reducing his Cook County tax bills by a little more than $1,200.
“When asked (during a deposition) why the mailer did not reflect that (Grasso) owed approximately $1,200 to Cook County based on exemption overlap as indicated in the research report, rather than $36,000 in fraud, Corbett responded ‘I can’t speak to our thinking at that time,’” an answer he repeated throughout the sworn testimony, according to court records.
Grasso and Mottl settled out of court in 2023. The next year, a DuPage County judge granted summary judgment to Corbett and Cor Strategies, finding that “even in a light most favorable to (Grasso), there is simply no clear and convincing evidence that the defendant entertained serious doubts and published anyway.”
But in July, a three-judge panel of the state Appellate Court reversed the ruling and sent the case back for trial, with the judges unanimously finding they “could reach no other conclusion than a genuine issue of material fact is presented concerning whether defendants recklessly disregarded the truth in accusing plaintiff of $36,000 in tax fraud.”
“We cannot allow a litigant to stroll into a deposition, pull a Jon Lovitz and announce, ‘Yeah, I had no idea it was false. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah,’ then demand summary judgment because no one possesses contrary evidence from inside his head,” Appellate Judge John Anderson wrote in a concurring opinion, referencing the actor’s pathological liar character on “Saturday Night Live.”
While Corbett told the Tribune he is confident the trial court ultimately will rule in his favor, Grasso said in an interview Corbett’s credibility is at the heart of the matter.
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“I believe he did defame me, and I’m glad that the Appellate Court believed there was enough evidence for there to be a trial,” said Grasso, now the Republican nominee for DuPage County chair. “And that goes to his credibility and, of course, my credibility. But beyond that, I’ll — let’s just let the voters decide.”
Fiscal focus
While Corbett’s support for abortion rights likely would have doomed him in a Republican primary, his work for local school districts on bond referendums also has drawn the ire of the political right.
In 2024, for instance, Cor Strategies and an affiliated firm were paid almost $19,000 for consulting and advertising by a political committee backing a $151.5 million bond referendum to upgrade three middle schools in Wheaton-based Community Unit School District 200.
The measure passed and drew criticism from former GOP state Rep. Jeanne Ives, a conservative firebrand active in local politics there.
“No Republican should sign Corbett’s petition,” Ives wrote in a social media post last spring. “He worked with CUSD200 to pass the $151 million referendum for performing arts centers in middle schools.”
Ives claimed Corbett and Ed Sullivan, a former Republican state legislator turned lobbyist whose firm works with school districts on bond referendums, swayed voters with “BS numbers sent out in targeted ads.”
Corbett said such arguments ignore Illinois’ long history of underfunding public schools, with the state providing only about a quarter of school districts’ revenue, according to the State Board of Education’s most recent Illinois Report Card.
“When those school districts aren’t receiving the funding that they need from Pritzker and the state, their only choice is to go toward property taxes,” Corbett said. “I don’t blame them for that. I blame Pritzker and the state for not fulfilling their obligations.”
As governor, Corbett said he would increase state school funding beyond the $350 million annual increases approved under Pritzker. He would pay for that, in part, by going after so-called unfunded mandates, a familiar Republican target, and by freezing “discretionary spending.” Both would be political challenges in a legislature almost certain to remain under Democratic control.
His platform also calls for expanding the state sales tax to cover more services, particularly unspecified “high-end and nonessential services,” while eliminating it on items such as over-the-counter medicines, diapers and school supplies. Policy experts have advocated similar changes, but they have gained no traction in Springfield.
Though his platform departs from typical Republican proposals, some views Corbett has shared on his podcast hew closely to party orthodoxy.
In summer 2025, for instance, Corbett bemoaned the Republicans’ failure to promote Trump’s tax and spending package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
“I’ve seen a little bit from Republicans on pushing our side of this, but nowhere near enough,” Corbett said on the podcast. “Where’s the TV ads? Where’s the blitz? Where’s the social media ads? Where’s the digital ads to let voters know? Because the media ain’t gonna do it for us. They’re obviously working against us here.”
In particular, he criticized news coverage of provisions that could shift some of the cost of federal food assistance to states, such as Illinois, which have higher payment error rates.
“A lot of what you’ve seen in the coverage of this bill talks about how that this bill and Republicans and Trump have kicked working families, low-income families off of getting their food assistance,” Corbett said at the time. “But that is absolutely … a lie.”
From July 2025, when Trump signed the measure into law, to this August, SNAP participation in Illinois dropped by 24%, from roughly 1.9 million people to a little more than 1.4 million, according to state data compiled by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The left-leaning think tank attributed the drop, part of a nationwide trend, to the law’s expansion of “harsh and ineffective” work requirements, among other factors.
Long haul
Final fundraising numbers won’t be available until after the election, but Corbett’s totals so far suggest there’s no groundswell of outside support for his candidacy. For his backers, though, the campaign offers an alternative to a Democratic Party that controls all the levers of power and a Republican Party struggling to regain relevance in the state.
“The reason I’m supporting Colin is because I really believe that Illinois needs more leaders who are willing to put, really, governing ahead of politics,” said Lou Sandoval, the former head of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce and chairman of Corbett’s campaign.
Like Corbett, Sandoval said he feels somewhat politically homeless. He supports the pro-business policies once central to Republicanism, but also comprehensive immigration reform that would give people brought to the U.S. as children, in particular, a path to citizenship.
But Sandoval also acknowledges that a Nov. 3 victory is unlikely.
“It’s a structure that’s built against anybody running that doesn’t go inside the two-party system,” he said.
Corbett, meanwhile, hopes his candidacy will draw those not engaged with politics off the sidelines.
“Pritzker is tolerated, not well-liked, and the Republican nominee isn’t even tolerated; he’s disliked,” Corbett said. “And I really saw an opening here for somebody who could give voters something to vote for, someone to vote for.”
He readily admits, though, that activating the politically disengaged center will take more than one candidate or one election.
baiduhai’s Rick Pearson contributed.