Darren Bailey has dialed back his position on abortion. He took it off his policy platform entirely. His campaign says the focus this time is affordability.
This week he and his running mate spoke at a "Save America" rally in Springfield. The event was sponsored by Illinois Family Action — the political arm of the Illinois Family Institute, a group that regularly lobbies against bills expanding abortion access.
His running mate, Cook County GOP chairman Aaron Del Mar, spoke for six minutes. He said Gov. JB Pritzker is "willing to murder millions of babies." Then he said this, to applause:
"Nobody wants to make Illinois a Mecca for abortions from everyone around the country to come here and sin against God."
Three weeks earlier
In July, Del Mar sat for an interview with WBEZ as part of a media tour promoting the ticket's economic policies. He was asked about abortion. His answer:
"No matter how many times JB Pritzker and the Democrat majority try to say that Darren and Aaron are going to try to take away women's access to reproductive care, that is a flat-out lie."
He went further about what the campaign is and isn't about:
"We're talking about core services. We're not talking about abortion, we're not talking about transgender issues."
Same man. Same ticket. Roughly a month apart. To a statewide public radio audience, the charge that they'd restrict abortion access is "a flat-out lie." To a room full of anti-abortion activists, Illinois is a "Mecca for abortions" and the governor is willing to "murder millions of babies."
Both of those cannot be the campaign's actual position. One of them is what they believe and the other is what they say when the wrong people are listening.
Bailey and Del Mar's campaign did not return requests for comment.
Bailey said the quiet part himself in May
This isn't only about the running mate. In May, Bailey spoke at a Christian conference in Decatur, where he said:
"Anyone who knows me knows there's no one here more pro-life or more pro Second Amendment than I."
That is not a man who has changed his mind. It is a man who has changed his audience.
The 2022 version of Bailey didn't bother with the two-track approach. He ran openly on restricting abortion access and expanding gun rights, and he called Chicago a "hellhole." He lost handily to Pritzker, badly underperforming in Cook County and the collar counties.
Del Mar explained the new approach plainly: Bailey has changed the "public-facing campaign" after "learning from his mistakes from four years ago."
Read that carefully. The thing that was a mistake was not the position. It was letting voters see it.
It is the same maneuver he ran on Chicago itself. He spent years calling the city a "hellhole" — then, once he needed the city's votes, apologized for it earlier this year. The pattern is not a change of heart. It's a change of venue.
The group in the room
There's a detail in this story that makes the rally worth more than a passing mention.
Illinois Family Action withheld its endorsement of Bailey in the March primary, even though it had donated to his 2022 campaign. It backed conservative think tank president Ted Dabrowski instead. Dabrowski lost to Bailey by 24 points.
And yet in August, IFA is the group hosting Bailey and Del Mar on a Springfield stage, alongside Republican U.S. Senate candidate Don Tracy.
A campaign genuinely pivoting away from abortion politics does not spend a week in August at a rally thrown by an anti-abortion lobbying outfit that didn't even endorse it. That is a campaign doing outreach to a base it needs and hoping the rest of Illinois isn't paying attention.
Pritzker's campaign spokesperson said Bailey and Del Mar are focused on "spreading the extreme MAGA agenda by attacking women's right to choose, supporting Trump's failing economic agenda, and spreading far-right conspiracy theories."
Why it matters in Illinois
Illinois is one of the places people travel to when their own state has banned abortion. That is the actual meaning of the word Del Mar used on that stage — "Mecca" is a complaint about patients arriving from states where the procedure is now illegal.
A governor of Illinois has real power over that: over what the state protects, what it funds, and whether the people who come here for care are treated as patients or as a problem to be solved.
Bailey is asking for that power while declining to say what he'd do with it. His platform is silent. His running mate says one thing on public radio and the opposite at a rally. Bailey himself, in May, told a friendly crowd there's no one more pro-life than he is.
Voters are entitled to know which of these is the campaign.
Illinoisans deserve a candidate who tells every audience the same thing. We deserve better.
Source
Mawa Iqbal, "Darren Bailey's running mate maintains abortion is 'sin against God'" — Chicago Sun-Times / WBEZ, August 7, 2026. Photos by Pat Nabong and Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times.
