As establishment Democrats close ranks around Nikki Budzinkzi as the chosen Democrat candidate in the newly gerrymandered 13th congressional district, her campaign has gotten off to a rough start. First up: does she even live in the district Illinois Democrats drew for her?
It was revealed just this week what political observers on the ground already knew. Budzinski, who announced her congressional bid before the new map was even drawn, lived and voted in Chicago and Washington DC before choosing to run for congress downstate. The Springfield address found on her filing paperwork was found to be unoccupied.
According to Sangamon County election records, Budzinksi, who voted in Chicago for each of the last five elections, attempted to register to vote at an apartment in Springfield a few days before she announced her campaign to run for Congress back in August. However, when the clerk’s office sent a voter identification notice to her listed a HH partment address, it came back “undeliverable.”
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Cook County property tax records show that Budzinski owned a home in Chicago while she worked as a senior advisor to Governor Pritzker. She left that role in February of last year and later moved to Washington, D.C., to work as the chief of staff in President Biden’s Office of Management and Budget, though she continued casting ballots in Cook County.
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Her recent arrival in town has already drawn criticism from her Democratic primary opponent, David Palmer, a former Iowa Hawkeyes basketball player who now works as a financial advisor in Champaign.
Budzinski’s residency issue comes on the heels of another story that broke recently in which she tapped a disgraced former Teamster to help raise funds for her campaign. Nicole Brener-Schmitz was forced to resign as a political director for the Teamsters Union after an independent investigation uncovered that she had stolen over $11,000 from the union in the form of fraudulent expense reports. Brener-Schmitz was also later dismissed from her political role with abortion-rights group NARAL for an “HR issue” and went on to work for embattled former Congresswoman Katie Hill.
Nikki Budzinski is a classic carpetbagger and political insider looking for more power and notoriety. Fed up working behind the scenes on Capitol Hill and with no open districts to run in near her home in Chicago, Budzinkzi decided to go district shopping in downstate Illinois. Luckily for her, Illinois Democrats gerrymandered her a district from East St. Louis stretching almost to the Indiana border.
“The voices of the folks who live in the Metro-East and central Illinois are too important to be handed over to a Chicago and DC political insider who simply wants her time to shine. Illinoisans have had enough of machine politicians rigging the system to benefit themselves.” – ILGOP Spokesman Joe Hackler
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