Lake County Gazette

Craig Wilcox is printing new campaign material in his bid to represent the 32nd Senate District.

Up until a couple of weeks ago, Wilcox was vying against John Reinert for the Republican nod in the March primary, but things have changed.

Now the McHenry County Board member is running unopposed in the primary since unbeknownst to Reinert, one of his circulators admitted to fraudulently retaining signatures.

“Through the hearing process, we still had a line-by-line fight, but we still had evidence and felt very confident that the hearing officer would throw all of those petitions out for failure to circulate which would have brought him well under the 1,000,” Wilcox told the Lake County Gazette.

Before the matter went to the electoral board for a decision, Reinert withdrew from the race, leaving Wilcox as the sole Republican for the seat held Sen. Pamela Althoff (R-McHenry), who is retiring.

“I am disappointed in being denied the honor of taking my message to the voters,” Reinert said on Facebook, adding he was unable to meet the state guidelines needed to file. “To be blunt, my campaign was dealt a devastating blow by a company in which I misplaced my trust.”  

Wilcox said Reinert’s decision to step down was honorable.

“I was pretty convinced John Reinert did not go out and say ‘Get me signatures and fake them if you have to,’” Wilcox said of many of the signatures that were probably obtained at grocery stores or train stations, some even out of the district.

“He is a county board member with me and has worked with me every month and has for the past year and he has good ideas,” Wilcox said. “I told him I don’t have ownership and if he has a bright idea I will bring it to Springfield. I want to propose legislation and give him credit for it.”

He said prior to the decision regarding Reinert’s petition signatures, the two discussed working together.

“We always talked about out of the Republican primary, whoever had won needed to be a stronger candidate because of the debates during the primary instead of being a weaker candidate because we fought each other hard,” Wilcox said. “So we want to include him and his supporters and do this together.”

As for his campaign now, the retired Air Force colonel said there is a whole different strategy since Reinert withdrew.

“We obviously did not touch every voter in the district so we are going to go back to introducing who we are and we will save the issues and development stuff closer to the general election because now we will be comparing ourselves to a different opponent,” Wilcox said.