Illinois first lady Rep. Pritzker, who typically avoids the political spotlight, announced Wednesday that she will contribute $500,000 to support Democratic Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton after the campaign of Acton’s Republican opponent Vivek Ramaswamy released a controversial video featuring her estranged mother.
The contributions, which have not yet been published in Ohio campaign finance disclosures, will include the maximum contribution of $16,615.67 to Acton’s campaign fund, with the remainder going to the Ohio Democratic Party, said Jordan Abudayyeh, a spokesman for Rep. Pritzker. The midterm elections will take place on November 3.
Ramaswamy’s campaign confirmed to The Associated Press on Tuesday that it had produced an ad featuring Acton’s ex-mother calling her a liar, and that the Republican campaign planned to spend $4 million to promote it. Acton and his brother were removed from their mother’s custody in 1978 after their stepfather was charged with sexually assaulting Acton, the AP reported.
“The bad guys gain power when we refuse to stand up and fight,” Rep. Pritzker said in a statement. “Vivek Ramaswamy represents everything that is wrong with our politics today: arrogance, cruelty, dishonesty and the belief that it is acceptable to say and do anything for power. I refuse to sit quietly while men like Vivek Ramaswamy exploit the pain of a highly qualified woman for political gain. There comes a time when condemning someone’s actions is not enough – we must put everything on the line to defeat these men MAGA.”
Rep. Pritzker was not available for an interview Wednesday, Abudayyeh said.
Gov. JB Pritzker, the billionaire heir to Hyatt Hotels, has spent about $500 million on political contributions since the 1990s, including about $440 million for his three gubernatorial campaigns, but his wife has been more selective in her individual political donations, state and federal campaign records show.
Yet Rep. Pritzker has donated nearly $14.8 million to federal campaigns over the years, $8.6 million of which went to committees supporting Hillary Clinton, according to federal records. In Illinois, she contributed about $446,000, nearly two-thirds of which went to the campaigns of former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and former Gov. Pat Quinn, according to state records. His mother was a South Dakota state legislator and his father was a Democratic pollster, candidate for the U.S. Senate, and chief of staff to a South Dakota governor.
Governor Pritzker has not reported any campaign contributions from Acton, but he has been active in Ohio in recent years. As an individual and through his dark money political organization Think Big America, he invested $1 million in a successful effort in 2023 to amend the state constitution to protect abortion rights. In 2024, he gave $250,000 to the Ohio Democratic Party, and his new Ready for the Fight political action committee said it spent about $1.5 million this year against Republican U.S. Republican Max Miller, who is running for re-election in the state’s 7th Congressional District.
Ohio campaign finance records show that the governor’s cousin, Jennifer Pritzker, contributed $10,000 to Acton’s 2025 campaign, and her in-laws Susan Pritzker contributed $500 to Acton earlier this year.
The governor denounced the ad Tuesday by Ramaswamy, a biotech billionaire and former GOP presidential primary candidate, in a social media post.
“Dr. Amy Acton has overcome immense challenges to serve the state she loves,” the governor wrote of his party’s Ohio nominee, who served as the state’s public health director. “Vivek Ramaswamy has reached a new low point by launching these vile and false attacks against her. »
Some Republicans criticized Ramaswamy’s campaign over the video. But Vice President J.D. Vance, who previously represented Ohio in the U.S. Senate, said Wednesday during a campaign stop in Cincinnati for a rally with Ramaswamy that he was “a little bit disgusted” by “Republicans all over the country who are complaining more about this ad than what congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America.”
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