Update: Bruce Rauner nar­row­ly defeat­ed Pat Quinn and will be the next gov­er­nor of Illinois.

Even many voters who might like a tough-guy businessman as governor might balk at a candidate who engages in deception, evasion, threats, deliberate destruction of jobs, illegal treatment of customers and general business skullduggery.

In a year when many guber­na­to­r­i­al and sen­ate elec­tions are look­ing like toss-ups as the final bal­lot­ing day arrives, few seem clos­er than the fight for Illi­nois gov­er­nor between incum­bent Demo­c­rat Pat Quinn and Repub­li­can Bruce Rauner, a near-bil­lion­aire pri­vate equi­ty fund exec­u­tive who has nev­er held office before.

It’s a race prob­a­bly defined for most vot­ers by which can­di­date they dis­like more rather than by a pas­sion­ate sup­port for either contender.

Quinn is a vet­er­an politi­cian who casts him­self as a pop­ulist. But after step­ping in to replace Gov. Rod Blago­je­vich, con­vict­ed for mis­use of his office for pri­vate gain, Quinn end­ed up alien­at­ing much of his poten­tial pop­ulist base, espe­cial­ly pub­lic employ­ees, whose pen­sions he cut (though the State Supreme court could over­rule him, tak­ing the state constitution’s pro­tec­tion of those ben­e­fits literally).

Rauner’s main base— oth­er wealthy peo­ple — has helped him flood the state with ads, but even a new Carhartt coat and old van have not made a mean boss into an endear­ing buddy.

For those who are unde­cid­ed, Quinn sup­port­ers go beyond the usu­al last-minute ads to offer a coun­try-style ​“Bal­lad of the Plu­to­crat” and a two-minute sum­ma­ry of why not to vote for Rauner. The gist of the latter’s quick-paced nar­ra­tive is that Rauner, despite his cha­rade with an $18 watch, is a mem­ber, by his own admis­sion, of the 0.01%, who pays $100,000 a year at one of his nine man­sions just for park­ing and belongs to a $140,000 a year wine club. Yet Rauner has said he oppos­es rais­ing the min­i­mum wage, takes advan­tage of tax dodges in Cay­man Islands and built a busi­ness that spe­cial­ized in advis­ing how to off­shore jobs.

And that leads to the key prob­lem with Rauner: in a sense, he is what he says he is. He is run­ning as a busi­ness­man who will run the state like a business.

How would that look? Two of his role mod­els are for­mer Indi­ana Gov. Mitch Daniels and cur­rent Wis­con­sin Gov. Scott Walk­er, both of whom start­ed out by try­ing — with con­sid­er­able suc­cess — to destroy pub­lic employ­ee unions. Rauner has made it clear he wants to take on the pub­lic employ­ee unions in Illi­nois. Many Repub­li­can exec­u­tives would applaud that, but it is not what many inde­pen­dents or mid­dle-of-the-road work­ing peo­ple think of as a busi­ness­man-gov­er­nor run­ning an effi­cient, effec­tive government.

But even many vot­ers who might like a tough-guy busi­ness­man as gov­er­nor might balk at a can­di­date who engages in decep­tion, eva­sion, threats, delib­er­ate destruc­tion of jobs, ille­gal treat­ment of cus­tomers and gen­er­al busi­ness skullduggery.

For exam­ple, even most vot­ers sym­pa­thet­ic to the idea of a busi­ness­man as gov­er­nor prob­a­bly do not have in mind one who tol­er­at­ed a man­ag­er accused of hit­ting a sec­re­tary and cre­at­ing an atmos­phere of vio­lence in the work­place sim­ply because clients liked the man­ag­er, as Raumer is accused of doing at his out­sourc­ing firm LeapSource.

“I will bury her. … I will make her radioac­tive. … She will nev­er get anoth­er job any­where, ever. I will bank­rupt her with legal fees. I don’t know if she has a fam­i­ly or not, but if she does, she bet­ter think twice about this,” Rauner alleged­ly told a Leap­Source board member.

Run the state like a business?

GCTR had also assem­bled a chain of nurs­ing homes, Trans Health­care, Inc., for which Rauner had been mak­ing deci­sions four years after it was found­ed, the Chica­go Tri­bune dis­cov­ered—not the one year that Rauner claimed he had been involved. Dur­ing those years, the nurs­ing homes were sued and charged over $1 bil­lion for at least six wrong­ful deaths. At the same time, investors, includ­ing GTCR, cre­at­ed a finan­cial shell for all of the chain lia­bil­i­ties that was turned over to one of the res­i­dents of the nurs­ing homes, thus pro­tect­ing the assets of the investors.

Then there was yet anoth­er dis­qui­et­ing twist in the final weeks of the cam­paign. The Chica­go Sun-Times, recent­ly pur­chased by a group of investors includ­ing Rauner and still owned by many of his friends, pulled Dave McK­in­ney, the paper’s long-time state­house polit­i­cal reporter, off his report­ing on the nurs­ing home sto­ry and all pol­i­tics on the grounds of ques­tion­able appear­ances because his wife works as a polit­i­cal consultant.

Inde­pen­dent polit­i­cal reporter Rich Miller denounced Rauner’s inter­ven­tion, the Sun-Times’ quash­ing of its own reporter’s sol­id work, and the Sun-Times​’unre­vealed con­flicts of inter­est in sud­den­ly aban­don­ing its rel­a­tive­ly new pol­i­cy of not mak­ing endorse­ments for a spe­cial excep­tion—an edi­to­r­i­al endors­ing Rauner.

Run the state like a business?

The cas­es run on and on:

A for­mer col­league in busi­ness, now writ­ing in Forbes , explained how pri­vate equi­ty funds like Rauner’s took advan­tage of pub­lic pen­sion funds to enrich them­selves, espe­cial­ly through inad­e­quate dis­clo­sure and exor­bi­tant fees.

Rauner-financed firms were involved in pro­mot­ing the use of lin­dane for treat­ment of lice in chil­dren with­out includ­ing infor­ma­tion that it was dan­ger­ous and had ​ “ been asso­ci­at­ed with seizures and death” in chil­dren, and raised the price of med­ica­tion for babies with heart defect from $ 78 to $ 1 , 500 (thus break­ing the law, accord­ing to George W. Bush’s Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion, which con­clud­ed, ​ “ Ovation’s prof­i­teer­ing on the backs of crit­i­cal­ly ill pre­ma­ture babies is not only immoral, it is illegal.”

​ been asso­ci­at­ed with seizures and death” in chil­dren, and raised the price of med­ica­tion for babies with heart defect from $ to $ , (thus break­ing the law, accord­ing to George W. Bush’s Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion, which con­clud­ed, ​ Ovation’s prof­i­teer­ing on the backs of crit­i­cal­ly ill pre­ma­ture babies is not only immoral, it is illegal.” In debates, Rauner nev­er men­tions a com­pa­ny that he start­ed that cre­at­ed jobs in Illi­nois. But GTCR did invest in sev­er­al Illi­nois busi­ness­es—then reduced the num­ber of jobs.

Does the state need to be run like these busi­ness­es? By this kind of businessman?