Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner on Tuesday said the party did what it could to stop Arthur Jones. | Alex Wong/Getty Images Illinois governor breaks with Cruz over Nazi candidate

Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner refused to follow Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz’s lead and call on voters of a Chicago-area congressional district to back a Democrat over a declared Nazi candidate in November.

Instead, Rauner on Tuesday called for Holocaust denier Arthur Jones to drop out of the race.


On Friday, Cruz urged residents of the district to write in a candidate or choose the Democrat — in this case, Rep. Dan Lipinski.

“This is horrific. An avowed Nazi running for Congress. To the good people of Illinois, you have two reasonable choices: write in another candidate, or vote for the Democrat,” Cruz wrote. “This bigoted fool should receive ZERO votes.”

Rauner declined to go that far.

“No,” Rauner answered when asked if voters should instead cast a ballot for Lipinski, according to WCIA TV. “The one thing I will say is the person, that guy, Johnson or whatever his name is, should not be on the ballot.”

In February, the governor said, “There is no room for neo-Nazis in American politics. I condemn this man in the strongest possible terms.”

Rauner on Tuesday said the party did what it could to stop Jones. “I called [on] him to get out and he should be out, and we should have somebody run against him,” Rauner said during a stop in central Illinois. “There is no room, as I said right immediately when he snuck on there, there is no room in our politics for a person like that.”

State Republicans have also said they will work to draft a write-in candidate for the general election.

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The Illinois Republican Party has faced nationwide ridicule after failing to block Jones from claiming the GOP nomination in the state’s 3rd Congressional District. The party chair, Tim Schneider, was recently reelected to his position with Rauner’s backing.

Last week, POLITICO reported that the Illinois GOP, which Rauner nearly single-handedly bankrolls, had failed on four occasions to purge Jones from the ballot or put forward a challenger.

“I snookered them,” Jones boasted after learning the state GOP had failed to mount a third-party challenge.

The GOP said it would ultimately have taken too many resources to collect the more than 14,000 signatures needed to secure a third-party bid in a predominantly Democratic district. Before that, the GOP was unable to legally boot Jones from the ballot through a petition challenge, failed to draft a primary opponent or mount a primary write-in campaign.

Rauner, among the most endangered incumbent governors in the country, faces billionaire Democrat J.B. Pritzker in November in a race in which spending has already topped $200 million.