Bill Daley is running for governor of Illinois, challenging incumbent Democrat Pat Quinn in the primary.

It wasn’t that long ago, April 2009, that another Daley — Bill’s brother Richard, then the mayor of Chicago — was telling us that Quinn was doing just fine:

Mayor Daley on Thursday all but endorsed Pat Quinn in 2010, arguing that the accidental governor has done “a very good job so far” and has the heart, soul and passion for the office he inherited when the now-indicted Rod Blagojevich was ousted.

The mayor’s brother, former U.S. Commerce Secretary Bill Daley, took a pass on the governor’s race, arguing Quinn was a good guy and that it was incumbent on Democrats to give their new governor a chance to tackle a financial crisis he did not create.

On Thursday, Mayor Daley went further than that.

He said Quinn has “done a very good job so far” and is definitely “electable,”

That primary is going to be the political equivalent of “Game of Thrones.”

Speaking of competitive Democratic primaries of 2014, looks like we’ll be seeing one in Illinois, where no one can defend the performance of incumbent Pat Quinn:

Sen. Dick Durbin told me Tuesday that Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan is “seriously thinking” about running for governor.

I talked to Madigan about a gubernatorial bid on Saturday night — she was here for President Barack Obama’s Inauguration festivities — and my takeaway from the conversation is she wants to run whether or not Bill Daley also gets in a Democratic primary to challenge Gov. Pat Quinn.

The main consequence of Madigan, 46, inching toward a bid is this: We now know the politically vulnerable Quinn is heading toward a colossal primary fight because he is going to be facing strong opponents, either Madigan, Daley or both in the March 18, 2014, balloting.

How unpopular is Quinn?

With a 64 percent disapproval rating, Quinn is the most unpopular governor PPP has polled in the country this year. Only 25 percent of those polled were satisfied with Quinn’s performance. Quinn’s disapproval ratings among Democrats are more telling: 43 percent of Democrats who took the survey disapproved of him.

The GOP keeps Mark Kirk’s seat. Congratulations, Congressman-elect Robert Dold; I underestimated his chances all cycle long.

And yet, this Illinois Campaign Spot reader warns the new Republicans to not get too comfortable:

Greetings from still occupied Illinois. Kirk and the House candidates won, Brady BOTCHES the gov race. Of all the Dems to survive last night………Pat Quinn ?

As you said a feel bad landslide. All those new House Republicans from Illinois better not get too comfy because they will get redistricted to the far side of the moon now. House Speaker Mike Madigan will give Quinn the keys to the red train at Santa’s Village and continue to be the real Governor of Illinois (as he has been since Jim Edgar, the last real Governor Illinois had). So I get a state income tax increase and a whopper of a property tax increase. Yay for me.

Take a look at the vote %s from the Gov and Senate races, might explain why the House results were so better than the Senate. House races are in their little districts, Senate…………everybody in the state gets a shot at you. The % of the vote out of Cook County…………..most of that is African American from Chicago, plus heavy city union vote. Quinn came out of Chicago alone up 4 to 1, lot of ground to make up around the state. Statewide, not just in Illinois, monolithic African American vote is HARD to beat, even in a wave. GOP needs a message or candidate to strip some of that off. Any state with large African American vote is going to be a tough go in 2012 for whoever the GOP candidate vs Dear Leader.

I would throw in one point about redistricting: People move, demographics change, and after a while, even safe seats don’t seem so safe anymore. Phil Hare’s awkwardly drawn district lines were meant to create a safe Democratic seat, and Congressman-elect Bobby Schilling laid that notion to rest.

A subscriber to Capitol Fax, a subscription-based Illinois political news service, shares a fascinating bit of news with me. I don’t want to post from the article directly — the guys at Capitol Fax need to make a living — so I’ll just broadly outline their scoop.

Illinois Democrats appear to have made serious mistakes in their absentee-ballot get-out-the-vote efforts. They started late and they mailed all of their absentee-ballot applications for every targeted voter in the state from one location in Chicago. Obviously, that takes longer than mailing it locally, and so many of the applications are still sitting in post-office bins across the state. The deadline for requesting an absentee ballot is . . . today.

So the state party has to contact these folks by phone and tell them that they’re in danger of missing the deadline, and so they should vote in person on November 2 . . . except they don’t have the phone numbers for all of their targeted voters.

Republicans, meanwhile, have a three week head-start. It is not clear how much these troubles will impede Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts, but you figure it probably hurts Pat Quinn and Alexi Giannoulias on the margins, and those guys don’t have much room for error.

UPDATE: Brian Faughnan writes in to offer a deeply disturbing theory: “A GOP veteran of Chicago politics suggests that the Dems ‘screwed up’ that absentee-ballot campaign on purpose. He suggests that the plan was to ensure that lots of ballots are fouled, to force a showdown over whether to count tens of thousands of ballots that can’t be verified. He sees it as a way to insert vote fraud into the process in a massive way.”

The Illinois state government at work:

Last week Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn said the state is going to have to tighten its belt, and then trimmed $1.4 billion from the new state budget. On Tuesday Quinn downplayed the fact that in the same budget he handed-out pay raises to some of his top staffers. An Associated Press report indicates the governor’s office rewarded a number of top officials with pay increases.  Budget director David Vaught, for example, received a $24,000 raise to bring his salary to $144,000 a year.

Quinn said Vaught has earned it.

“He got a new assignment, the budget director, it’s one of the most important jobs in state government.  So it has a different salary, yes it has a higher salary.  But over all the amount of money spent by taxpayers on the governor’s office is significantly lower today.”The governor said countered the criticism, saying his office has been doing a lot more with a lot less.  

But the AP report states that as governor, Quinn handed out 43 pay raises to 35 different people over the past 15 months.  The average raise according to the AP came in at 11.4 percent.

Remember, it’s only a recession for the private sector.

Bill Brady:

Today’s revelation shows there are two rules under Governor Pat Quinn — one for him and the powerful insider crowd, and another for all the rest of us. While working families are tightening their belts and doing more with less, Pat Quinn is doling out massive pay raises to his own staff — and we’re paying for them.  Today’s revelation shows, once again, that Pat Quinn is incapable of solving our fiscal crisis, and has lost control of state government. How many other agencies received pay raises?

In yesterday’s rankings, the one that has generated the most skepticism is putting Rep. Phil Hare of Illinois in the “Blue/As Difficult as Beating the St. Louis Rams” category. As one media guy who watches Congress closely put it:

You have Phil Hare in the easiest to beat bunch. He seems more like Leans Democrat to me — equivalent to your Orange/Eagles group. This is a district that was carried not just by Obama, but by Kerry and Gore. In 2008, Republicans couldn’t even be bothered to contest Hare, and he got 57 percent the last time they did. He’s done a couple stupid things lately — ‘I don’t care about the constitution’ and not releasing an internal poll — but this one seems to be a much harder take-away than some others.

All true, but I figure the “I don’t care about the Constitution” makes for one wicked attack ad, and that internal poll must have shown something pretty ominous, or else he would have released it. (Think about it, even a 55-45 split in his favor would be acceptable to release.)

Here’s Hare to the Wall Street Journal at the end of last month, right before President Obama visited the district:

In Illinois, Rep. Phil Hare, the Democrat who represents Quincy, said he needed the president to make the case that the economy was improving, and that his programs, especially the economic stimulus, have worked. “I’ve had a death threat. I had a rock thrown through the window of a leased vehicle. It’s tough out there,” Mr. Hare said.

I’m also wondering about coattails in Illinois; it looks like the Democrats have two awful top-of-the-ticket names in Illinois. Neither Alexi Giannoulias nor Pat Quinn are leading the Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll, and neither Democrat has led a poll since March. The last five percentage totals for Quinn, the incumbent: 36, 38, 38, 33, 37. Those are Corzine-esque numbers.

You know how we know our political world has gone off the rails?

The good folks at the Republican Party of Virginia* send me an e-mailed press release, with the headline, “Embarrassing: Failed Democratic Candidate Attacks Governor on Job Creation.”

My first thought was they were referring to Scott Lee Cohen attacking Governor Pat Quinn.

Scott Lee Cohen, the pawnbroker who flamed out of Illinois politics just days after voters nominated him as the Democratic lieutenant governor candidate, is making plans to run for governor.

Cohen would have a steep climb to redefine himself in the eyes of Illinois voters, even by the standards of this state’s tainted political culture. During his primary campaign, the 43-year-old political novice ran on notions of integrity and business acumen. But scrutiny of Cohen’s background after the election revealed troubling facts and false statements.

The most salacious revelation surrounded his 2005 domestic battery arrest, in which his convicted prostitute girlfriend alleged he put a knife to her throat. The case was dropped when she didn’t show up in court, but in explaining his side of the story, Cohen made statements that turned out to be false. He said he had met the woman in a bar, but later acknowledged that he met her when he was a patron at the massage parlor where she was arrested for performing sex acts for money. Cohen also said the woman would vouch for his character, but she issued a statement through a lawyer saying he was not fit to hold office.

But instead they were talking about our old friend Terry McAuliffe.

McAuliffe says the new governor, who just marked his 100th day in office, isn’t making it any easier to attract new jobs to the state by getting bogged down in controversies over his Confederate heritage proclamation and resisting legal anti-bias protections for gay Virginians.

Of course, on McDonnell’s 101st day, Northup Grumman moved its corporate headquarters from Los Angeles to northern Virginia.

UPDATE: The release was from the Republican Party of Virginia, not the Republican Governors Association; I initially misread the three-letter-acronym starting with “R.”