Pat Quinn, Bruce Rauner face off in first debate of Illinois governor race

CHICAGO (WLS) -- With the campaign in the race for Illinois governor in its final month, Governor Pat Quinn and challenger Bruce Rauner met in Peoria Monday night for their first official debate leading up to the November 4 election.

Both candidates have spent millions of dollars pounding each other with negative television ads and rarely looked at each other during the one-hour long debate.

"A small group of Chicago machine politicians got control of our government in Springfield and they've led us down a bad path," Rauner said.

Republican Rauner fired the first shot and throughout would try to link Democratic Gov. Quinn to his corrupt predecessor, Rod Blagojevich. Quinn pre-empted the attack with a familiar defense, that he inherited the state government's ethical and fiscal problems.

"When I took the oath of office five years ago, it was a pretty tough time for Illinois," Quinn said.

But Rauner was relentless night in comparing Quinn to Blagojevich.

"This is a corrupt system," said Rauner. "Pat Quinn is at the core of it just like his partner and mentor Rod Blagojevich."

One of the debates most contentious moments occurred when Rauner accused Quinn of cutting funding for education.

"Then he cut half a billion dollars from our education funding," Rauner said.

"When it comes to education funding my opponent makes up things," Quinn countered. "We've increased education funding in the classroom by about 500 million dollars."

And they differed on whether the state had lost or created manufacturing jobs.

"Since Governor Quinn has come into office, Illinois has lost over 40 thousand manufacturing jobs," Rauner said.

"When I became Governor, Chrysler in Belvedere had 200 jobs," said

Quinn. "They now have 4,500 manufacturing jobs."

When it came to increasing the minimum wage, Quinn says he favors a raise unconditionally while Rauner says he'd do it only after pro-business reforms.

"I'm adamantly for raising the minimum wage," said Quinn. "It's the best way to help thousands of people who do hard jobs, work hard."

"If he was serious about this, he could've gotten it done," Rauner said.

And should the 5 percent state income tax rate be sustained, as Quinn wants, or rolled back to 3 percent as Rauner wants it?

"They already have income taxes that are too high," said Rauner. "I'd rather like to see our taxes rolled back to where they were in 2010."

"My opponent, who's a billionaire, doesn't want to raise his income tax but he wants to slash funding for schools all across Illinois," Quinn said.

As expected, the campaigns of both contenders claim their candidate won the debate.

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