“Illinois is my home. This is where I’ve raised my family,” J.B. Pritzker said on his campaign website, “where I built a business and where I’ve created programs to improve the lives of people across the state.”

Democratic Governor-elect of Illinois and Parker parent J.B. Pritzker became the apparent victor over incumbent Bruce Rauner on Tuesday, November 6. After campaigning on a platform of income tax reform, property tax relief, healthcare, recreational cannabis use, and educational and entrepreneurial investment, Pritzker is now tasked with the responsibility to fulfill his promises with his Lieutenant Governor-elect Juliana Stratton. He will be sworn into office on January 14.

Sophomore Teddi Pritzker describes her father’s approach to transitioning into politics. “Whenever my dad sees a problem,” she said, “he feels like he needs to fix it to give back to society, which is the right thing to do.” On the night of the election, she remembers none of her family sleeping well. “The election was a surreal experience,” Pritzker said. “The campaign trail had been our whole lives for the past two years. I was still changing into my dress for the night when they called the race because they called it about twenty minutes after the polls closed, which was really early. It took me a good day or two to process everything because it just didn’t seem real.”

Throughout his career, Pritzker has spent more than twenty years as a national leader and advocate for early childhood education, specifically in quality childcare and universal preschool. On Thursday, December 13, he was in Washington, D.C. where he met with other governors-elect and White House administrators. “When I went to the White House,” he said, “when the opportunity came to speak with Ivanka Trump, who has taken it upon herself to be the leader for the White House on issues of early childhood, I approached her about expanding their efforts in the area of home visitation for newborn children, at-risk parents and children, as well as to expand preschool to make it universal.”

Using his wide range of expertise from his work and education, Pritzker has spent decades as a force in his legal, entrepreneurial, and political fields of work. “I’ve really had a lifelong involvement in politics and public policy, even when I was a young kid,” he said. “So, when I went to college, I studied political science.” Pritzker also went to law school at Northwestern University and worked on Capitol Hill for several years with a number of congresspeople.

As he has grown his businesses in the past decades, he has been involved in politics alongside. He ran in the Democratic primary for Congress in 1998, co-chaired Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, and was the chairman of the Illinois Human Rights Commission, a state agency that hears discrimination cases and decides them. “If you look at my biography,” Pritzker said, “you see a lot of business for a lot of years, but I was doing business and politics simultaneously.”

From the Governor’s Mansion, Pritzker plans to lead in a middle-ground, business-like frame of mind. “Lieutenant Governor-elect Juliana Stratton and I are ready to fight every day for Illinois,” Pritzker says on the homepage of his campaign website. “We’re going to bring back good-paying jobs, expand access to affordable healthcare coverage, and work to make sure every child gets a quality education, no matter his or her zip code.”

$171.5 million of Pritzker’s own money was allocated to his campaign—more than any candidate in U.S. history. Senior Zoe Laris-Djokovic wonders if the money could have been better allocated. “I don’t know how much I believe his campaign promises,” Laris-Djokovic said, “because I know that he was just trying to get the angry vote against Rauner.”

The state’s fiscal problems remain severe. Illinois is deeply in debt, with an unclear path to financial solvency. Tens of thousands of residents leave the state each year. The Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University conducted a study on the issue in 2016, finding that nearly half of the people living in Illinois want to leave the state. The most common reason cited was taxes.

Pritzker looks to start with improving chances for the economic prosperity of each individual community of Illinois. He says that there is a very close correlation between the well-being of a community and the quality of childcare, preschool, and education that people get. “There are forty-year longitudinal studies that show that kids who get preschool and quality childcare are much more likely to graduate from high school, much more likely to graduate from college, and less likely to be incarcerated,” he said. “Having kids grow up and have those kinds of opportunities and successes means the communities are going to be better, and taxpayers will pay less for the services that would otherwise be required to remediate the challenges that these people would have.”

As part of Illinois’ fiscal policy, Pritzker wants there to be a graduated income tax system (also known as a fair tax system) that asks the wealthiest people in the state to pay more and gives a tax break to those in the middle class and those striving to be in the middle class. Additionally, he wants to raise the minimum wage to fifteen dollars. “We’re going to have a fight ahead of us to organize and ensure the legislature passes,” he said when referring to the minimum wage.

Under Pritzker’s leadership, marijuana is also likely to be legalized. “There is a bill,” History teacher and leader of Parker’s Students for Sensible Drug Policy chapter Jeanne Barr said. “It’s written by Kelly Cassidy and Heather Steans, who are parents in this community. [Cassidy and Steans] aim for Illinois’ policy to be the gold standard of cannabis policies. What they’re trying to do is study all of the cannabis policies around the country and take best practices from each one so that Illinois’ is the most sensible.”

The Compassionate Use of Medical Cannabis Pilot Program Act gradually made medical cannabis legal in Illinois state almost five years ago. It was originally considered the toughest medical cannabis act in the country, according to Barr. “It had a very limited list of conditions: cancer, AIDS, glaucoma, and so on.” She speculates that the bill for recreational use of marijuana will be gradually employed as well.

Pritzker will step into the governorship after a year of work on Cassidy’s and Steans’ recreational usage bill. He has already said that he will sign it if it gets to his desk. “The prediction seems to be that [the bill] will pass into law sometime in 2019 and take effect in 2020,” Barr said.

Eventually, the Pritzker administration also looks to implement a framework to license businesses to sell marijuana to consumers for recreational use. The administration also looks to work with black and brown people in the development of the framework, which Barr appreciates: “As legal cannabis markets opened, some states have passed laws that barred anyone with a criminal conviction from the legal cannabis industry,” Barr said. “After 100 years of the drug war, that has specifically targeted communities of the poor, which sometimes overlap with communities of color.”

Governor-elect Pritzker said that special attention should also be afforded to minorities who are part of the LGBT community. In office, he will work with social organizations like Howard Brown Health and the AIDS Foundation. “Trans teens are the most susceptible to suicide and abuse,” he said when referring to the LGBT community, “so working with these organizations will be important, and there should be an educational component.”

During the campaign, Pritzker would end speeches by asking his supporters “are you ready for the fight?” He was excited by the enthusiasm his supporters showed. The control of Illinois’ government is now in the hands of Democrats. “As we enter office,” Pritzker said, “the fight is definitely ahead of us. We must pass and implement the programs and policies that I put forward in the campaign.”