James Robert Edgar (July 22, 1946 – September 14, 2025) was an American politician who served as the 38th governor of Illinois from 1991 to 1999. A moderate Republican, he previously served in the Illinois House of Representatives from 1977 to 1979 and as the 35th secretary of state of Illinois from 1981 to 1991.
Edgar was born in Vinita, Oklahoma, and raised in Charleston, a city in Central Illinois. Beginning his political career as a legislative aide, he was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives in 1976 and reelected in 1978. In 1979, while still in his second term, Edgar was appointed the director of legislative affairs for Governor Jim Thompson.
Following Secretary of State Alan J. Dixon's election to the U.S. Senate in 1980, Thompson appointed Edgar to serve the remainder of Dixon's term. Edgar would go on to win a full term in 1982 and was reelected by a significant margin in 1986 in a race complicated by a LaRouchian candidate on the Democratic ticket.
Edgar ran successfully for Governor of Illinois in the 1990 election, narrowly defeating incumbent Attorney General Neil Hartigan. During the Republican Revolution of '94, he won reelection in a historic landslide over the Democratic state comptroller Dawn Clark Netsch—winning 101 of the state's 102 counties, including Cook County. He declined to run for a third term in 1998 and subsequently retired from public office.
Early life and education James Robert Edgar was born on July 22, 1946, in Vinita, Oklahoma, to Cecil and Betty Edgar. Cecil, a small-businessman from Charleston, Illinois, died in an automobile accident in 1953, leaving Jim and his two older brothers to be raised by their mother.
To support her children, Betty Edgar worked as a clerk at Eastern Illinois University, where Edgar would later attend. While at Eastern, Edgar served as student body president. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in history in 1968.
Edgar developed an interest in politics at a young age. Though his parents were both Democrats, Edgar became a Republican while in elementary school after following the 1952 campaign of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
A young Rockefeller Republican, Edgar briefly volunteered for the presidential campaign of Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton in the 1964 Republican primaries and supported New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller in 1968.
Early political career
Work in the Illinois General Assembly Following his graduation from college, Edgar served as a legislative intern and then personal assistant to Illinois Senate Republican leader W. Russell Arrington, despite his mother's wish for him to attend law school. Edgar would later regard the moderate Arrington as his role model.
Following his time with Arrington, Edgar would also work briefly under Illinois House Speaker W. Robert Blair.
Illinois House of Representatives
In 1974, Edgar ran unsuccessfully in the Republican nomination for state representative from the 53rd district, coming in third place. After the campaign, Edgar worked as an insurance and cosmetics salesperson before briefly serving the National Conference of State Legislatures in Denver.
He ran for the same seat again two years later in 1976 and won. He was re-elected in 1978.
While in the House, Edgar served on the Appropriations II, Human Resources, and Revenue committees as well as the Illinois Commission on Intergovernmental Cooperation. Due to his moderate policy positions, Edgar was often considered a swing vote, especially on the Human Resources committee.
In April 1979, shortly after winning re-election, Edgar resigned his state House seat to accept an appointment from Governor Jim Thompson to be the governor's legislative liaison. Though reluctant at first, Edgar accepted Thompson's offer with an unwritten promise that it would lead to Edgar getting a spot on a statewide ticket later on.
Illinois Secretary of State
In January 1981, Governor Thompson announced Edgar's appointment as Illinois Secretary of State to fill the vacancy left by incumbent Secretary of State Alan Dixon following his 1980 election to the U.S. Senate. He won re-election twice in 1982 and 1986 with his 1986 re-election against the Illinois Solidarity Party nominee Jane N. Spirgel and the Lyndon LaRouche-backed Democratic nominee Janice A. Hart being the largest statewide margin of victory in Illinois history until the election of Barack Obama to the U.S. Senate in 2004. During his first term as Secretary of State, Edgar diverged from past practices in the office by keeping many of the Democratic employees hired by his predecessor. He would later comment on his decision by saying "to me, the best politics is good government" and that in his view, as long as the employees did their jobs, he had no interest in firing them regardless of political affiliation.On policy, Edgar's partial term and first full term were largely defined by his work to toughen Illinois' drunk driving penalties. This included strengthening breathalyzer requirements for individuals pulled over for possibly driving under the influence and reforming the state's legal view of driver's licenses to be a "privilege, not a right," thereby allowing licenses to be administratively suspended pending a court date for potentially driving drunk as opposed to the prior system where drivers retained their licenses until their court date. Edgar also voiced support for a national 21-year-old legal drinking age and was appointed to U.S. President Ronald Reagan's Presidential Commission on Drunk Driving in 1982.
During his second term, Edgar spearheaded a successful legislative battle to pass a bill instituting mandatory automobile insurance for Illinois motorists. Prior to Edgar's intervention, the bill had been routinely defeated by the state's insurance lobby. Edgar would later pick the Senate sponsor on the bill, Bob Kustra, to serve as his Lieutenant Governor. Edgar also pushed forward an effort to construct a new Illinois State Library as its own building and his efforts to support the State Library during his tenure earned Edgar the nickname of "The Reader" from State Library employees.
1990 Illinois gubernatorial election
On August 8, 1989, Edgar announced his candidacy for Governor of Illinois following incumbent Governor Jim Thompson's decision not to run for a fifth term. Despite instantly becoming the Republican Party's frontrunner and Thompson's heir-apparent, Edgar was challenged in the 1990 primary by perennial candidate Robert Marshall and conservative political activist Steve Baer. Baer opposed Edgar's pro-choice stance on abortion and his support of making permanent a then-temporary 20% income tax surcharge used to fund the state's education system. Edgar won the Republican nomination with a little under 63% of the primary vote.In the general election, Edgar faced Democrat Neil Hartigan, the incumbent attorney general and former lieutenant governor. A prominent Illinois politician with deep ties to Chicago's regular Democratic organization, Hartigan was known for championing socially liberal causes. However, in the 1990 campaign, he ran on a staunchly anti-tax platform, opposing an extension of the 20% income tax surcharge. Instead, Hartigan asserted that better management of the state's finances would help free up the necessary education funding without raising taxes.
Meanwhile, Edgar campaigned on modifying the temporary income tax surcharge into a permanent one, arguing the revenue was vital for public education and criticizing Hartigan's proposals as a false promise. Edgar also portrayed himself as a consistent leader while attacking Hartigan as an indecisive policy maker who changed his opinions on issues when it became politically convenient, a perspective that had hurt Hartigan in the past. At one rally towards the end of the campaign, Edgar held up a waffle and joked that it would become the state seal if Hartigan were elected.
Edgar's campaign was hindered by a poor national environment for Republicans and a desire amongst the Illinois public for a change in leadership following the previous four terms of Jim Thompson.
In the two weeks prior to the election, those hindrances paired with poor polling led Edgar to believe he was going to lose. But, despite trailing Hartigan for most of election night, Edgar narrowly won the election by a little over 2% of the vote. Edgar's victory occurred alongside the re-election of incumbent U.S. Senator Paul Simon in a Democratic landslide and made Edgar one of only two Republicans to win statewide office in Illinois that year.Although Chicago voted overwhelmingly for Hartigan, Edgar secured roughly 20% of the city's African American vote, the best result for a Republican in decades. Post-election analyses have pointed to this as a key factor in Edgar's close victory.
During the 1987 Chicago mayoral election, Hartigan initially backed a white third-party candidate, Thomas Hynes, over incumbent mayor Harold Washington, the city's first African American mayor. Although Hartigan eventually endorsed Washington after Hynes withdrew, his initial support of a white challenger created lasting distrust among Washington's allies. Consequently, during the 1990 gubernatorial race, this political rift allowed Edgar to successfully court the endorsements of several prominent African American leaders, including Lu Palmer. This contributed to an unexpectedly strong performance for Edgar in Chicago's majority African American wards, helping deliver his victory.
Governor of Illinois
First term (1991–1995)
On January 14, 1991, Edgar took the oath of office as Governor of Illinois and gave a his inaugural speech on fiscal responsibility. During the gubernatorial transition between the 1990 election and his inauguration, Edgar and his staff were made aware of a nearly billion-dollar deficit in state spending that he would have to deal with upon assuming office and though the exact size of the deficit was downplayed by the Illinois State Bureau of the Budget to the public and to the news-media of the time, it was still recognized to be the largest budget deficit in state history up to that point. Then, three weeks following Edgar's inauguration, the state began to feel stronger effects of the early 1990s recession, worsening the state's financial standing further.
To try and correct the state's finances, Edgar's first proposed budget for the fiscal year 1992 included no tax increases and extensive cuts to state spending totaling in the millions of dollars—with the exception of education, which received a slight increase. This budget ran into conflict with the Democrat-controlled Illinois General Assembly and a months-long budget fight ensued between Edgar and Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan over his proposals. After months of negotiations, the two reached a compromise in mid-July that included most of Edgar's initial spending cuts, made permanent the temporary income tax surcharge that had dominated the 1990 campaign, and established property tax caps in all counties except Cook. Edgar would have two more significant budget fights in 1992 and 1993 and the state's financial troubles would dominate much of Edgar's first term.