"Today, I laid our more than $1 billion in structural reforms," Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner boasted to his supporters via a blast e-mail last week.

Baloney.

Rauner's press conference to announce a billion dollars in alleged budget savings was an almost total farce.

Two worries are obviously driving driving much of Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan's personal legislative agenda this year: low Democratic turnout in an off-year election for an unpopular governor and Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner's millions in campaign spending.

"If you're an African American on the South Side, what motivates you to vote for [Governor] Pat Quinn when you wake up election morning?" was the blunt assessment of one longtime Madigan associate last week.

For example, Madigan signaled last week that despite his past reluctance to raise the minimum wage and his longtime alliance with the Illinois Retail Merchants Association (which is leading the charge against it), he's not opposed. Calling the idea a matter of "fairness" and "equity," Madigan told reporters last week: "I think you'll find the opposition to raising the minimum wage comes from people that have done pretty well in America, and for some strange reason they don't want others in America to participate in prosperity."

Asked if he was referring to Rauner, Madigan asked: "Who?"

Illinois state Senator Kirk Dillard told Chicago radio station WLS last week that Republican county chairs ought to try to get Bill Brady and/or Dan Rutherford out of the governor's race so he could have a clear shot at wealthy front-runner Bruce Rauner. Dillard claims he is building strong momentum with recent endorsements, including the powerful Illinois Education Association (IEA).

But two polls taken last week showed that Dillard isn't even winning the DuPage County state Senate district that he has represented for more than 20 years.

A Capitol Fax/We Ask America poll taken February 20 had Rauner leading in the district with 36 percent; Dillard had 30 percent. Brady polled 10 percent, and Rutherford was at 2 percent. Another 22 percent were undecided. The poll of 614 likely Republican voters had a margin of error of 3.95 percent. Twelve percent of the calling universe was cell phones.

I didn't commission the poll to be a jerk, but because somebody slipped me results of a Strive Strategies tracking poll taken February 18, which had Rauner at 33 percent and Dillard at 26 percent in Dillard's own district. The margins between the two men are almost exactly the same in both polls, so this is pretty solid evidence that Dillard is, indeed, losing his own Senate district, which he has represented since 1993.

What the heck is going on? Well, millions of dollars in campaign ads on Chicago TV by Rauner and pretty much nothing by Dillard is the simplest answer.

Without a doubt, the most overlooked aspect of Bruce Rauner's multi-million-dollar TV-ad buy has been his advertising campaign's repeated attacks on Governor Pat Quinn.

"Career politicians are running our state into the ground, and Pat Quinn, he's at the top of the heap," Rauner says in one of his ads that have permeated the airwaves since November. "Pat Quinn, a career politician who failed to deliver term limits," a Rauner TV announcer declares in another spot.

The millions of dollars worth of ads are supposedly aimed at Republican-primary voters, but obviously everybody else in the state is seeing them, as well. And Quinn, who doesn't have a well-funded primary opponent, hasn't bothered to rebut any of Rauner's multiple attacks. Considering Illinois' persistently high unemployment rates, the hostile national climate, the never-ending negative stories about the state's finances, and Quinn's four-year history of low job-performance scores, the governor's silence seems like a big mistake.

And if a new Capitol Fax/We Ask America poll is accurate, Rauner's months-long, unrebutted attacks have indeed helped knock Quinn into a shockingly deep hole.