A solid week of horribly negative media coverage of Bruce Rauner was apparently outweighed by lots and lots of television ads, because his numbers are still rising.

A new Capitol Fax/We Ask America poll found that Rauner's lead increased since late November in the race for the Republican gubernatorial nomination.

The poll of 1,139 likely Republican-primary voters taken January 14 found Rauner getting 34 percent of the vote, with state Senator Bill Brady at 17 percent, Treasurer Dan Rutherford at 15 percent, and state Senator Kirk Dillard bringing up the rear at 9 percent.

A We Ask America poll taken November 26 - after Rauner launched his holiday-season TV-ad blitz - showed Rauner with 26 percent, Brady with 18 percent, Rutherford with 17 percent, and Dillard with 10 percent. Those numbers echoed a Public Policy Polling survey taken just days before, which had Rauner leading with 24 percent.

So, essentially, the rest of the pack hasn't moved at all, while Rauner has added eight points to his lead. Last week's poll had a margin of error of 2.9 percent.

It's no secret that Republican-primary voters in Illinois have been almost rigidly hierarchical when it comes to choosing gubernatorial candidates. They pretty much always choose the candidate who can best demonstrate that it's his or her "turn."

In 1990, after eight years as secretary of state, Jim Edgar was the clear choice. Indeed, he barely had opposition. The same went for two-term Secretary of State George Ryan eight years later. In 2002, it was clearly Attorney General Jim Ryan's turn, and he bested two other high-profile candidates in the primary. In 2006, Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka beat three lesser-known opponents to win her primary race, although it wasn't as easy.

By now, it should be self-evident that Bruce Rauner has locked up pretty much all the big money in the Republican-primary race for governor. Last week's pension-reform vote provides even more evidence.

Rauner has built an impenetrable fortress of high-dollar campaign contributors. Ron Gidwitz, long known in GOP circles for being the gateway to big-time cash from the wealthy, has fully joined in, as has Ken Griffin, the richest man in Illinois.

Gidwitz was with Senator Kirk Dillard in the 2010 gubernatorial primary, but Gidwitz and Rauner have sucked up so many dollars - including more than $250,000 from campaign fundraising committee member Griffin and lots more from Griffin's friends - that Dillard hasn't been able to raise any cash from rich people he's known for years, even decades. Dillard's financial predicament has become so desperate that he voted against last week's pension-reform bill in the obvious hope that he can now raise some dough from public-employee unions.

Dillard's vote is even more bizarre when you realize that he voted against a union-negotiated pension bill back in May and twice voted in favor of House Speaker Michael Madigan's pension-reform bill in May and June.

But he really had no choice last week; it was sink-or-swim time.

Illinois union leaders are reportedly mulling several options about what to do in the governor's race. But the only thing the leaders appear to agree on so far is that anti-union Republican gazillionaire Bruce Rauner cannot be allowed to win.

Some union honchos are looking at endorsing a candidate in the Republican primary. State Senator Kirk Dillard, for instance, already has strong support from the Operating Engineers, a union that is now even more opposed to Rauner since the candidate's endorsement by the strongly anti-union Associated Builders & Contractors group. Other unions have also taken keen notice of that endorsement.