Left parentless just before college, Pritzker started at Georgetown and later transferred to Duke. There he met Terry Sanford, the university president, who would change the trajectory of his life. Sanford was a former North Carolina governor who protected Freedom Riders in their push for desegregation in the 1960s and backed Vietnam War protesters while leading Duke. Pritzker became a mentee. When Sanford ran for Senate in 1986 and won, Pritzker joined the campaign and then his staff. It was Sanford, Pritzker says, who advised him that if he wanted to run for office someday, he should decide where he wanted to set up a life, meet the people, and go do it there. Pritzker took a job with Senator Alan Dixon, an Illinois Democrat, and studied law at Northwestern. He spent a million dollars of his own money to run for a Chicago House seat in 1998, when he was 33, but finished third to Jan Schakowsky, who has held it since. He has said the loss taught him that ideas go only so far in a campaign. “It’s like somebody building like a small business,” he told the Chicago Tribune. “You need to build the infrastructure to win a campaign.”
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