Election night might have been more of a whimper than a blowout, but digging into Tuesday’s results reveals some key takeaways for both voters and politicos.
After hundreds of candidates, thousands of votes and millions in spending, here are my three lessons:
The Benjamins
Money has corrupted the system, and we might never be able to go back. Sorry to start on a depressing note, but every conversation I had about races in the past month always ended up at money. And speaking with voters on Tuesday, Hoosiers hate that it has taken over elections.
The Citizens United ruling in 2010 changed the dynamics forever, allowing unlimited “independent” election spending by corporations and labor unions. A few months later, a lower court used that case to strike down limits on the size of contributions to groups that support candidates without donating to them directly.
And that brought us super PACs, a beefed-up version of political action committees. Unlike their brethren, super PACs are prohibited from donating directly to political candidates and cannot coordinate with a campaign but both can raise and spend unlimited sums, as detailed by the nonprofit OpenSecrets, which tracks election spending.
These groups poured millions into Indiana races this year and often are behind the most misleading or downright false election ads. And yet the candidates who benefit from the attacks turn a blind eye. The PACs are supposed to be run independently. But I suspect their behavior would change if the candidates they’re helping denounced their actions more often.
And self-funding of campaigns is also becoming much more common. Candidate after candidate this primary dipped into their own pockets to fund their campaigns. And their pockets are much deeper than mine.
Brad Chambers loaned his campaign $10 million in the GOP gubernatorial race. That’s a staggering amount of money.
Or consider Jefferson Shreve in Indiana’s 6th Congressional District. He loaned his campaign $4.5 million and it appeared to seal his win. Just months before that he bankrolled 93% of his unsuccessful mayoral campaign with $13.5 million in contributions to himself, according to the Indianapolis Star.
So much for a candidate building a wide swath of support from citizens. But I do want to credit Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch for doing just that. She isn’t a wealthy businesswoman. Instead, she has spent her life serving in public office and her campaign was funded by supporters who believed in her vision.
Haley effect
Indiana — and national news outlets — are buzzing with the fact that Nikki Haley managed to snag one in five GOP presidential votes here. And that’s even though she dropped out two months ago.
It’s hard to tell without serious data crunching, but one of two things may have happened.
Occam’s razor tells you the simplest explanation is probably the right one. Some Republicans just don’t like Donald Trump. I know a few who voted exactly that way.
The other option is that Democrats and independents took Republican ballots to vote in the governor’s race for a more moderate candidate. There was even an advertising campaign pushing it. I also know a few people who did this.
Nick Roberts, a Democrat Indianapolis City-County Councilor, did some initial analysis that seems to back up the latter.
He used precinct-level data that was available on the Indiana Secretary of State’s site to do some math. While counties are still reporting, he looked at 2,527 precincts to create a correlation graph.
Overall, he found that Haley’s support was extremely predictive (a 67% correlation) to Chambers’ support. In fact, there are about 75 precincts around the state that they both won. For both candidates, heavily-Democrat Marion County was their best county in the state, with Chambers winning it outright as his only county win.
Again, more analysis is needed. But that theory seems to have some preliminary support.
Too many candidates
I freely acknowledge that this take will seem antithetical to encouraging civic involvement in the state. But there were a number of key races that just had too many candidates.
The governor’s race is a perfect example, with six Republicans lining up. There is a fine line between having no options and too many. By having six, debates were less helpful and the campaigns themselves were less substantive.
At the Indiana Capital Chronicle, a simple four-part questionnaire on a specific topic (with responses limited to 150 words) ballooned to thousands of words when each candidate weighed in. An hour-long forum meant each candidate had only a few minutes to appeal to voters — often creating more questions than answers.
At least three of those candidates probably should have taken themselves out of the equation.
I will forever wonder if Crouch or Chambers or Eric Doden, for instance, could have tightened that race against U.S. Sen. Mike Braun other candidates had dropped out. If the polling wasn’t so clearly in his favor, he might have been forced to be more specific on issues and even make significant policy proposals.
And if it’d been a one-on-one or a three-person race? Who knows how much more competitive and less fractured the vote might have been.
The crowded primaries weren’t limited to the governor’s race. On the U.S. House side, there were 63 candidates running across nine House seats. That’s an average of seven per race — but some actually had 10 candidates. How is a voter supposed to educate themselves adequately on that many candidates to make an informed choice?
Regardless, a nominee who came through with 30% of a vote isn’t particularly inspiring, especially when you remember that less than one-third of registered voters even bothered to cast a ballot. When you consider the above, it’s no wonder that most of Indiana stayed home on Tuesday.