After Republican U.S. Sen. Mike Braun easily won the fivecandidate primary for Indiana governor in May, political analysts predicted his victory over Democrat Jennifer McCormick was a near certainty.
Not anymore. Over the past month, signs have emerged indicating the race has tightened significantly heading into the final days of the election.
In just the last week, the Democratic Governors Association funneled $750,000 toward McCormick’s campaign, bringing its total investment in October to nearly $2 million. That kind of funding from the association hasn’t hit the state since 2016, when Mike Pence stepped down to run for vice president.
Those contributions have helped close the fundraising gap with Braun, who raised almost $4.87 million from July through September. McCormick raised $1.4 million, according to campaign finance reports.
The recent injection of outside money toward a Democratic candidate in deep-red Indiana is a clear sign the party believes McCormick is within striking distance of a win, argued Jay McCann, a political scientist at Purdue University.
“It signifies that serious people think it’s a possibility,” he said. “The people who invest in campaigns are not reckless. They have a strategy on where they put their money.”
That’s one reason The Center for Politics early in October shifted the race from a “safe” to “likely” Republican victory, indicating McCormick had gained a competitive chance. It’s the only Republican state governor’s race in the country not designated safe by the nonpartisan group. “The GOP is still clearly favored there, but there’s been enough activity that it doesn’t seem like an average, sleepy ‘Safe’-rated contest,” the center said about the designation change.
In a state where Republicans have dominated for decades, how has a Democratic candidate managed to gain real traction?
The answer lies in the question, according to Chad Kinsella, a political scientist who heads Ball State University’s Bowen Center for Public Affairs.
BALANCING ACT
Republicans have held a supermajority at the Statehouse since 2012. The last Democratic governor was Joe Kernan, who lost reelection in 2004.
That long stretch of GOP rule has some Hoosiers craving political balance in state government, argued Kinsella, and it could be fueling support for McCormick.
The push toward political equilibrium isn’t uncommon. Voters in Republican strongholds like Kentucky, Kansas and North Carolina all elected current Democratic governors. Republican Mitt Romney led deep-blue Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007.
“People want balance, and the governor is usually the office that they choose, regardless if it’s a blue or red state,” Kinsella said. “Independents in particular might vote for McCormick for governor, even though they may vote Republican the rest of the ticket.”
GOP supremacy in Indiana has also pushed the party to the conservative fringe, alienating more moderate voters who might turn toward McCormick, argued McCann, the Purdue political scientist.
An indicator of the Republican Party’s hard right turn: In June, state electors rejected Braun’s pick for lieutenant governor, state Rep. Julie McGuire, despite an endorsement by former President Donald Trump. Instead, they chose Micah Beckwith, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist who recently said he would fire or demote state employees who include their pronouns in email signatures.
“What you see is a group within the Republican coalition saying, ‘We’re the majority. Let’s keep pushing the envelope,’” McCann said. “After a certain point, you can reach so far out of the mainstream electorate that you pay a price.”
McCormick, a former Republican who was elected as the state’s education superintendent, has capitalized on Beckwith’s comments, painting Braun and the GOP as extremist and presenting herself as the more moderate, experienced choice for governor, McCann explained.
“She’s running a very kind of mainstream Democratic campaign talking about childcare, education and abortion,” he said. “Beckwith is just the opposite. He wants to run on those divisive, cultural kinds of issues.”
THIRD PARTY IMPACT
Even so, polls show Braun well ahead in the race. An Oct. 29 survey by the nonpartisan group ActiVote found the senator leads McCormick by 11.4 percentage points.
But the poll didn’t ask about Donald Rainwater, the Libertarian candidate for governor who may make that margin insufficient for victory.
The Indianapolis native in 2020 captured a record 11% of the electorate while facing off against incumbent Gov. Eric Holcomb and Democratic Woody Myers. If Rainwater performs well again, it would siphon critical votes from Braun and place McCormick within victory’s grasp, Kinsella explained.
“He pulled a lot of votes in 2020 I think he’s going to pull a lot of votes again this time,” he said. “I don’t think I can understate how important that number of votes could be.”
The Indiana GOP verified its worry over the Libertarian’s popularity by recently sending out flyers attacking Rainwater as a “deadbeat dad” based on a 30-year-old divorce filing. It’s the first time that a Republican nominee has attacked a Libertarian in Indiana, according to State Affairs/Howey Politics Indiana.
“Campaigns don’t do that unless they see a problem,” Kinsella said.
Braun will still win, he predicted, but it will be a Republican ticket headlined by Trump who hands him the victory. The former president remains popular in Indiana and is sure to boost downticket races. But McCann argued the record votes for Rainwater stem more from dissatisfaction with the ruling party than real support for a third-party candidate. If that frustration remains in this election, enough Republicans may defect to make McCormick the state’s first Democratic governor in two decades.
“I think it is fair to say that it’s possible,” McCann said. “It’s enough for the people who are evaluating the race to shift it more towards the competitive category and away from the slam dunk for the Republicans.”
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