Morning Digest, sponsored by Oath: Why the Indiana GOP is sweating the race for secretary of state
Thank you for being a paid subscriber to The Downballot. You’re the reason we’re able to keep publishing top-notch election analysis every weekday. Morning Digest, sponsored by Oath: Why the Indiana GOP is sweating the race for secretary of stateAnd why Democrats may achieve their long-awaited breakthrough
Leading OffIN-SoSIndiana Republicans are taking aim at former Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard, an ex-Republican running for secretary of state as a third-party candidate—an offensive that suggests Ballard’s former compatriots believe he could disproportionately hurt them in a closely watched four-person contest. “As mayor, liberal Greg Ballard failed Indianapolis,” the narrator says in a new spot the Indiana Republican Party began running on Friday. “Ballard raised taxes and fees over 140 times, and left Indianapolis with hundreds of millions in debt. Under Ballard, it became one of the most dangerous cities in America.”
The ad targeting Ballard, who created a new outfit called “the Lincoln Party” this year for his campaign to become Indiana’s chief elections official, is one of three spots that debuted the day after the state GOP and Gov. Mike Braun announced they were spending $1 million on a joint ad campaign. Another ad focuses entirely on praising Max Engling, a U.S. Senate aide who won the GOP nomination by defeating scandal-ridden incumbent Diego Morales at a June party convention. (Secretary of state is one of five statewide offices in the Hoosier State where party delegates, rather than primary voters, select nominees.) The third and final commercial attacks Democrat Beau Bayh, a Marine veteran and the son of former Sen. Evan Bayh. The ad accuses “liberal Beau Bayh” of having “voted in Indiana elections 15 times” while living in Washington, D.C., which the narrator says shows he can’t be trusted “to secure our elections.” “It’s disappointing that Max Engling is using the 25th anniversary of 9/11 to attack a veteran for voting in his home state while he was serving our country,” Terre Haute Mayor Brandon Sakbun, who chairs Bayh’s campaign, posted on X. “Hoosiers are tired of corruption and division.” The GOP’s offensive ignores Libertarian Lauri Shillings, a marketing official with the University of Indianapolis and the fourth and final candidate on the ballot. Bayh, who far outraised the rest of the field through June, was the first contender on the air last month when he launched his opening ads. The Democrat, who demonstrated his skills as a marksman and at the gym in a pair of commercials, argued he has the strength and discipline to combat corruption. But while those ads didn’t mention any of his opponents, Bayh responded to the GOP’s attacks on Monday with a new spot going after Engling. “While working in Congress, Engling traded tech stocks and became a millionaire,” says Bayh’s narrator. “Even profiting from big data centers that are raising our electric bills.” Ballard, for his part, also fired back at his former party. “The Indiana Republican Party is a shell of its former self,” Ballard said in a video he posted to social media. “I’m proud of my record—the real one, not the comical Disney villain version the GOP is now trying to push.” There are no publicly available polls of the busy race for secretary of state, an office Republicans have held since winning it in the 1994 elections. The contest has attracted attention well outside Indiana, though, as Democrats look to Bayh—the subject of a detailed Politico profile in April—to deliver their first statewide victory since 2012. The younger Bayh, who is waging his first campaign for higher office, says he can appeal to voters who have otherwise soured on his party. “Too often, in Indiana and nationally, Democrats are running with a sense of cultural superiority,” he told Politico. “[T]hey’re looking down their noses at people in Indiana.” Ballard’s campaign, meanwhile, could alter state politics even if he falls far short of victory. As long as Ballard wins at least 2% of the vote, candidates running under the Lincoln Party banner would be listed on the general election ballot for the next four years—a status Libertarians have enjoyed for decades. And should Ballard exceed 10%, his party would be able to hold primaries to pick its candidates for most offices, something only the Democrats and Republicans can currently do. Should he clear either of these hurdles, Hoosiers will have multiple elections to get used to a new image that is about to grace their ballot for the first time: Abraham Lincoln in sunglasses.
Indiana is one of just a handful of states that still allow straight-ticket voting, meaning that a voter can check a single box to cast a ballot for a party’s entire slate of candidates. This section of voters’ ballots also features a small mascot next to each party’s name. Democrats are identified with a rooster, an animal they adopted in 1840, and one that’s still used in a few other states instead of the more familiar donkey. Republicans, likewise, are represented by an eagle rather than an elephant, while the Statue of Liberty graces the Libertarian line. Ballard’s campaign manager, though, says he only learned he’d need an image for the Lincoln Party after some “friendly folks” informed him. “I don’t think that they really mean anything to the voters but there has to be some kind of mark,” Nathan Gotsch tells the Indiana Capital Chronicle of Lincoln in shades. “I just knew that we needed to have something up there.” GovernorsNV-GovThe Democratic Governors Association is finally booking significant ad time to help Aaron Ford against Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo, who has dominated the airwaves for months in Nevada, though the GOP retains a huge advantage. The Nevada Independent’s Tabitha Mueller, citing data from AdImpact, reported Tuesday that the DGA’s state affiliate has now spent or reserved at least $8.6 million on advertising. Data on ad reservations is often preliminary, though, and may be revised upwards as more information comes in. As of Tuesday, however, AdImpact had tracked about $39 million in ad spending and future reservations from the GOP, compared to $11 million for Democrats. A poll released last week from Emerson College found that, despite the GOP onslaught, Ford held a small 44-42 advantage over Lombardo. The survey was the first public poll since late July, and no others had been released as of Tuesday evening. HouseOH-07Republican Rep. Max Miller, whose reelection campaign has been rocked by abuse allegations leveled against him by his ex-wife, is airing an ad arguing that his Democratic rival, Brian Poindexter, is the one with a toxic past. “Drug possession, vandalism, assault,” intones Miller’s narrator. “Brian Poindexter: Busted by police in a heavy drug zone. Poindexter tried to hide the evidence by swallowing rocks of crack cocaine.” The ad debuted two weeks after the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative site, reported that a 1998 police report said that Poindexter, then 18, was pulled over by law enforcement in Cleveland. Poindexter, who allegedly took “some small objects from his coat pocket and put them into his mouth” and “began to swallow them,” according to the police report, was arrested for “drug abuse.” Beacon reporter Alana Goodman said that there is no record of whether he was prosecuted, while the Washington Post’s Alexei Koseff wrote in a subsequent story that he was not charged. A spokesman for Poindexter’s campaign told Goodman that “any implication that Brian has used hard drugs is false. Any suggestion otherwise is bullshit.” Goodman also wrote that Poindexter was arrested in a separate 2013 incident at a baseball game where, according to the police, he allegedly slapped a stranger named Bob Rzepka “for no known reason.” Rzepka, when contacted by Goodman, said he decided not to press charges against Poindexter, whom he believed was intoxicated. The piece did not include any comment from Poindexter’s team about the alleged incident. Poindexter told Koseff he didn’t believe such allegations would harm his campaign against Miller in Ohio’s 7th District, a conservative constituency based in the Cleveland suburbs. “I can’t predict what my opponent is going to do. He’s erratic at best,” the Democrat said. “He’s been in Congress for four years and that’s what all he has, is attacks and lies.” Poindexter is using his own ads to keep the focus on the domestic violence allegations against the incumbent. A new spot features Summit County Sheriff Kandy Fatheree telling the audience, “Thirty-four years in law enforcement tells me Max Miller does not belong in power.” DCCCThe DCCC added three more names to its “Red to Blue” program highlighting top House candidates on Tuesday: commercial fisherman Bill Hill in Alaska, climate activist William Lawrence in Michigan’s 7th District, and emergency room nurse Mitchell Berman in Wisconsin’s 1st. Hill is challenging Republican Rep. Nick Begich as an independent, but Democrats—including the state party—have rallied around him. A perennial candidate, Eric Hafner, will appear on the November ballot as a Democrat, but he’s serving a 20-year sentence in a federal prison in New York for threatening to kill public officials. Libertarian Jim McDermott is also running. If no one wins a majority, the race will be decided by ranked-choice voting. Lawrence, meanwhile, remained conspicuously absent from the DCCC’s list after he upset two more moderate candidates in the Democratic primary last month. But GOP Rep. Tom Barrett is still highly vulnerable in Michigan’s swingy 7th District, so D.C. Democrats were never likely to write off Lawrence despite his reputation as an outspoken progressive. Berman’s inclusion, by contrast, is a much greater surprise. Republican Rep. Bryan Steil has consistently turned aside challengers without much trouble, and he enjoys a massive fundraising advantage over Berman. But the political environment and Donald Trump’s relatively narrow 52-47 win in Wisconsin’s 1st seem to have Democrats convinced that Steil’s time might be up. Poll PileAll polls must comply with The Downballot’s requirements.
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