I feel sad about the 60%-40% defeat of Senator Richard Lugar in Indiana’s Republican primary yesterday. He had a mostly conservative record over the years, fighting the unions’ bill to give them more bargaining power soon after he was first elected in 1976. On foreign policy he chaired the Foreign Relations Committee in 1985-87 and 2003-07 and has been ranking Republican since then. He played an important positive role in forcing out Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos during his first stint as chairman and since the 1990s he has doggedly worked for the Nunn-Lugar effort to corral loose nukes in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere.
But Lugar did get to serve six terms in the Senate; no other Indiana senator has won more than three terms. And he decided to campaign as a proud opponent of those conservatives symbolized by but not limited to the tea party movement. The winner of the primary, state Treasurer Richard Mourdock, is a serious person with experience in public office.
The patterns of support in this primary resemble those we saw in other seriously contested states in this year’s presidential primaries. Lugar carried only two of Indiana’s 92 counties: Marion County, which is basically coterminous with the city of Indianapolis as a result of Lugar’s Unigov initiative when he was mayor in the 1960s, and affluent Boone County to the northwest. Lugar came close in only a few other counties: Tippecanoe County, home of Purdue University; Monroe County, home of Indiana University; Hamilton County, the state’s most affluent county just north of Indianapolis; and Montgomey County, home of Wabash County. Mourdock won at least 55% in the other 86 counties. His top county was Ohio County, on beautiful hilly land along the Ohio River just southwest of Cincinnati, where he got 78% of the vote. In the eight-county Indianapolis metropolitan area, which cast 32% of the votes, Mourdock beat Lugar by only 52%-48%. In the other 84 counties Mourdock led by a huge 64%-36%.
This looks very much like the contests between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. Romney and Lugar were strongest in the affluent suburbs, in the biggest metropolitan areas and in university towns. Santorum and Mourdock were strongest in rural and small town counties. The difference of course was that in Indiana’s neighbors Michigan, Ohio and Illinois, Romney ran much stronger than Lugar in the affluent suburbs and big metro areas. This looks to be the biggest split, at least in many states, in the Republican party today.
