Conventional wisdom suggested that the well-connected Rep. Luke Messer was the favorite to win the three-way Republican primary in Indiana’s Senate race, coming up May 8. A strong campaign from relative outsider Mike Braun, a businessman and former state lawmaker, has contradicted that narrative. And then there’s Rep. Todd Rokita: the only one of the trio to have bankable statewide name recognition as a former Indiana secretary of state, and the most Trump-like candidate running.
It seems like a tossup—emphasis on “seems.”
“I could not find a media or corporate polling partner for the primary, which is amazing, given all the money that’s spilling into this race,” says Brian Howey, more or less a dean of Indiana political reporting. Howey runs the subscriber-based Howey Politics Indiana, a must-read for Hoosier politicos, and often has partnered with firms to survey statewide campaigns.
But not this time, with less than two weeks until the ugliest, most drawn-out Senate primary in the country concludes. Indiana is one of the few GOP pickup opportunities in 2018, with Democrat Joe Donnelly trying to win over an electorate that supported Donald Trump by nearly 20 percentage points in 2016. The Republican field was positioned to be a who’s who of the state’s House delegation, but Messer and Rokita were the two who declared: college schoolmates and temperamental opposites whose political ascensions have paralleled each other. Local journalists wrote about their rivalry as far back as last summer. All the while, the third wheel, Braun, threatens to finish first place.
Such a race, given the intrigue and stakes, would stand to beckon the attention of election handicappers and pollsters—and it may well yet. Nationally recognized names like Marist (which conducts the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll) and Angus Reid Global published surveys just before the Hoosier state presidential primary two Mays ago. State pollsters, however, are sitting this Senate primary out.
That includes the Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW). The Downs Center partnered with some news outlets several years ago for election polling, says its director, Andy Downs, “but their budgets were small, and we ended up carrying the overwhelming majority of the cost. It doesn’t seem that their budgets have gotten any larger in more recent years.” And polling ain’t cheap.
“We poll when we are contracted to do so and when we are researching academic questions. We do election polling on an opportunistic basis. Indiana has had several interesting races in the last 10 years. We could see that some of those races were going to be interesting months in advance. Others were a surprise. In spite of what appears to be a relatively consistent occurrence of interesting elections, for financial reasons, we never build a budget around election polling,” Downs says.
The one independent survey of the Indiana Senate primary, from Gravis Marketing, has a sample of 280 likely Republican primary voters and a 5.9-percent margin of error. Braun led the field with 26 percent, to Rokita’s 16 and Messer’s 13. But 45 percent said they were still undecided.
These data, much like an armchair quarterback’s read of the field, don’t imply anything conclusive. In lieu of hard numbers, the country’s hottest primary also appears to be its most uncertain.
