INDIANAPOLIS — The beleaguered Republican leadership may pick up a victory in Indiana, but in the Hoosier State’s hotly contested Senate race.
The competitive primary pits a Marine, Congressman Todd Young, against a farmer, Congressman Marlin Stutzman, who both have limited name identification statewide.
Indiana polling has showed Young up 8–12 percentage points on Stutzman in recent days, but approximately a quarter of Republican Hoosiers remain undecided.
Young built his advantage with the support of a super PAC run by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s allies, the Senate Leadership Fund. The group has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars putting ads on the air to help Young succeed.
Young’s supporters took a page out of Donald Trump’s playbook, and branded Stuzman as “Me First Marlin.” The pejorative nickname is designed to sharpen the contrast between Young’s military service and Stutzman’s record.
The moniker has also caught on amid reports that Stutzman initially billed his campaign for a family trip to the Ronald Reagan presidential library in California.
Stutzman, meanwhile, has not had the financial resources at his disposal to effectively counter the attacks. Young outspent Stutzman by $1.3 million through mid-April, and had more than $1 million left to use with under one month remaining.
Carly Fiorina and Utah Sen. Mike Lee, both top surrogates for Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign, have both proclaimed their support for Stutzman, who has been called “another Cruz.” But Stutzman has not reciprocated the support for the Cruz team, and told the Washington Examiner he would not say whether he would vote for Cruz or Trump. He said he supports both men.
Without the influence of GOP headliners, Stutzman does not appear to have defined Young as part of the “establishment.” But Stutzman told the Examiner he thinks Hoosiers see through the Young team’s ads and noted that his own team is seeking to show that Young is “selected by Mitch McConnell and he’s going to owe him for his Senate seat and that’s something that people need to consider.”
Republican strategists and onlookers believe whether Young succeeds on Tuesday could be attributable to Trump’s performance statewide.
“If Trump winds up winning Indiana, it’s probably a good bet that Young is going to win Indiana. I know that sounds backwards,” said Ford O’Connell, a veteran of Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. “The problem that Stutzman has is very similar to the problem that Ted Cruz has and that is that they’re both base conservatives who have been unable to basically expand their voter reach to the other two-thirds of the party.”
Young, however, sounds less prepared to fully embrace the eventual GOP nominee than Stutzman.
Trevor Foughty, Young’s campaign manager, said the congressman would support whomever the GOP nominee becomes, but would not say whether Young would attend the Republican National Convention in neighboring Ohio, amid the prospect of a cutthroat contested convention.
Stutzman, who famously opposed former House Speaker John Boehner’s re-election to GOP leadership, sounded eager to attend the convention and see to it that Cruz or Trump succeeds.
“Absolutely, I’m planning on attending the convention,” Stutzman said. “And it better be one of the two, it should be either Cruz or Trump, as the nominee because if the establishment in Washington tries to pull something on Republican primary voters, there will be an uprising.”
Indiana Republicans have flirted with insurgent outsiders in the past, only to suffer in statewide general elections. Richard Mourdock, a Tea Party candidate and former Indiana treasurer, upset incumbent Sen. Dick Lugar in 2012, but lost to Democratic challenger Joe Donnelly in the general election.
As Indiana casts its ballots on Tuesday, the loss of the Senate seat in 2012 does not seem to have weighed on the minds of many Hoosiers, but McConnell’s allies backing Young seem intent on proving they’ve learned their lesson.
