Evan Bayh’s true address might be the swamp Donald Trump wants to “drain.” The former Democratic senator, running in Indiana to reclaim his old seat, has faced an onslaught of negative news about his years of residency outside the Hoosier state, his post congressional-work, and his vote for Obamacare: a trifecta of headline-grabbing issues that has blotted his powerful family name and given him the image, however improbably, of a Washington insider.
To Bayh’s detriment, those headlines keep coming.
Just Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that insurance premiums for a 27 year old with a midlevel Obamacare plan would spike by an average of 25 percent next year. Although the number and the context vary by state—that specific figure is set to fall by three percent in Indiana, but the Hoosier exchange has been fluid, with many consumers ditching high-cost plans on the exchange for Medicaid (expanded in 2015) and the state government approving rate hikes for most insurers—the news has renewed concerns about the health care law’s stability. Indiana residents, like those in many other states, face dwindling options in 2017, as multiple carriers have announced they will depart the market. All told, Obamacare is still burdensome to defend. Bayh’s opponent, Republican representative Todd Young, has made it an issue on the campaign trail and the debate stage.
Bayh’s living situation, on the other hand, has seemed to spin itself. The Associated Press reported last Friday that he didn’t stay overnight in his Indianapolis condo once in 2010, his last year of congressional service. Previously, it was revealed that Bayh consistently listed Washington, D.C., not Indiana, as his primary home after departing the Senate. He’s faced residency questions as far back as July, when the Evansville Courier & Press wrote about his real estate dealings in the nation’s capital. For a political clan whose public service to Indiana dates to the 1960s—Bayh’s father, Birch, served three terms in the Senate—the narrative has been a nuisance, if not damaging.
More damaging still, however, could be accusations that Bayh is seeking a return to Capitol Hill only after “cashing in” on his career. “Evan Bayh took the money and ran,” said Young of Bayh’s Obamacare vote during the race’s lone debate last week. “He joined a major lobbying firm in Washington, D.C., and he represented clients that needed relief from the very problem he created from Obamacare.” Bayh only backed the health care law after a tax on medical device sales written into the bill was halved from 4.6 percent to 2.3. The tax has since had a negative effect, if an indeterminate one, on Indiana’s prominent medical device manufacturing industry. Bayh went to work lobbying against the tax—at least in practice—for the law firm McGuireWoods. “At a time when creating jobs, fostering innovation and competing globally are the pre-eminent challenges facing America, surely consensus can be reached to undo a provision that makes all three that much harder,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2012. “As a Chinese proverb says: It is better that wisdom comes late than not at all.”
Republicans are hoping Hoosier voters come to the same realization before heading to the polls in two weeks. Bayh rode his massive name ID to an early lead in the polls; the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee touted a survey it commissioned in July that showed the former lawmaker with a 21-point advantage. But the spread was just seven points in a Monmouth poll conducted in August. It narrowed further in successive surveys from Indiana-based Howey Politics, to four points in September and just one in early October.
But the momentum appears to have stopped there. The two most recent polls of the contest, released in the last two weeks, each showed Bayh with a six-point edge—this despite the myriad instances of negative coverage the Democrat has endured in the race’s key stretch. Were he to lose, it’d be “a death by a thousand cuts type of thing,” one Hoosier political analyst told me.
Be on the lookout for the sharpness of those newspaper pages.
