Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) is treating the long-shot bid of a self-funding egg tycoon as a threat in a Senate primary that he had all but locked up.
Banks, a staunch Trump ally running for the seat of outgoing Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN), had been preparing for war with political heavyweight Mitch Daniels, the former governor of the state. But Daniels’s January decision to pass on a run appeared to spare the GOP a protracted and bitter primary.
TRUMP’S GOP SUPPORT HAS ONLY CLIMBED SINCE INDICTMENTS BEGAN
Republicans from every corner of the party, from Senate leadership to former President Donald Trump to the anti-establishment Club for Growth, quickly coalesced around Banks, and one by one, his possible rivals decided not to enter the race.
But a candidate filing posted with zero fanfare in early July spoiled Republican efforts to clear the field for Banks. John Rust, a virtual unknown in GOP politics whose family runs one of the largest egg farms in the country, had decided to run.
Pro-Banks operatives regard Rust’s campaign as amateurish, and there are serious questions about whether he is even eligible to run as a Republican under Indiana law. But Rust’s stated willingness to drop millions of his own money in the primary has them taking no chances.
As rumors swirled that Rust might enter, Banks allies from Donald Trump Jr. to Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) came out in force against him. But the attacks began in earnest once Rust filed on July 1, with the Banks campaign and its surrogates painting him as a “Democrat in sheep’s clothing” who price-gouged egg consumers during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
The broadsides, issued in a series of press releases and posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, amount to early warning shots by the Banks camp — no real money has been put behind the offensive.
But the impression given in the Washington Examiner’s conversations with Banks allies is they would rather treat Rust with caution than be caught “flat-footed.”
“I have a hard time seeing a scenario where Jim Banks isn’t the next senator from Indiana. I think most people would acknowledge that,” a Republican strategist operating an outside group in support of Banks said. “At the same time, any good campaign will take any candidate who is claiming they’re going to spend millions of dollars seriously.”
Rust, who announced his campaign last week in a video posted to X, said his desire to “protect children’s innocence” from the transgender movement on the Left spurred him to run.
But he made clear in an interview with the Washington Examiner that he intends to frame his candidacy as a referendum on “career politicians” like Banks.
Rust, a first-time candidate for Senate, or any other office for that matter, acknowledges he’s learning on the fly and cringes at some of his early media appearances.
His campaign rollout has been slow — it took seven weeks from the time he filed until he released the announcement video, and it might not be until October that he holds his first major campaign event. But he has ambitious plans to visit all 92 counties in Indiana to knock on doors and collect the signatures needed to get on next year’s May ballot.
More importantly, he’s willing to invest heavily to do it. Rust declined to give a ballpark figure, but operatives believe he plans to spend around $5 million.
“I will spend whatever it takes to get my message out,” Rust said. “That’s not going to be cheap, that’s not going to be a million dollars or whatever. It’s going to be a lot of money. I’m under no illusions, this is a very expensive race and that I have a mountain of outside special interest money coming after me because they cannot control me.”
Rust has hired a campaign manager and two outside consultants and has put money into a campaign office and tour bus. He’ll be stepping down from his role as chairman of the board of Rose Acre Farms in two weeks, allowing him to campaign full time.
The looming question, however, is whether Rust will actually shell out the money he’s promising to challenge Banks. He teased that he’ll cut his first ad “very soon,” but it’s not clear the dollar value he’ll put behind it.
Even a self-funder such as Rust has a daunting task before him. Banks has $2.5 million in his campaign coffers and the support of virtually every conservative institution in Washington. The deep-pocketed Club for Growth has already begun airing ads in support of him, and the Trump-friendly American Leadership PAC stands ready to get involved, too.
Banks’s allies are waiting to see what Rust does next, but they are promising to wage a full-out assault should he ramp up his attacks.
“Rust is crazy to think that Jim Banks’s allies are just gonna lay down and let him spend millions of dollars unopposed,” the Republican strategist said. “I mean, I promise you, if Rust actually does start spending real money, all of Banks’s allies on the outside are gonna mobilize and mobilize in an extremely serious manner.”
The thrust of those attacks would be twofold — his family business and his voting record.
Rose Acre Farms is one of several egg producers caught up in a lawsuit alleging a coordinated effort to jack up egg prices.
Rust denies the charges filed by major food producers such as Kraft and General Mills and projected confidence his family’s company will win in court, but the antitrust suit is already starting to bleed into the race.
Banks sent out a press release on Tuesday calling on Rust to disclose whether he is “bankrolling his campaign with money he made ripping off Hoosier families.”
Rust, for his part, suggested he won’t use money from Rose Acre Farms to finance his bid. “I’ve done very well financially outside of my family’s business, and that’s how I’m funding my campaign,” he said.
The bigger liability for his candidacy will be the votes he cast in four Democratic primaries dating back to 2006.
Rust espouses traditional Republican views, from securing the southern border to fiscal responsibility, but Banks’s allies have seized on the votes to cast him as a liberal.
“When a Democrat like Rust tries to run in a Republican primary, you have to assume he’s a Schumer plant,” said one Senate GOP strategist, referring to the Democratic majority leader. “And conservative primary voters don’t appreciate being conned by liberal hucksters like Rust or Schumer.”
Rust, who did vote in two Republican primaries, in 1996 and 2016, said his Democratic votes were for pro-agribusiness candidates and fellow churchgoers at the local level and that he’s always voted Republican in state and federal races. He pointed to Federal Election Commission filings showing he’s only ever donated to GOP candidates.
But those votes could hobble his candidacy in a deep-red state such as Indiana. Moreover, they could prevent him from making the ballot entirely.
In 2021, Indiana passed a law requiring prospective candidates to have cast their last two ballots in the party primary they want to run in. For Rust, the last times he voted were in 2012 and 2016, with his 2012 votes cast in a Democratic primary.
That means he is technically ineligible unless Amanda Lowery, the chairwoman of the Republican Party in Jackson County, where Rust resides, grants him an exception.
She has no plans to do so, however, telling the Washington Examiner that Rust could have voted Republican in 2018, 2020, or 2022 had he wanted to avoid the roadblock.
“I’m following the law. It’s as simple as that,” she said. “John Rust has had plenty of opportunity before now to prove that he is a conservative, and he has not done that. If he isn’t a Democrat, then his voting record would prove that.”
Rust called the attempt to label him a Democrat “desperate” and suggested Lowery has “unknown motivations.”
How does he plan to run without her signoff? He won’t say. But it’s not stopping him from campaigning. “Hoosiers deserve a choice in the primary, and I intend to give them one,” he said.
Getting on the ballot will be no easy lift — he must collect somewhere on the order of 8,000 to 10,000 petition signatures from registered voters to be sure he meets the state threshold.
And even if he is able to collect those signatures, he will be met with a challenge to his eligibility that will be decided before the Indiana Election Commission sometime next year.
Nonetheless, Banks isn’t taking the race for granted. He’s attended nearly 200 events since announcing in January, according to his campaign, and touts the 250-plus in-state endorsements he’s received in that time.
“John Rust has many hurdles to get through before he can get his name on the ballot but if he does I will welcome a spirited campaign about his liberal record,” Banks said in a statement. “Hoosiers are looking for a conservative fighter to be our next Senator and I’m the only candidate running with a record of doing just that.”
Banks has developed a reputation as a stalwart conservative in Congress. Until recently, he chaired the Republican Study Committee, the largest conservative conference in the House, and stood up the “Anti-Woke Caucus” in January to focus on the culture wars.
But it’s Banks’s proximity to Republican leadership — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) attended a fundraiser for him on Wednesday — that Rust perceives as his weakness in the 2024 contest.
He’s painting Banks as a go-along-to-get-along politician who has lost what it means to represent Indiana voters since arriving in Congress in 2017.
“I think what happens when these politicians move to north of Richmond, they get a different perspective,” Rust said. “And you have to keep the perspective of Indiana in your heart, where you live.”
Rust previewed some of the attacks he’ll level at Banks, highlighting that he missed the final vote on the debt ceiling bill that passed in May. (Banks has missed 1.3% of House votes, according to ProPublica.)
“If you don’t show up for work, then you ask for a promotion — I don’t know what world he lives in, but that’s pretty incredulous,” Rust said.
Banks allies, however, think the “outsider” campaign Rust is mounting will fall flat since he is, in effect, running in the same conservative lane as the congressman.
“Outsider candidates are successful when their opponent is somebody who is more moderate, somebody who, you know, doesn’t represent the grassroots,” said the Republican strategist operating a pro-Banks outside group. “And if you put John Rust and Jim Banks side by side in front of a bunch of grassroots conservatives, they will say, ‘Give me Jim Banks,’ 10 times out of 10.”
“Like, I don’t think there’s really any single issue where John Rust could even dream of getting to the right of Jim Banks on,” the operative added.
That appears to be exactly what Rust is attempting to do, however. In the interview, he cited Banks’s vote for the First Step Act, a compromise criminal justice reform bill that passed with overwhelming bipartisan support but has since fallen out of vogue with Republicans following an uptick in crime.
“That lowered the prison terms for people that committed crimes with guns by 10 years,” Rust said. “That’s not a conservative position, in my opinion.”
Rust casts himself as a budget hawk in the mold of the outgoing Braun, even going so far as to align his views with the Freedom Caucus, and, as Braun did in 2018, is committing to limit himself to two terms in the Senate.
In contrast to Indiana’s senior senator, Todd Young (R-IN), Rust says he is opposed to the sort of deal-cutting seen in the upper chamber.
He is not, however, chasing the MAGA mantle that Banks has claimed in the race.
Banks’s allies have leaned hard into Trump’s endorsement of the congressman, a rarity so early in the cycle. In a state such as Indiana, where Trump beat President Joe Biden by 16 points in 2020, it’s a decided advantage, and the Club for Growth has already cut an ad for Banks highlighting it.
“I mean, look, there’s only one person that’s been endorsed by Donald Trump, and that’s Jim Banks. And the reason Donald Trump endorsed him is he wants someone that’ll carry [the America First] agenda,” said Ward Baker, general consultant for the Banks campaign. “We need a fighter, and that’s what Jim Banks is, and that’s why I believe the president endorsed him.”
Rust denies he is anti-Trump, as the Banks campaign claims, saying he voted for Trump in the general election in 2016 and 2020 and would do so again if he becomes the Republican nominee.
He did create some daylight between himself and the former president, however. Rust agrees with Trump “most of the time,” he said, but would not hesitate to call out some of his “liberal” policy positions, again mentioning the First Step Act he supported as president.
When asked about the prosecutions against Trump, Rust defended the former president’s stolen election claims as a matter of “free speech.”
One Republican strategist in Indiana believes Rust could be a compelling candidate on his background alone. He is a gay conservative fighting what he sees as a Democratic Party attempting to put him in an ideological box.
But the operative believes the odds are slim that Rust actually mounts a successful bid.
“He’s an interesting guy, but I’m not sure even with the $5 million, I don’t think I’d lose a lot of sleep if I were Jim Banks,” the operative said.
Republican strategist Mike O’Brien, who served in the Daniels administration and more recently ran the successful 2016 campaign of Gov. Eric Holcomb (R-IN), called Rust’s bid the “longest of long shots.”
“I just don’t see a path for this guy at all,” he said.
Rust would have to build up his name ID from scratch — no one in Republican politics the Washington Examiner spoke to had heard of him before he entered the race.
And Banks’s allies believe whatever money he does put forward can easily be canceled out with spending of their own.
“Look, he would need, really — to make this thing a real dog fight, I think he’d need to put in $15 million,” one pro-Banks operative said.
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Rust told the Washington Examiner he is ready for the onslaught and would not have entered if he didn’t think he could win.
“They’re going to try to clobber me, but I’m ready. I’m in this for a fight,” Rust said. “The more they’re coming after me, the stronger I’m going to go after them.”
