Sorry Sen. Dick Lugar, but even before losing the Indiana GOP primary Tuesday, Republican officials were talking up the likelihood Treasurer Richard Mourdock would win in a walk over Democrat Rep. Joe Donnelly in a fall matchup. “We expect a smooth transition” to backing Mourdock, a top Republican official told Secrets Tuesday before the votes were counted.
The reason: They expected Lugar, considered out of touch with Indiana politics, to lose and see Mourdock as a stronger candidate. While Democrats see an opening in the race, wildly spinning that the new GOP candidate is a product of the loony, Tea Party fringe, the Republicans believe he’s more in touch with the state than Lugar–or Donnelly.
Their proof: the state remains solidly Republican, though President Obama won it in 2008; Mourdock has twice won statewide elections and in 2010 won 101,000 more votes than Sen. Dan Coats who bested his Democratic foe by 15 percent; and he won more votes in Donnelly’s 2nd Congressional District than Donnelly did in 2010.
Confidence is so high of keeping the seat, that the GOP tells Secrets they aren’t likely to pour a lot of money in the Mourdock-Donnelly race. The Democrats will.
GOP sources said that they kept in touch with Mourdock’s campaign through the primary and are already working with him to ready for the fall election.
“He has Tea Party support, but he’s running more as a conservative,” said a Washington-based Republican official. “This is a state and a campaign that we know,” added the official, who said the GOP is “confident” of victory.
According to a GOP memo issued today: “National Democrats will continue spinning — just like they did two years ago — that somehow Joe Donnelly will be the next senator from Indiana, even though two years ago they ultimately did not invest one dime in the state. Richard Mourdock’s position on issues important to Hoosiers, his built-in statewide organization and ability to fundraise, coupled with Joe Donnelly’s pro-Obama voting record in a state that continues to trend toward Republicans makes clear why Mourdock will be the next senator from the State of Indiana.”
Democrats, meanwhile, slapped Mourdock as a “tea partier” in their own memo. Among the many points they made promoting Donnelly, the Democrats said: “Today there are tens of thousands of disillusioned Hoosiers who have supported Dick Lugar their entire voting lives and are likely dismayed by the polarizing, extreme forces that defeated him. While Richard Mourdock is poorly positioned to appeal to these voters, Joe Donnelly is exactly the kind of reasonable, honest, job-focused, centrist these voters have always supported.”
