Three answers to one question Tuesday night summed up the Republican primary in the Indiana Senate race. During the campaign’s opening debate, the moderator asked the trio of candidates running to replace incumbent Democrat Joe Donnelly to name two spending cuts they would vote to make right away. This is an ugly primary: You could learn 90 percent of what’s useful to know about it just from listening to the responses.
The three men competing for the nomination are Reps. Luke Messer and Todd Rokita—adversaries and the two favorites—and former state representative and businessman Mike Braun. Here’s what they had to say on Tuesday, with key words and phrases noted in bold.
Messer
Messer, whose answer preceded Rokita’s, is the least adversarial of the candidates. He’s long been favored by state Republicans and was a leadership favorite soon after arriving in the House in 2013. He’s a policy-minded member—he’s been chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, technically making him the No. 4 House Republican, since 2015. Policy-minded members don’t toss red meat to their base. They toss spreadsheets: They talk about “block grants” and use words like “efficient.”
Every crowded primary has a candidate who chides the others for criticizing one another instead of the general election opponent. Messer is that guy. Despite his rivalry with Rokita—which has made national news already—he went out of his way to note common priorities with his rival.
Rokita
I block-granted Medicaid—that’d be the cut, like we’ve mentioned. And TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] and food stamps are two others that I mentioned earlier that I would cut. I support the president in doing so. Department of Education: I either co-sponsor or I write the bill to eliminate the Department of Education, because it’s nowhere found in the Constitution, along with several other agencies that I’d vote to curtail, if not eliminate altogether. So there’s a third one. A fourth one: public broadcasting. You know, I listen to WIBC (Indianapolis) every once in a while and it suits me just fine. And [WIBC] and (parent company) Emmis are in the private sector. We do not need to have taxpayer-funded liberal demagoguery and dogma going over our airwaves and over our cable. It’s absolutely ridiculous. If the liberals want to fund their terrible ideas, they should pay for it themselves. I’m also very proud to note that I have operated a budget from when I was your secretary of state that was from 1987, unadjusted for inflation. I served 20 years later, we were operating dollar for dollar on the same money that the secretary of state had in 1987. Which one of us do you trust to go against Joe Donnelly and restore some sanity to the Senate?
Whereas Messer is a tepid Trump supporter, Rokita is a strong one. He released an ad in December that excerpted Messer knocking the president for his lack of restraint. He’s taken up Trump’s fight against the NFL. “As the NFL’s popularity tanks, will Joe Donnelly stop pandering to his left-wing political base and liberal media allies and admit that he should side with Americans and Hoosiers who respect the flag?” his campaign chairman asked in September. Rokita, despite serving in elected office since 2002, acts like a political and cultural outsider; his alliance with Trump seems obvious and natural.
In this race, he’s also used some tried-and-true ideological rhetoric. Given Trump’s popularity among Republicans and the party’s previous nomination of a hard-right Senate nominee in Indiana, Richard Mourdock, Rokita is a strong candidate for the May primary.
Braun
So if you know how the budget’s made up—entitlements, interest on the debt, and defense—we are spending too much in general. So you cannot make any dent on discretionary spending cuts only. The reason that that’s not a question you can answer, is because you’re not going to make a dent in the problem unless you do it across the board. I’m for taking the entire federal spending and baselining it and freezing it just like we do in the real world. We’re not making selective cuts to my business when we went through the ’08 crisis. We were doing it across the board. There is no way unless you do it comprehensively, according to a plan like Rand Paul’s, that you’re going to make any progress. There’s not enough room in the discretionary budget to make a dent, especially when you’re spending $300 billion more with the Kumbaya we had between Democrats and Republicans this last time around. And I’ll stick with that. It has to be across the board.
Braun has a complicated and sparse political past: He was an elected state rep for only three years, and the Associated Press reported that he consistently voted in Democratic primaries between 1996 and 2012. He’s styled himself as a Trump-aligned, fiscal-minded Republican in the campaign. Notably, Rokita’s campaign attacked Braun after the AP published its story, but Messer did not; Rokita also blasted out a press release Tuesday night slamming Braun’s legislative record, but did not message similarly against Messer.
