Indiana businessman Mike Braun knocked off moderate Democratic senator Joe Donnelly, multiple news networks projected around 9 o’clock on the east coast Tuesday night, helping Republicans’ chances of keeping the Senate on a night Democrats had to have almost everything go right to flip the chamber.
Braun, who prevailed in a Trump-centric primary over Reps. Luke Messer and Todd Rokita, led Donnelly by nearly 150,000 votes with half the state reporting when the race was called, translating to a margin of more than 10 percentage points. Hoosierland has historically accommodated Democrats who tack to the center statewide, like the family of former governor and senator Evan Bayh and Donnelly. But Braun was able to surge in territory that the president dominated over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The victory was something of an upset—the final Real Clear Politics average of polls showed Donnelly ahead by 1.3 percentage points, and he was roughly a 59 to 41 percent favorite to win in TWS chief election analyst David Byler’s Swing Seat model.
To David’s credit, he pegged Braun as a potential upset candidate—and with good reason. Indiana’s partisanship has hardened after the state voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. Then, it looked like a place that could resemble its Midwest neighbors to the northwest, like Wisconsin, more than the red border state of Kentucky to the southeast.
Now, not so much. Republican Eric Holcomb succeeded Republican Mitch Daniels as governor. Republican Todd Young, who has focused much of his agenda the last year on Yemen, is Indiana’s other senator. And oh yeah—former Republican governor Mike Pence is vice president, and former Republican senator Dan Coats is Director of National Intelligence.
These days, that makes Donnelly seem like an outlier, in retrospect. For more background on the race, read here and here.
