This story was supposed to be about Mike Braun, the third wheel in a field of three Republicans in the Indiana Senate primary. It was supposed to be about him—his background, his policies, his clever way of outflanking his competition—because the 64-year-old, self-styled “outsider businessman” is somehow the favorite to win his party’s nomination on Tuesday to challenge Sen. Joe Donnelly, the incumbent Democrat, in November. It once was an unlikely outcome: His two rivals, Reps. Luke Messer and Todd Rokita, were the natural frontrunners at the outset of the campaign, possessing name recognition, donor access, and formidable backgrounds. At ages 49 and 48, Messer and Rokita have an alluring, almost fraternal rivalry—they graduated from the same college at roughly the same time, ascended state government at roughly the same time, and were elected to Congress at roughly the same time. Their noticeable difference (and it’s a stark one) is temperament: Messer’s is affable, and Rokita’s is joyously truculent.
Braun could have withered outside the spotlight. But instead, he used oodles of his own money—the owner of a distribution company, he loaned himself most of the $6 million he’s raised—to persuade voters he was battling two sides of the same coin. “I was up against two guys that obviously had been staging their promotion to the Senate for a long time,” Braun tells me. He openly says he built his campaign around the Messer-Rokita dynamic: He referred to Rokita as “this guy over here” and Messer as “the one on the right” during their final debate, and his ads feature cardboard cutouts of the pair wearing similar suits and red power ties. Braun, by contrast, wears open-collar, light-blue shirts in commercials and during public appearances. Maybe it’s forced—Braun served a brief stint in the state legislature between 2015 and 2017, and “anybody who’s paying attention knows the guy is comfortable in a suit,” jokes former Indianapolis political reporter Jim Shella—but the approach has been effective. Absent any meaningful polling of the contest, most of the betting money is on Braun to win, according to the political prediction market PredictIt.
It’s typical to hear a politician credit something other than himself for his success, using the rubric this race isn’t about me, it’s about _______. You can fill in the blank with “the voters” or “the message” or another seemingly selfless, probably calculated, definitely feel-good term. But this time it’s not about the voters or the message or “something bigger than all of us”— and that’s to hear Mike Braun tell it. Straight into the camera, his closing pitch in a recent ad was: “I’m running because President Trump paved the way.” What did he mean by that?
“I thought, hey, President Trump cleared the field at the highest level as an outsider businessman, of course a different style,” he says. “I don’t purport to—everybody’s got a different approach and style and personality, but trajectory, as an outsider businessman. You know, I’m on record as one thing, and that was an inspiration for me to run for U.S. Senate.”
Braun sees Trump as a kindred spirit and like-minded tactician. “I was a supporter of Trump from the get-go by association with the pathway where he came from, if that makes sense,” he says. “In other words, everything about what Donald Trump did, which was outmaneuvering the establishment, has been kind of the way I built my business and the way I pictured a successful Senate run. So, yes, I was always a supporter of him. It was more in the sense I could see the similarities, and I thought that, hey, he did it in the toughest venue, in the toughest gauntlet to run through, and did so well in Indiana leading up to it.” (Trump effectively clinched the Republican nomination for president after vanquishing Ted Cruz and John Kasich there.)
For the past year, local and national reporting has observed, rightly, that the Indiana Senate race is about Trump. But it’s not simply that his aura influences the campaign in an obligatory fashion, in that candidates of the president’s party seeking national office would speak positively of his policies and address his controversies, the way it’s been for time immemorial. It’s that Braun, like Messer and Rokita, find ways to embrace Trump even if the moment doesn’t suit it, like a man bear-hugging the air. Take the temperature of this race: It’s a high of Trump and low of Trump, with Trumpy skies as consistent as the blue above the San Diegan horizon.
During the primary’s final debate this week, Indiana conservative radio host and moderator Abdul Hakim Shabazz noted that “we’ve received more questions about that,” the candidates detouring every which direction they can to laud Trump, “than any other topic.” Braun, despite taking flak from his opponents for consistently voting in Democratic primaries before beginning his nascent political career, calls himself a “lifelong conservative.” Rokita has strained to sell himself as the most conservative candidate in the contest. And Messer, a member of House leadership early in his tenure with a specialty in education policy, has been a “conservative” allied with the Speaker Paul Ryan brand. It was fair for Shabazz to ask the familiar question: Do you have any policy disagreements with President Trump? Especially given that Trump’s alleged conservatism differs from the Tea Party conservatism en vogue during the Obama years Messer and Rokita were elected.
Here’s Rokita:
“President Trump’s doing a great job, but because he knows I have his back, if there is a policy disagreement, it’s going to be a healthy disagreement, and that’s who you need in the Senate, to always put Hoosiers first. He always knows I have his back during the elections, when these guys weren’t around.”
Here’s Braun:
“Here’s where it’s tough on a couple of old career politicians. So, the one on the right [Messer]: never-Trumper, even after [Trump] was the nominee. And that’s because he’s so establishment, he didn’t want somebody from the outside to come in, because it’s going to shake up his career. And this guy over here [Rokita]? He is on record [as saying] President Trump is vulgar, President Trump is not presidential, and only came around when it was inevitable—”
Rokita interrupted: “That’s not fair. That’s not what I said.”
“You’re quoted as that, Todd.”
“No. It’s not true.”
“It’s heck to have a record,” Braun continued. “You can’t trust people that say one thing—now, it’s different if it’s 20 years ago. This is just a couple years ago. And President Trump was an outsider. A businessman. He doesn’t want more people from the swamp, career politicians. And neither one of them with any honesty. They’ve changed their tune. I’m on record saying President Trump was the inspiration for why I ran, and he needs more reinforcements like me, not two guys who have changed their tune very recently.”
Messer’s turn:
“Look, nobody agrees with anybody all the time. I mean, I’m married—I think anybody that’s married out there knows that you occasionally disagree with your spouse, don’t you? So, there are disagreements.”
What are those disagreements? Messer didn’t name them. He left it at that. And then said: “But let me tell you what I’ve learned in dealing with this president, is that he has an unconventional way of doing things, and he comes out of the gate with some strong opinions, and he virtually always gets back to the right place.” This includes United States-North Korea relations, an issue on which Messer prematurely nominated Trump for the damn Nobel Peace Prize six days before the primary.
The debate allotted time for 30-second rebuttals. When it came time to hear them, Shabazz reminded the three men of the original question—again, there’s nothing unusual here about evading a debate inquiry, but the obtuse degree to which it was avoided is quite magnificent.
Rokita, again:
“You know, I’m going to tell you, I’m very proud to have the Trump Indiana 2016 endorsement,” he began. (A couple of high-ranking Indiana-Trump 2016 officials endorsed Rokita, which he plastered on yard signs in such a way that Trump’s own re-election campaign thought was too misleading.) “They didn’t endorse these two guys—although both asked—because they knew who had the president’s back. These guys are obsessed with cardboard—one guy has cutouts, the other one’s talking about yard signs. When I talk with the president, we’re not talking about yard signs. He knows I have his back.”
And Braun:
“I mean, what I’ve seen so far, I’m going to agree with [Trump] on most things, because he’s going to approach it as an outsider. It’s someone that’s thinking out of the box. And Todd Rokita changed his vote on these last spending bills because there was a conservative [Braun] in the race, and he’s voted with Luke Messer 95 percent of the time.” (Rokita voted against the most recent spending package that the White House endorsed and Trump signed, reasoning that Trump despised it and had no other choice.) “So if you want somebody that’s going to be in sync with President Trump—outsider, businessman, done something in the trenches of conservatism, not endorsing the backside of a government paycheck their entire careers.”
Enter Shabazz, the defeated moderator: “Congressman Messer, I’ll give it a shot with you.”
No dice.
“Listen, I mean, this is what the media wants to do, [Shabazz]. The media wants to divide us from the president of the United States,” Messer said.
There is an opportunity in this question to demonstrate independent thought, or thought of any kind at all. The Tax Foundation provided an exhaustive analysis of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, for example, and surely there is some policy point relevant to Indiana voters that warrants at least scrutiny. The Obamacare repeal effort was a monstrosity, poorly explained and defended by House Republicans (including Messer and Rokita). Sometimes discussing public policy is about discussing public policy—rare, these days.
Braun spoke about it in our conversation, particularly about trade. His focus, like Trump’s (and like many trade hawks this century), is on China. “China has got probably the most marginal impact, when it comes to what your relationship’s going to look like in a bilateral way,” he says. “And they, over the last five to seven years, especially, are not only committing industrial espionage, they’ll manipulate their currencies, they’ll definitely subsidize industries, and they’ll definitely dump gluts onto the world markets. And I think those are all things that most other of the large economies don’t do.”
But Braun should be aware that China is a sore spot with many Indiana farmers. “Agricultural products are one of the few U.S. industries with a significant positive trade balance. A 10 or 25 percent duty on exported steel or aluminum may cause countries to retaliate with a tariff on the ag products they import from the U.S.,” said Indiana Soybean Alliance policy chairman Phil Ramsey in March. “And since we export 30 percent of our soybeans to China and 60 percent of our soybeans overall, this is a real concern.”
Ramsey was prescient. After Trump announced a new tariff schedule on those metals, China came back with an announced 25-percent tariff on U.S. soybeans in early April. Braun granted it’s not easy to defend Trump’s action to that particular group of farmers—but he couched China’s response in a broader goal, of getting China to fall in line with accepted worldwide trade practices, which he says ultimately will benefit the United States on net.
Still, he conceded the difficulty certain farmers could face.
“I’ve not found anything in life that you work towards that doesn’t involve a little bit of at least short-term pain or a little bit of difficulty. You generally don’t change the dynamic of something you’re going to want to improve without a little bit of agony in the process of doing it. And I think if it doesn’t get any worse than what it is, and not only if it would affect other sectors other than soybean farmers, we might have to tolerate some of that always knowing that we don’t want to get to the point where it spirals,” he tells me.
“And I think at this point it’s just about right. And I think that in the case of soybean farmers, you’ve got to remember, if China doesn’t buy soybeans from us, and they buy elsewhere, there are going to be other customers out there that are going to still need to buy the soybeans that China is buying elsewhere. So we don’t know how that’s all going to work out. I think at this point that you can be alarmist about it—’it’s going to lead to something drastic’—I just don’t think that’s the case. I think you’ve got to be willing to take a little risk if you want to accomplish anything.”
He wraps up the answer: “And I think that’s what [Trump] has done.”
