All my friends know I don’t take calls on the night election results come in. I’m to obsessed studying them. This actually started in the early to mid-1960s when we’d get our information from a late NY Times and NY Post edition. Tuesday night, however, I wasn’t exactly glued to my screen. Indiana. Who cares? It’s a safe red state (PVI is R+11— same as Mississippi, worse than Kansas, South Carolina or Missouri— and Tuesday there only a tiny handful of races of any interest whatsoever, none involving Democrats.
1- Victoria Spartz won her on-again, off-again reelection campaign, edging MAGAt Chuck Goodrich 31,665 (39.1%) to 26,856 (33.2%). She self-funded $700,000 into the race.
2- Dead candidate Jennifer Pace beat Catherine Ping 7,704 (31.2%) to 7,384 (29.9%) for the Republican nomination to face incumbent Democrat Andre Carson in the Indianapolis packed blue district with a D+37 partisan lean.
3-With MAGAt Jim Banks giving up hid 3rd district seat to run, successfully for the open Senate seat, fr right extremist, former Rep Marlin Stutzman will be goos-stepping back into the House after narrowly beating Tim Smith 19,475 (24.2%) to 18,168 (22.6%) in the 8-person primary in the northeast corner of the state. Smith had put $1,111,736 of his own money into the campaign. Stutzman spent $400,000 of his own cash and 3 other candidates also self-funded 6-figure amounts. But the biggest spending came from outside groups where America Leads Action spent $1.8 million against Stutzman, the Wall Street billionaire-backed WFW Action Fund (Ken Griffin, Paul Singer. Warren Stephens) spent over a million dollars against Stutzman, Club for Growth and House Freedom Caucus spent, respectively $765,660 and around $400,000 for Stutzman.
4- Perhaps the most interesting race was former Congressman John Hostettler’s futile bid to get back into the House. Hostettler isn’t just an extreme right-wing sociopath (which he is), he’s an avowed anti-Semite and Nazi who was soundly defeated (61-39%) for a 7th term in 2006 by a conservative Democrat. Tuesday, in the backward 8th district in the southwest corner of the state, there were 8 Republicans running for the open seat (Larry Bucshon is retiring), which has an R+36 partisan lean. Either despite or because of the Naziism, Hostettler managed to come in second, even winning tiny Fountain County. State Sen. Mark Messmer will be going to Congress after besting Hostettler 30,661 (38.5%) to 15,640 (19.6%). Two minor candidates, Richard Moss and Dominick Kavanaugh tried buying the race with over half millions each in self-funding. But Messmer, the establishment candidate, raised $761,031 and Hostettler, always a weak fundraiser brought in just 40,625, worst of any of the GOP candidates. AIPAC, which normally doesn’t get involved in Republican primaries, spent $1,567,912 against Hostettler and the Republican Jewish Coalition kicked in another $954,925 against him. America Leads Action also spent $1.6 million against Hostettler and for Messmer. One neo-Nazi operation, American Leadership PAC— completely financed by Tom Klingsenstein, Bill Koch and Timothy Dunn— spent just over $300,000 for Nazi-boy and against Messmer. Jewish billionaire Jeff Yass’ extreme MAGA group, Protect Freedom PAC, spent $482,417 supporting the anti-Semite. Yass’ PAC is also spending heavily on other GOP extremists in tough primaries, like Bob Good (VA), Joe Kent (WA), Alex Mooney (WV)…
But none of this was the big story out of Indiana. The big story was the much larger-than-expected protest vote against Trump centered in the suburbs. First a tangent: also on Tuesday, at the Milken Institute Global Conference, Paul Ryan told Yahoo Finance that he wouldn’t vote for Trump in November. “Character is too important for me. [The presidency] is a job that requires the kind of character [Trump] doesn’t have.” He’s not going to help keep Trump out of teh White House, though, because he says he’ll be writing in the name of another Republican rather than voting for Biden. Whatever constituency Ryan has left, it’s in places like to well-off suburbs around Indianapolis. And that’s where Nikki Haley’s zombie campaign did best or, put another way, where Trump had a very unpleasant surprise.
Losing nearly 22% of the primary vote in an uncontested race is bad enough, but over a third of the vote in the suburbs around Indianapolis gave Trump a thumbs down. This was the Haley vote in the Indianapolis area, the biggest source of votes in the state:
Marion Co.- 35%
Hamilton Co.- 34%
Tippecanoe Co.- 31%
Boone Co.- 32%
Predictably, Trump did best in the backward rural counties with the lowest educational attainment levels and where life is least worth living and where people are angry about their shitty existence and at everyone and everything. These are the counties ripe for fascism.