Bayh’s sudden entrance into the Indiana Senate race suddenly puts this seat on the table
Checkmate, Democrats!
Weeks after Marco Rubio gave GOP hope of holding a fragile Senate seat by re-entering the race to replace him, Evan Bayh suddenly emerges to do something similar in Indiana as Democrat Baron Hill suddenly withdraws from the race to succeed Republican Senator Dan Coats. The plan seems to have been in the works for several weeks and the dye is cast for state Democrats to tap Bayh as Hill’s Democratic replacement on the ballot. And in an uncanny coincidence perhaps never before seen, should Bayh win, the seat will have passed from Coats to Bayh and again, from Coats to Bayh (Bayh succeeded Coats in the Senate in 1998 and Coats did the same when Bayh chose not to seek re-election in 2010). For those keeping track, Hill has his place in the historical mix as well. He had challenged Coats way back in 1990 and garnered a strong 46% as Coats faced Hoosier voter for the first time after being appointed to the seat of Vice-President-elect Dan Quayle.
Hill, a former four-term Congressman, had been in the race to succeed Coats for well over a year but had struggled to raise money. He gave his party many tough votes in Congress but paid the price in his conservative-leaning district in 2010. For this race, Hill would be further hampered by the fact that the man who beat him, Todd Young, is now the GOP nominee for the Senate seat and thus hails from the same geographic base (Bloomington and a few rural counties). Still, his move less than four months from Election Day is a surprise. But if national Democrats had a hand in this, it’s not hard to see why.
In addition to his Senate tenure, Bayh is a “boy wonder” of Hoosier politics. His father is Birch Bayh, a good old-fashioned liberal who held the seat for three terms before losing to Quayle in 1980. After a stint as Secretary of State at age 31, Evan Bayh was a popular two-term Governor with an aversion to tax increases. Similarly in the Senate, he often drew rebuke from more liberal members of his party for being one of the rare members of the caucus who would vote to include pay-as-you go measures in major spending packages. As the Democratic Party is losing more and more of its thoughtful moderates (though not nearly at the rate of the other party), that has made Bayh stand out. He has also been sitting on a $10 million campaign war-chest since leaving the Senate where he remained as a lobbyist. He’ll need all of those strengths for November.
Young himself is no slouch on the fundraising front. In the primary, he had a lot of establishment support, propped up in part by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Young faced a primary against a very ideological Republican colleague, Congressman Marlin Stutzman and McConnell moved mountains to put donors in Young’s corner. Then there is the fact that despite Bayh’s “knee-jerk” moderate reputations, Indiana is a conservative state. True, it’s bent has narrowed in recent years. President Obama shocked many by carrying the state in 2008 and although it was one of two states that flipped back to “red” four years later, Obama cut in half the margin by which John Kerry had lost to George W. Bush in 2004. That same year, Bayh won re-election with 61% against an underfunded Marvin Scott.
Then there is outside dynamics. One is the possibility that Republican Governor Mike Pence may be tapped as Donald Trump’s running-mate. Pence is already running for re-election in a race I would expect to be a cliffhanger come November.
Bayh likely can count on plenty of goodwill from voters of all stripes from his Senate tenure. The question is whether the Obama brand has damaged his chances among more conservative voters, of which Indiana has many. Obamacare, which Bayh supported, may prove dicey, but perhaps not pivotal. Young’s campaign is not wasting time seizing his support – he tweeted Bayh’s “decisive” vote within 90 minutes of the switch. By the same token, the coalition of Hoosiers who will be coming out heavily against Trump – students, African-Americans, etc who typically have small voter turnout might be enough to put Bayh over the top. In Lake County (Gary), the latter group was pivotal to Obama winning the state in 2008 and it may do the same for Bayh this year. Turnout will also be stratospheric in other urban areas – the Indianapolis markets of Hamilton and Marion Counties in the center, Evansville in the South and Allen(Fort Wayne) and Howard (Kokomo) in the North. Vermillion and Tippecanoe Counties are benchmarks for student turnout While turnout will hit a crescendo in rural areas as well, I would suspect Bayh has more room to grow with swing voters who remember him fondly. That said, Young is not well-known outside of Southern Indiana so Bayh will have a chance to define him.
The unanswered question is how much his luster has worn off with his time out of office. Republicans are already making hay over a mansion Bayh owns in Washington. It’s worth noting that another ex-Senator, Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, took just 43% in his comeback bid in 2012, though Kerrey had returned to the state from New York and Nebraska is more conservative than Indiana. But equally noteworthy is that Coats had been a resident of North Carolina before moving back to the state to mount his ’10 Senate bid.
Can Democrats count their chickens for this seat? Not by a long-shot. But if you ask Democratic Senatorial Campaign Chair Jon Tester and likely Democratic leader Charles Schumer if they are having a great day, their response would without question be, indubitably. And with Indiana’s first-in-the-nation poll closing (all but several counties in the Northwest close 6 p.m. EST) and a long-list of vulnerable seats, if Bayh wins, the GOP could learn that the first cut is the deepest.