Introduction - The History of the Indiana Senate Race, 2012

As part of a course in U.S. Politics, we are supposed to a pick a US election to analyze this fall. Seeing as how someone had already picked the massive Elizabeth Warren-Scott Brown race for Teddy Kennedy's old Senate seat, I was left with Indiana as the most interesting race this fall. The race was first brought to my attention back in early 2012 when political commentators were noting how Tea Party groups were trying to unseat two of the most senior Republicans in the Senate - Orrin Hatch of Utah and Dick Lugar of Indiana. In 2010, Tea-Party candidates won various Republican Senate primaries at the expense of establishment Republicans... among them we had Sharron "2nd Amendment remedies" Angle in Nevada, Joe Miller in Alaska, Christine "I'm not a witch" O'Donnell in Delaware, Ken Buck in Colorado and Mike Lee in Utah. Only Mike Lee - who defeated the reliably conservative incumbent Bob Bennett in the primary - would go on to win the general election. Had Republican primary voters chosen electable candidates instead of Sharron Angle, Ken Buck and Christine O'Donnell, Democrats would in all likelihood have lost the Senate and one Senate Majority Leader in Harry Reid.

What we're seeing in Indiana is fairly similar. Richard Mourdock, a Tea Party favorite, took on Dick Lugar, an incumbent and one of the more centrist Republican Senators. Dick Lugar, who was fairly certain to win in a general election lost against Mourdock who is now in a general election toss-up against Joe Donnelly, the Democratic nominee (whom I know nothing about at the moment, but I'll get to him in my next blog post). Or that's at least what the polls show at this fairly early stage of the election. So we may see a repeat of 2010, when Republicans squandered the chance of regaining the Senate by nominating unelectable candidates. Keep in mind though that polls at this rather early stage in local and state races without incumbents aren't particularly meaningful, and since Indiana is considered a Republican-leaning state, it would seem as if Mourdock would be better set to win this race.

So as an avid follower of U.S. politics, the Indiana race will be interesting to analyze because it relates so well to the national trend and can provide so much insight into what's going on at the national level. Here we have yet again the expulsion of a moderate Republican in favor of a Tea Party extremist. A Senator Richard Mourdock would only be in the Senate to obstruct and clog things up even further. What's Mourdock's idea of compromise and bipartisanship? His idea of compromise is that Democrats come to agree with him on everything. Is a Senator Mourdock going to be around to get that massive post-2012 debt reduction deal passed? Is he going to help push through bipartisan tax reform? Immigration reform? Education reform? No. Mourdock is only going to be a hindrance to any solutions to the problems the U.S. is facing. For me, he personifies the right-wing fundamentalism that has plagued the Republican party since 2008, and the obstructionism that has lead to a political crisis in Washington.

Regardless of whether Republicans take the Senate or not, and regardless of whether Mourdock wins this race, the right-wing faction of the Republican party has won a victory. By ousting the less than "severely conservative" Lugar in a much publicized primary race, the effect is certain to push other Republicans with a less than perfect conservative record to go further right. As Barney Frank so aptly put it: “It [the Republican majority in Congress] consists half of people who think like Michele Bachmann … and half of people who are afraid of losing a primary to people who think like Michele Bachmann.” Case in point, after Bob Bennett lost against Mike Lee in 2010, the above-mentioned Orrin Hatch immediately started preparing for a primary fight in 2012. He went from a 75 percent conservative rating in 2007 to a 100 percent conservative rating in 2012. In the process, Orrin Hatch, who once introduced the DREAM Act (which would provide permanent residency to the children of illegal immigrants if they go to school or join the military) to the Senate, became a vocal opponent of it when it was re-introduced by Democrats after Obama's election. Republicans of course filibustered (blocked the majority from passing the bill) the whole thing and a slew of Republicans who once supported the bill joined in on the filibuster.

Dick Lugar's mistake in all of this was to not prepare adequately for his primary challenge and flip-flop his way into "severely conservative" territory (like Hatch did). He was one of three Republicans to vote for the DREAM Act when Democrats re-introduced it (the other two had lost or would go on to lose primaries to Tea Party challengers). He got pounced for not living in Indiana, for his age and his status as a veteran Congressman at a time when Congress was as popular as Hugo Chavez. But his downfall was a less than ideologically perfect conservative record and a will to reach across the aisle (you might, for instance, recall how presidential candidate Obama cited his work with Lugar to bolster his bipartisan credentials in the presidential debates in 2008).

So that's the history of the Indiana Senate race for 2012 up until this point, why it interests me and how this Senate race relates to the state of the politics in the US as a whole. In my next blog post, I'll look closer at Richard Mourdock and Joe Donnelly, and the policies they stand for. I'll also take a deeper look at the demographics of Indiana and the issues at play in the state.