The GOP Senate race in Indiana started off ugly and is ending in similar fashion, with the candidates trading barbs — in one case symbolic punches — over everything from where they live to drunken rap sheets to their fidelity to President Trump.
Political analysts and GOP insiders say acrimony between Reps. Todd Rokita and Luke Messer, two House members looking to move up to the Senate, set the tone for the race and provided an opening for former state lawmaker Mike Braun, who has used his personal wealth and a well-oiled messaging campaign to claim the outsider mantle.
“Early on it created a huge pathway for somebody like me to come through,” Mr. Braun told The Washington Times, alluding to the fighting between the two Republican congressmen. “It has just been a bigger opening than I imagined.”
“By the time they realized I was their main competition, I think they were too baked into that approach,” Mr. Braun said.
The three candidates will have one last chance to pitch voters on their visions and talk trash about one another on Monday in a final debate before the May 8 primary election.
The winner will take on Democrat Joe Donnelly, one of the most endangered incumbents in the midterm elections.
There has been limited polling in the GOP primary race — though a Gravis Marketing survey released earlier this month showed Mr. Braun, who late last year resigned his seat in the Indiana House after a three-year stint, leading the field among likely voters with 26 percent. Mr. Rokita places second with 16 percent and Mr. Messer third with 13 percent.
That leaves 45 percent of respondents up for grabs in a state Mr. Trump carried by 19 points over Hillary Clinton.
Mr. Braun also has led on the financial front, raising $5.9 million, most of it from his own wallet. He has spent $4.5 million, including on commercials casting Mr. Messer and Mr. Rokita as “swamp creatures” and depicting the two as a pair of cardboard cutouts.
Mr. Messer has raised $2.9 million and spent more than $2.8 million and Mr. Rokita has raised $2.6 million and spent $2.1 million.
Mr. Braun’s rivals dismiss the idea that he is surging.
“That was the case two weeks ago. Now the ship is sinking fast,” said Chasen Bullock, a spokesman for Mr. Messer.
The race has centered on which Republican is Mr. Trump’s biggest fanboy.
Mr. Messer has been accused by rivals of being a “Never Trumper” in 2016.
And Mr. Rokita has been criticized for describing Mr. Trump as “vulgar, if not profane” when he served as a surrogate for Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential bid. He’s also taken heat for giving voters the false impression, through campaign signs, that he was endorsed by President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, the state’s former governor.
Mr. Braun, meanwhile, has been attacked for voting in Democratic primaries and for supporting a bill to fund roads and bridges that raised the gas tax.
“Mike Braun is a lifelong Democrat who has hiked taxes dozens of times, while cutting his own,” said Nathan Brand, a Rokita spokesman. “If Mike Braun’s $6 million hasn’t bought this race yet, clearly Hoosier voters have seen him for the Democrat, tax-hiking politician that he is.”
A week out from the election, Mr. Braun says the attacks aimed at him from the congressmen — he has dubbed them “Todd the Fraud” and “Liberal Luke” on the airwaves — smack of desperation.
“I think the fact that there is an outsider, a career businessman going against two career politicians is going to be the deciding factor here in Indiana,” Mr. Braun said.
Mr. Braun said Mr. Trump inspired him to get into the race and that he believes his life experiences make him the most Trump-like candidate.
“I think there is a big difference between a politician weighing in on an issue with no experience in the real world and going to Washington where you have lived through those issues enough to know what is really important,” he said.
Republicans say Mr. Rokita, who entered the House in 2010 after serving as Indiana secretary of state, has played the lead role of attack dog in the race — and relished it.
Over and over again he has raised questions about Mr. Messer’s loyalty to the state by highlighting how his family moved to Northern Virginia after he was elected to Congress in 2012. Last week, he unveiled a children’s book parody entitled “OH, the Places You’ll Forget.’
In a recent ad, Mr. Rokita sports boxing gloves and slugs punching bags with the faces of Mr. Braun and Mr. Messer superimposed on them.
Mr. Rokita also seized on reports from the Indianapolis Star about how Mr. Messer did not disclose a pair of DUIs he received in the 1990s. Mr. Rokita’s camp then blamed the Messer team of floating a story to the same newspaper when it reported about a traffic stop in which Mr. Rokita seemed to be intoxicated” and “provided the officer with a false identification,” according to the police report.
Asked whether he has any drinking and driving baggage, Mr. Braun said, “Fortunately, I do not.”
Mr. Donnelly could end up benefiting from the nastiness of the GOP primary race, said Joshua Kaplan, political science professor at the University of Notre Dame.
“The three contenders for the Republican Senate nomination are not very different from one another politically, so they are grasping to find ways to stand out, and there’s a temptation to do that by going negative and personal,” Mr. Kaplan said.
Mr. Kaplan said Mr. Braun is the most removed from the state Republican Party, but has “made an effort to stay above the fray as Rokita and Messer go lower and lower.”
“Without the extreme animosity between the other two candidates, which is clearly not winning support for either of them, Braun would not have nearly as good a chance in the primary,” he said.
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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