With the final day of campaigning in the Indiana GOP Senate primary underway, the national Republican establishment seems headed to a rare victory over the forces of the tea party movement in the race to seize Sen. Evan Bayh’s (D) Senate seat. There are actually five candidates running for the Republican nomination, but three have risen to dominate the race, and define the internal battle lines: former Sen. Dan Coats (who is the establishment pick), Rep. John Hostettler (who has the support of Ron Paul) and former state Rep. Marlin Stutzman (who is the tea party choice).
Based on money and recent polling, Coats seems poised to sweep the field — a rare victory for the party mainstream that’s still smarting from Gov. Charlie Crist’s collapse in Florida and the conservative insurgency that looks like it might take out Sen. Bob Bennett (R) in Utah.
Coats is about as old-school establishment as they come. A former staffer for Dan Quayle, Coats ran for and won Quayle’s House seat when Quayle ran for Senate in 1980. He was then appointed to replace Quayle in the Senate in 1989 after Quayle became vice president. Coats retired from the Senate in 1998 to become a lobbyist and President George W. Bush’s ambassador to Germany.
With a resume like that it’s little surprise that leaders on the party’s edges chose to take on Coats when he emerged as the presumed national GOP choice to win the nomination. (The NRSC has made no official endorsement, but Coats has said that it was a personal call from NRSC chair John Cornyn that gave him the idea to run.)
Over the past several weeks, Coats has found himself under assault from the national conservative movement that has sought to cleanse the Republican party of moderates and establishment figures since Obama won in 2008.
Coats is dominating the primary money race (though he has struggled badly against the likely Democratic nominee, Rep. Brad Ellsworth, in that regard.) He raised $379,000 between his February campaign kick-off and March 31. Stutzman raised less than $80,000 in the whole quarter and Hostettler raised less than $40,000. And a recent poll shows Coats with a significant lead in the primary heading into tomorrow. The poll, conducted by SurveyUSA for The Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics, shows Coats leading the five-way field with 36% of the vote. Hostettler is second with 24% and Stutzman is third with 18%.
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) — the tea party movement’s main man in Washington — backed Stutzman on April 20 after the former state legislator won a string of tea party-sponsored straw polls in Indiana. DeMint’s reasoning? Coats is a nice guy but all that past record stuff is just a bit too much baggage.
“I like Dan [Coats]. I like John [Hostettler],” he told Fox News, “But we need new faces here.”
Stutzman is the one conservatives are counting on to cost the GOP establishment a victory. He has a mini-following on the right that cite him as the pure conservative option.
Hostettler is among those who say Coats isn’t conservative enough. He cited Coats’ vote for the 1993 assault weapons ban as evidence that he doesn’t pass the 2010 conservative purity test.
“I voted to repeal it,” Hostettler huffed to the Gary, IN Post-Tribune. But Hostettler hasn’t always marched lock-step with his party’s most conservative wing either — he was among just a handful of Republicans to vote against the Iraq War in 2003. Decisions like that endeared him to Ron Paul — long a vocal opponent of the war — and earned him Paul’s endorsement last month.
The gun issue has been a tough one for Coats. The NRA has taken him on, but that hasn’t seemed to scare Republicans in Washington, who still think Coats is going to win easily. They point to prominent conservative Coats endorsements from Rep. Mike Pence (R) and Focus on the Family founder James Dobson as evidence that he’s got plenty of support on the right.
But RedState and other national conservative voices are clearly not on board the Coats train and, try as they might to suggest otherwise, the party establishment seems to be in the midst of another civil war in Indiana. At the buzzer, signs suggest this is a battle the establishment could win.
