Braun, Michael (1954- )

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    Senator Mike Braun Clinches G.O.P. Nomination for Indiana Governor

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    Senator Mike Braun of Indiana won the Republican nomination for governor of his solidly conservative state, The Associated Press said on Tuesday, positioning him as the strong favorite in this fall’s general election.Mr. Braun defeated several other candidates, including Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch, in the primary. Mr. Braun, who received the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump, has presented himself as a fiscal conservative and has pledged to take a tough stance on crime.Indiana’s current governor, Eric Holcomb, a Republican who has occasionally bucked the right wing of his party on public health and cultural issues during his tenure, was barred by term limits from seeking re-election.Mr. Braun, a businessman and first-term senator, will face Jennifer McCormick, the former state superintendent of public instruction, in November. Ms. McCormick, who was unopposed in the Democratic primary, was elected to her prior position as a Republican but fell out of favor with that party.Indiana was once politically competitive. Barack Obama carried the state in the 2008 presidential race, and Mr. Braun’s predecessor in the Senate, Joe Donnelly, was a Democrat. But Republicans have dominated elections in Indiana over the last decade. Mr. Trump carried the state by 16 percentage points in 2020.Republicans have used their control of state government to outlaw abortion in almost all cases, to ban gender transition treatments for transgender minors and to impose “intellectual diversity” requirements on public universities. State leaders have also cut income taxes and worked to attract business investments.Mr. Braun, a former state legislator, defeated two Republican congressmen in the 2018 Senate primary before beating Mr. Donnelly by six percentage points in the general election.In early 2021, Mr. Braun indicated that he would object to the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidential election victories in contested states. But after Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol that Jan. 6, Mr. Braun reversed course and voted to certify the results.Mr. Braun’s decision not to seek a second Senate term leaves an open seat that Republicans are widely expected to hold in the chamber. Representative Jim Banks, a former chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, is running unopposed for his party’s nomination and will face the winner of the Democratic primary in November. More

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      Representative Jim Banks Announces Senate Bid in Indiana

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      The seat will be open as Senator Mike Braun runs for governor instead.Representative Jim Banks, a staunch conservative with the backing of a deep-pocketed political action committee, opened his bid for an Indiana Senate seat on Tuesday with an ad highlighting his deployment to Afghanistan and issuing a broadside against “radical socialist Democrats.”Mike Braun, who currently holds the seat and is one of the state’s two Republican senators, will run for governor next year, creating an opening that could lead to a crowded primary fight in the reliably Republican state. Mr. Banks, who recently led the House’s Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus that is broader and less confrontational than the House’s Freedom Caucus, turned to the Senate after he lost his bid to be whip, the No. 3 Republican position in the G.O.P.’s new House majority.He enters the contest with the backing of the Club for Growth, a moneyed conservative political action committee that spent millions of dollars to get its preferred House and Senate candidates across the line in the November midterms. The group and its super PAC “are prepared to spend whatever it takes to help Banks secure the nomination and victory,” its president, David McIntosh, said Tuesday.The Club for Growth is already spending money against another possible candidate, the former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, whom it considers too conciliatory. Mr. Banks signaled that he too would focus on Mr. Daniels, who was also president of Purdue University and a White House budget director under President George W. Bush. Mr. Daniels a decade ago called for a truce on cultural issues, a stance Mr. Banks appeared to call out in an interview with Politico, saying that issues like abortion and gender “matter more than at any point in my lifetime.”“I’ll never be calling for a truce on social issues or cultural issues,” he told Politico.Mr. Banks also has the endorsement of Representative Larry Bucshon, another Indiana Republican, and Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas.But Indiana’s current governor, Eric Holcomb, who is facing a term limit, is considering a run for the Senate, as is Representative Victoria Spartz, whose Ukrainian birth has elevated her voice in Congress.In his announcement, Mr. Banks called himself “a small-town kid from a working-class home” with deep roots in Indiana and a record fighting overseas and in Congress for “conservative Hoosier values.” He threw in a nod to former President Donald J. Trump, calling him “the strongest president in my lifetime.”Mr. Braun, a businessman who had little political experience when he ran against Senator Joe Donnelly, a Democrat, in 2018, beat him by six percentage points. His victory came two years after Representative Todd Young breezed past Evan Bayh, a Democrat and former senator who had come out of retirement to try a comeback. Those defeats signaled just how difficult a Democratic comeback in the state would be.In November, Mr. Young won re-election with nearly 59 percent of the vote. More