Just before the filing deadline in 2010, Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh shockingly declared he’d retire, turning a seat that Democrats were favored to hold into one that the GOP was easily able to pick up. Now, just as unexpectedly, Bayh will reportedly announce that he's going to wage a comeback for the very seat he abandoned six years ago. We have lots to discuss.
First, the mechanics. Team Blue had been fielding ex-Rep. Baron Hill, but he'd waged a desultory campaign and raised less than $1 million as of mid-April, a pitiful sum for a statewide race. Hill dropped out Monday morning, clearing the way for Democrats to replace his name on the ballot with Bayh's. (It's a mirror-image of went down in 2010, when the party's central committee swapped out Bayh for Rep. Brad Ellsworth.)
Republicans, meanwhile, are defending an open seat, since the man who succeeded Bayh, Sen. Dan Coats, decided to quit after just one term. (Coats had previously served in the Senate from 1989 to 1999, appointed to the vacancy left behind by none other than Dan Quayle.) In Coats' stead, Republicans had chosen Rep. Todd Young, an establishment-oriented type who handily defeated a tea partying fellow congressman in the GOP primary earlier this year.
But Young's campaign has faced some troubles (only a nakedly partisan ruling by election officials saved him from getting knocked off the ballot for filing too few signatures), and he certainly didn't imagine he'd suddenly land a top-flight opponent in the general election. Indeed, he had just over $1 million in the bank at the end of June, which doesn't even put him in the top 20 among Senate candidates in competitive races this year.
Bayh, by contrast, still has an extraordinary $9.3 million left in his campaign account, one reason Democrats wanted him back in. (It's also a reason they gnashed their teeth so furiously six years ago, since Bayh's last-minute departure left them in the lurch financially—and he wasn't particularly generous with his cash.) But more important than money is Bayh's name and reputation. Bayh, who hails from one of Indiana’s most prominent political families, won two terms as governor starting in 1988 (when he was just 33 years old), then went on to win election to the Senate in dominant fashion in 1998—reclaiming the seat his father, progressive icon Birch Bayh, had lost to Quayle in 1980.
But while Evan and Birch may have represented the same seat, they did not share the same politics. The younger Bayh established himself on the Democrats' right flank in the Senate, not just voting for the Iraq war but, as Vox reminds us, going so far as to co-sponsor the resolution authorizing it. He was also one of just three Democrats to vote for Bush's 2003 capital gains tax cuts.
Indiana is, though, a conservative state, so the voting record Bayh amassed wasn't too surprising, especially since Quayle defeated his father in part by attacking the elder Bayh as an out-of-touch liberal. But Bayh was never content merely to vote against his party—he always felt compelled to speak against it, too, often in the douchiest of terms. Bayh didn't just behave like a proverbial "Fox News Democrat," he actually became one, signing on with Rupert Murdoch's network not long after leaving the Senate.
And Bayh's other retirement moves have only served to make him look like a very typical politician. Despite calling for serious reforms to the filibuster and campaign finance laws in a surprisingly aggressive op-ed on his way out the door, Bayh went on to take jobs with both a massive lobbying firm and a private equity shop, which Ezra Klein dubbed "sad" and "hypocritical." His family name might still be golden back home, but now he's given Republicans new ways to tarnish it. (And as Nathan Gonzales notes, it seems that Bayh hasn't spent much time at home lo these past many years, an attack that was particularly pungent when wielded against now-former GOP Sen. Dick Lugar in 2012.)
Despite his history of apostasies, Bayh was a near-finalist when Barack Obama was choosing a running-mate in 2008, and he still has plenty of friends in the establishment: Look no further than the fact that Democrats kept on trying to persuade him to get into the race even though there are just four months left in the election cycle. And there's no doubt that he's a huge upgrade over Hill, who was only going to win by the grace of some sort of fluky miracle.
Progressives certainly won't love Bayh if he makes it back to the Senate any more than they did during his first go-round, but he does give Democrats a real chance to win. Bayh also will likely force Team Red to spend some money in a contest that they thought they could take for granted. If all Bayh does is divert some conservative money from other Senate battlegrounds, Democratic candidates elsewhere will be grateful.
However, Bayh hasn't actually run for any office since 2004, which is a very long layoff. To put that into perspective, neither YouTube, Twitter, nor the iPhone had been invented when Bayh's name last appeared on a ballot. And while Indiana narrowly backed Obama in 2008, neither Hillary Clinton nor her allies have shown any interest in targeting its 11 electoral votes this time. Bayh easily beat a weak opponent in 2004 while George W. Bush was decisively carrying the state, so he’s proven he can appeal to ticket-splitters.
But even in spite of his missteps, Young looks like the type of generic Republican who usually wins in Indiana, and Bayh will somehow need to appeal to plenty of Donald Trump voters to put him over the top. In view of all these considerations, we're shifting our rating on this race from Likely Republican to Lean Republican. Bayh changes the game, but just how much isn't yet clear, and there's a lot we'll want to see before we consider moving this race any further.
