Greg Ballard's Entry Could Spell Doom for Diego Morales

Abdul over at Indy Politics was the first person to report this. And it is a poll done by the folks at Independent Indiana. Now, what's interesting, we'll talk about Independent Indiana for a second, but what's interesting is this poll was done back in November. It's only being released in March. And we'll try to make some sense of that here in just a moment. This poll, done by a group called Independent Indiana, those of you who are long time listeners to me know we've had them on our program before. They are a group dedicated to getting independent candidates, so not Republican or Democrat or even Libertarian for that matter, elected to public office in the state of Indiana. And they've done all sorts of polling last year. They had a couple polls that got statewide attention, some national attention on redistricting. And this, I believe, was part of the poll that they did on redistricting back in the fall because we had them on the radio show talking about this. However, for whatever reason, they didn't release this data publicly until, well, really yesterday when Abdul put it out. So here's what the poll said. And by the way, it was a survey of 400 likely Indiana general election voters, plus 4.9%. So 5% margin of error. That's a little high. But what they did was they took the two front runners for the Indiana Secretary of State nominations on the Democrat and Republican side. Diego Morales the Republican, Beau Bayh the Democrat, and they paired them with an undeclared candidate. That undeclared independent candidate, former Indianapolis mayor Greg Ballard. Now many of you know Greg Ballard was a two-term mayor in Indianapolis. He was a Republican, but he was a very moderate middle-of-the-road Republican, worked on, campaigned on, was elected on, kind of getting property taxes under control, addressing public safety, things of that nature. But he also had some more liberal social views and did some things that were very unpopular with the conservative base. So I'm not sure why Independent Indiana picked Greg Ballard. He hasn't said he's running for Secretary of State privately, unless it's very privately. He hasn't really been making overtures, at least that I've heard of, but maybe they picked him because he's seen as a pretty moderate middle-of-the-road kind of guy. For whatever reason, Independent Indiana chose to pair Greg Ballard, former mayor of Indianapolis, with Diego Morales and Beau Bayh. Now look, there is no guarantee that Diego Morales and Beau Bayh are even going to be the nominees of their respective party. Diego Morales has a very serious competition in David Shelton, the Knox County Clerk, and Beau Bayh has competition as well on the Democrat side. I think most people though believe that those two will escape their conventions and be their party's nominees, but no guarantee on that whatsoever. So when Beau Bayh, Diego and Diego Morales are paired with Greg Ballard, according to this poll from Independent Indiana, Beau Bayh is in the lead. Now it came behind, this was in November, right? This poll was done in November. Beau Bayh leads with 31.5% of the vote, followed by Diego Morales with 28.5% of the vote, and Greg Ballard, former mayor of Indianapolis, comes in third with 23.8% of the vote, 16% of voters are undecided. So really, it's sort of a pick-em-race according to this poll if Greg Ballard gets involved running for Secretary of State. Now let's talk about, because, and look, this is a, this is even different than what we normally talk about with polling. We always say very, very upfront, polling is but a snapshot of a moment in time. You have to take a number of polls, put them together to get a picture of where the electorate actually is, especially when we're talking about a poll that was done at the time, a year in advance of the election, and it includes the guy who hasn't said that he's running. But let's try to make some sense of why the numbers are what they are, because if you're Diego Morales, that is not good for you. So Beau Bayh comes in at 31.5%, and that's probably pretty accurate. The Democrat floor in Indiana, for lack of a better term, is usually with no strong independent candidate, but just a Democrat versus a Republican, usually somewhere between 35 and 40%. So if Beau Bayh is coming in at 31.5% with a big portion of people undecided at 16, that's probably about right. The guy who is really hurt in this is Diego Morales. Now, Independent Indiana, when we had them on in the fall, had polled on Diego Morales where most people didn't know who he was, and those who did know he was, he was really underwater in terms of favorability, which is bad news for Diego Morales, because he has in many ways used his campaign office as a 24-7 campaign machine. He's used his actual Secretary of State's office as a 24-7 campaign machine. So the idea that very few people know who you are, and according to the Independent Indiana poll, those who do don't have a favorable opinion of you, not good. This poll backs up what a lot of people have said that they think is going on inside the Republican party as it relates to the Secretary of State's race, that Republicans don't like Diego Morales. There's a lot of them who do not like Diego Morales, and if given the opportunity, would gladly vote for someone else. Now, many people are not going to vote for a Democrat. They know what Diego is. They know all the stories, the 10-day trip to India, where he won't tell people who paid for it, the no-bid contracts to people who happen to give to his campaign, the hiring of family members, the $90,000 car, the list goes on and on, right? People know about this. They don't like Diego Morales. They'd prefer to vote for somebody else, which is why I think David Shelton is seen as a serious threat to Diego Morales at the Republican convention. However, if push came to shove, they're still voting for the Republican. They're not going to vote for Beau Bayh, red above all else. Now, if you give them a viable alternative, somebody passable, somebody palatable, they're open to that, and I think that's what this this poll shows, where when the base of a generic Republican in Indiana, if it's generic Republican against generic Democrat, usually above 50%. You're looking at the Democrat, generic Democrat, 35 to 40, the generic Republican, somewhere probably between 50 and 53. The rest would either go to libertarians, undecideds, maybe not vote, pick them at the finish line type of thing. And so what you're seeing is a dramatic underperformance from Diego Morales if a viable Republican in this case, running as an independent, is an option. It shows how disliked Diego Morales is in the Republican Party. Look at this. Diego Morales, 28.5%, Greg Ballard, 23.8%. If you put them together, what do you get? 52%, which is right where that generic Republican would be. Now, poll shows Ballard leading among voters ages 18 to 34, pulling roughly 32% of the vote compared to 28 for Morales and Beau Bayh. Geographically, and this shouldn't surprise anyone, Ballard is strongest in central Indiana. That's where people know him. And roughly, and this was probably the most interesting part of the entire survey, was that roughly nine in 10 respondents said they would react positively or neutrally to a candidate running as an independent. That means, and we've talked about this for years, if you give the people somebody good, they're open to it. But good means a couple things. What does a good independent candidate actually look like in Indiana? Every state's different. A good independent candidate in Indiana has to do the following things: One, above all else, got to be able to raise money. If you can't get on the airwaves, if you can't put infrastructure in place, you might as well just pack it in and not even do it. I mean, it's going to cost any independent candidate probably between a quarter of a million and a half a million dollars just to get on the ballot because of the signature requirements, which we'll talk about here in a second. We'll talk about some of the obstacles that Greg Ballard might have to actually run for public office as an independent. Which, by the way, I've not heard Greg Ballard once say I'm considering running as an independent candidate for Secretary of State publicly. Maybe he's telling people that privately. I haven't heard it. All right. So nine in 10 people say that they have a favorable or at least neutral, so not negative, impression of somebody running as an independent, but you got to raise money. And in the state of Indiana to run a viable statewide race, you'd have to raise at least $10 million. Now look, Secretary of State's office is an office with a lot of importance. And there's a lot of people who need a lot out of the Secretary of State's office. It oversees elections. It oversees businesses. Many others, auto dealers. I mean, there's some big wigs that are invested in what goes on in the Secretary of State's office. The idea that those big donors or potential big donors would risk pissing off Diego Morales if he wins and giving to Greg Ballard. I don't know. I think that's going to be a hard ask to raise that $10 million. So the first thing is you got to be able to raise money. Now Greg Ballard, if anybody could do it, probably him. A lot of connections. Very well liked in the donor class. Very well liked in the business community in central Indiana. Very well liked amongst the establishment who hate Diego Morales. But you got to be able to raise money. Number two, you got to give people a compelling reason to vote against the other two guys. You have to give people a compelling reason to vote against the other two guys, which means you got to have one heck of a personality. If you think about truly independent candidates who have won statewide races. I mean, there's guys like Angus King and Maine. He's a Democrat. He runs as an independent. He's a Democrat. Really kind of the truly independent figures that come to mind are guys like Jesse Ventura in Minnesota. What did he do? He spent almost no money. He was just famous enough, well known enough, had a big enough personality that people went to him. He would literally just say, "Hey, we're taking our campaign bus and we're going to be at this park and we'll see you guys in five hours." And people would go because he was a celebrity. These people knew him because he was going to say something that was hilarious or inflammatory about the other candidates. He drew millions and millions of earned media at the time. This is 1998. Millions and millions of dollars in earned media, free media. You have to be able to maximize the ability to use the media as an independent candidate to get you the publicity that you can't buy. Because look, Diego, his donors, they're not letting him go down without a fight. And the Bayhs, they've been planning this for a long time, right? They see Beau Bayh, the Democrats see Beau Bayhj as the chance, the golden opportunity to give some validity back to the Democrat party in this state. They will spend whatever they have to to get him in there. And the same thing goes with the Republicans with Diego, the Diego people, I should say. So if you're Greg Ballard, you're going to have to make a super compelling case on why both of these people are unelectable. You're going to have to raise the money and then you're going to have to go out and make the case. Because a lot of people would say, you see this a lot of times with polling, right? Well, I don't like either of these two. People get asked in the question on the phone, I don't like either of these two people. And yeah, okay, I'd consider voting for the independent. And then they get in the booth or they get ready to go vote. And they're like, yeah, but I can't let that other guy get in there. That is the number one reason of the two-party stranglehold in this country is people fearing the other guy, not voting for someone, but fearing the other guy. And so as an independent candidate, you have to embed in the minds of the voters just how bad the other two guys are. And I don't know, Greg Ballard, look, he is a heck of a nice guy. Interviewed him multiple times over the years. Very, very good guy, very respected individual. I'm not sure he's got the personality to be able to compel people to one vote for him and two to vote against the other two candidates. The third thing, and this I think would be one of the biggest challenges for Greg Ballard, how do you get people in Fort Wayne to vote for you? How do you get people in the region to vote for you? How do you get people in Jeffersonville to vote for you? Greg Ballard would probably do very well in central Indiana. I don't doubt for a minute that in central Indiana, he may beat one of the two major candidates. He may beat one of the two major candidates, but how do you, without that super dynamic personality, without the ability to captivate the media to give you that earned media you need and without infinite money, how do you convince people to vote for you? You got to go hard at the negatives on Diego Morales. You got to go hard at the negatives on the Democrat party as a collective. Beau Bayh would be very hard to go at negatively as an individual because he doesn't have much of a track record in terms of the political scene. But the Democrat party, the Democrats in Indiana, oh sure, absolutely. You can have fun with them all day, but does Greg Ballard have the stomach to do that? I don't know. I don't think so. So finally, I want to talk about why now. This poll according to independent Indiana's release was done in November. Why now? That's really a question and anytime you see something come out related to politics, you need to ask why and why is it coming out in the moment it is, especially something that was delayed. You're looking at what, November, December, January, you're talking a four month delay from a media strategy. Great job on their part. Think about how they maximized the independent Indiana people. Nathan Gotsch runs independent Indiana. He's a great guy. Think about how they maximized the publicity out of that poll. So they got all that publicity during redistricting, then apparently sat on this little nugget for months. And now what are we doing? How are we leading off our show? We're talking about Independent Indiana. We're talking about independent Indiana again, which if they'd have thrown it all out in November, we'd have been part of the soup. Oh, look at this poll. It's part of the redistricting. That's a brilliant marketing plan by the Independent Indiana people. And it actually shows how serious they are as an organization that they're thinking these things through. They were able to take the dollars they used to do this poll. They were able to get all the publicity they wanted and needed in the moment of redistricting. And then four months later, we're still talking about them. However, what you have to take that with a grain of salt and go, look, four months is a lifetime in politics. That's forever. So it does dilute some of the results perhaps or the shock value of the poll or whatever, because heck Greg Ballard may have got wind of this and told people, oh, don't even think about that. I'm not running. I don't know why they chose me. Who knows? Or maybe it now inspires him or encourages him to actually run. But we do have to put the asterisk in that this poll was four months ago. Now, most people aren't going to see that. They aren't going to look at it. They're going to think about it. They're going to see the headline and they're going to go with it, which is what most of what's going on with social media. But it will be fascinating. Here's what we know. We know Diego Morales is a very flawed candidate. If the Democrats were ever going to win a statewide office in Indiana, it would be against Diego Morales. Beau Bayh, probably the best the Democrats have to offer at this point. Inexperienced as a candidate, no doubt, but name ID, the look, and most importantly, the money. He checks all of those boxes. And if the Democrats can paint Diego Morales as so bad in the coming months, if indeed he is the nominee, then I think they've got a better than punchers chance, especially if there's a viable third party candidate who will pull votes from the Republican. That is a real possibility.