Negative Campaign Ads and Boring Candidates Blamed for Low Turnout in Indiana Senate Primaries

So Jacob Stewart has a piece out today, which you guys can read at indystar.com, about how horrifically negative and probably most important misleading the ads are in the Senate races, and we’re talking about the state Senate primaries. And by the way I mentioned Adam Wren was going to be with us from Politico, he has a new piece out where he actually followed a couple of these candidates, both an incumbent and a challenger, around for several hours as part of their campaign and visited doors or events, we’ll talk about that when he comes on in a little bit, in addition to him being at that White House Correspondents Dinner the other night. And what Stewart is basically saying in this article is that the ridiculously negative and misleading ads prevent good people from running, because good people take a look at it and go, not for me.

Negative Campaign Ads in Indiana Primaries May Be Driving Away Qualified Candidates

And look I think there’s a difference between dirty campaigning and completely excoriating someone’s record. I think your record, if you’re going to run for, look I’ve said this for a long time, politics is blood sport, and if you’re going to run for public office your personal record as it relates to your finances, how you’ve handled your own money, how you’ve handled a business, and your voting record as a candidate, I think those are fair game. I think it’s no holds barred, it all applies. If you want to manage my money, I get a right to know how you’ve managed your own money, I get a right to judge how you’ve managed your own money, and I get the right to say whatever I want about your voting record. I’m not for being nice in elections, I’m not, but I also think that who people are as humans, their personal life, what they do personally, I’m very much off guard, like family member, unless the family member is doing something nefarious, unless your kid is doing something like Hunter Biden is fair game, okay, right, like Hillary Clinton when Bill Clinton was president, fair game, they’re political people. So I’m not coming at this as someone who’s like a wimp about politics, I think all bets are off if you’ve mismanaged your own money, if you’ve mismanaged a business. Look I ran a business during the financial collapse, I bought a radio station, you want to talk about timing, bought a radio station right before the whole economy collapsed in 2008. You know what we did every day, we paid our bills, we suffered for a couple of years to the point where we were living in the radio station because we felt an obligation to pay our vendors. And I get that there are sometimes things that happen beyond your control, but for the most part if you really want to pay somebody, unless you just completely lost a job, you figure out a way to do it a lot of the time. I’ve been through it, I know. And if you didn’t, then I get a right to know about that, I’m sorry. Part of running for public office, if you’re going to manage my money is I get to know about your bankruptcies, I get to know about your legal proceedings, I get to know those things. It doesn’t make you a bad person. But all of that being said, the ads have gotten pretty ridiculous and over the top, and what it is doing in these primaries, and we’re going to talk with Niki Kelly tomorrow, we’re going to talk about the lack of overall enthusiasm. There is enthusiasm on Twitter for these elections, the Turning Point USA people, whatever, they’re fired up about it, the average person not so much.

Low Voter Turnout Reflects Lack of Engagement in State Senate Races

Abdul has run some numbers on early voting, and I think the leading county is my home county of Hendricks County, I don’t know what the population number is now, it’s got to be 150 to 175,000 people, it’s like 4000 people have voted, and we’re less than a week from the election now. That’s the number one county. There is no enthusiasm. I was talking to my dad about this yesterday about the lack of enthusiasm, and I said the problem is these people are boring. If you’re running for office, I’m sorry, you’re boring. There’s nobody running right now that I look at and go that person is super interesting.

Why Many Indiana Candidates Fail to Inspire or Connect With Voters

You know the most interesting person running is Piper, John Piper, the guy running for Congress who runs ads here, full disclosure. I’m not saying that he’s great, I’m just saying it’s interesting. We’re supposed to talk to Piper on Friday, and I have no idea what the guy’s going to say. I’m totally intrigued about what he’s going to say. I’ve heard the ads, I have no idea about any of it, I’m going to ask him about some of it and just see what he has to say. I’m not saying he’s right, I’m not saying he’s spot on, I’m simply saying he’s interesting. Craig Haggard, boring. Jim Baird, even more boring. We’ll talk about Baird and Haggard here in a little bit. But in any of these races, like Spencer Deery against Paula Copenhaver in Lafayette, that is two people that are about as exciting as dried paint running against each other. And I don’t care that Paula Copenhaver went to the White House, or that she’s not going to talk about leaving Todd Rokita’s office and why she did that. By the way, if someone won’t tell you why they left a government office, hey Paula why don’t you tell people why you left Rokita’s office? We’re going to talk about honesty and integrity, because Copenhaver is mad right now that people are running an ad about a legal entanglement that she had related to a business she owned years ago with her ex-husband. You’re going to stand on a moral high horse and complain about people not telling the truth, or not coming clean, or not telling the whole story. Why don’t you tell everybody why you left Rokita’s office? Because you sure are touting that Rokita endorsement. So why don’t you tell everybody how you ended up working for Micah? Deery? He’s way too nice, I would have run ads all about that.

How Campaign Strategy and Messaging Impact Voter Interest and Participation

But the point is in almost all of these races the candidates are boring, woefully boring, and putting a Trump endorsement behind you, or Turning Point USA, or Scott Presler. Or on the establishment side millions of dollars of raised money. It doesn’t make you interesting. And so people aren’t engaged, they don’t care. You have to make people care. When you run, just free advice here, you have to make people care about you one of two ways, probably a mixture of both. First of all that the current guy or girl in office is doing such a bad job you’ve got to fire them, and you’ve got to lay out how personally that affects people, and redistricting does not personally affect people, that’s why it’s a bad argument. Second, you’ve got to make people invest in you. I will deliver for you, I will get in there and fight for you. It’s a sales pitch. And none of these people on either side make a very good sales pitch for themselves, the personal sales pitch. But Stewart is right. Good people don’t run for public office because they don’t want to deal with this. They don’t want misleading ads, they don’t want people digging into their past, because let’s face it a lot of people make mistakes in their life. I think we all have. If you took the worst moment of any person’s life and put it on display, we’d all say that wasn’t good, that wasn’t great. All of us, every single person. Good people are like yeah I don’t mind scrutiny, but I don’t want my life torn apart.