Indiana Senate Race Tied as Bayh Slips Even Further

When Democrat Evan Bayh jumped into the Indiana Senate race last July, it was widely believed that the race would be a slam-dunk for his party. Bayh had served three terms as a U.S. senator in Indiana before stepping down in 2011, and, prior to that, was the state’s governor for eight years. He had a cash advantage of $9 million dollars over his Republican opponent, Todd Young, and a last name that made him Indiana political royalty. Internal Democratic polls had him up by over 20 points.

What a difference a year makes. Monday’s Monmouth University poll shows that Young has completely erased Bayh’s lead, with the two candidates now tied at 45 percent among likely voters. The same poll records Bayh’s unfavorable numbers creeping up considerably, from just 19 percent in August to 27 percent in mid October to 32 percent today.

That’s no accident: Bayh has been damaged by a slew of revelations about his post-Senate career in Washington, which have allowed the Young campaign to paint him as a political insider in this year of outsider candidates. Just last night, the Huffington Post reported that Bayh’s private schedules from his time in office indicate possible congressional-ethics violations related to his hunting for a Wall Street job while still serving in the Senate:

The job titles of four of the people Bayh met with were at the time “chief talent officer”; “global head of human resources”; “senior vice president, talent acquisition leader for campus recruiting, executive recruiting and commercial banking”; and “global head of talent acquisition.” Those are not the sort of executives a senator meets with to talk about legislation.

In other words, under the guise of Senate business, Bayh appears to have met with headhunters in an effort to score himself a private-sector job. He even met with executives from his future employer, the private-equity firm Apollo Global Management, which he joined shortly after he left office in January of 2011. He had also broken with most Democrats to oppose a proposed tax increase that would’ve hurt financial companies such as Apollo.

When the Indianapolis Star asked Bayh’s campaign about the nature of several taxpayer-funded trips that he had taken to New York City in late 2010, the campaign said Bayh hadn’t met with anyone from Apollo during those trips. This was false. In fact, he stayed overnight three times at an Apollo executive’s residence and met with the company’s CEO twice. The schedules also show that Bayh held numerous private meetings with fundraisers, lobbyists, and donors as early as 2009, sometimes with his own campaign fundraiser present.

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Josh Holmes, president of the policy-management firm Cavalry, tells National Review that these latest revelations are rightly damaging to Bayh’s candidacy. “When a senator uses public office as a headhunting firm to line up a multi-million dollar payday while their constituents are suffering amidst a recession, bad things tend to happen,” Holmes says. “Nobody but Evan Bayh is responsible for the fact that it’s an issue in his Senate race.”

Bayh’s potential misuse of his office isn’t the only scandal to have dogged his campaign.

Bayh’s potential misuse of his office isn’t the only scandal to have dogged his campaign. In August, news broke that Bayh had not been living in Indiana as he had repeatedly claimed. When an interviewer asked the candidate if he would move back to the state after beginning to run for Senate again, Bayh responded, “I’ve never left.” But in reality, he had listed his two, multi-million-dollar homes in Washington, D.C., as his primary residences rather than his $53,000 Indianapolis condominium. After leaving the Senate, he officially changed his address to reflect D.C. residence. And when he returned to Indiana last summer for a Democratic event, he stayed at a hotel a mere twelve miles away from his condo. The portrayal of Bayh as a Washington insider distant from the people of Indiana has been aided by the former senator’s support for President Obama’s policies, which are very unpopular in the reliably red state.

When Bayh first entered the Senate race, he enjoyed a surge of positive press due to the fact that he had jumped in at the last minute to replace Democratic candidate Baron Hill. He had been encouraged to run by Senate minority leader Harry Reid and minority whip Chuck Schumer, who hoped that he would obtain a substantial lead and force Republicans to pull their resources out of the Indiana race entirely.

#related#Since then, however, Bayh’s public image has taken endless fire, to the point where the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has had to spend millions in the state to salvage his candidacy. “Somebody on their campaign, maybe Bayh himself, made an incredible miscalculation on how this race was going to play out,” says Greg Blair, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “Other than the week that he announced his candidacy, you really can’t look back at this campaign and identify a single week that Bayh won.”

Though the race will likely be tight down to the wire, the momentum seems to be on Young’s side, and if negative revelations about Bayh continue to surface, the last week of the Indiana campaign might not bring the Democrats much relief.

— Alexandra DeSanctis is a William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism at the National Review Institute.

Editor’s Note: This article has been amended since its initial posting.