The 2024 GOP primary for Indiana’s U.S. Senate race is already heating up. The two front-runners — Congressman Jim Banks, who has already announced his candidacy, and former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, who is widely expected to do so soon — have thus far maintained largely respectful public postures toward one another, but shadowboxing among surrogates has commenced.
I spoke to Banks before he officially launched his bid earlier this week. “There are a number of differences between us, but I respect him — and I called him this week to let him know I was running and to tell him I respect him,” he said of Daniels. But, yesterday, a Politico report on the race detailed how “the latest front in the Republican civil war” was “set to erupt in the otherwise quiet state of Indiana.” Donald Trump Jr., a Banks ally, called Daniels a “weak RINO” in a tweet last week, and “in private conversations, the elder Trump has also made derisive remarks about the 5-foot-7 Daniels’ height,” Politico reported.
In response, Mark Lubbers — whom Politico describes as “Daniels’ closest advisor and confidante” — unleashed a series of negative statements about the “Trump crime family,” and described the former president as “traitorous.” Banks, Lubbers told Politico, “has become the proxy for beating everything that’s gone wrong since the grifters took over our party. This is Gettysburg. . . . Poor Banks has been given the role of George Pickett.”
On the Lubbers broadside, a close Banks ally tells me that there are “deeper differences” between the two candidates “than ‘Trump.’” Banks “leans populist,” while “Daniels sits on corporate boards, including Cerner during VA’s botched EHR rollout that led to multiple veteran deaths.” (Cerner, a software company whose board Daniels was appointed to in 2013, developed an “electronic health record (EHR) system” that “failed to deliver more than 11,000 orders for specialty care, lab work and other services” to VA facilities, causing “nearly 150 cases of patient harm,” Fierce Healthcare reported last year).
In addition, the Banks ally tells me, “Banks is pro-life and Daniels is pro-truce.” Daniels had called for a “truce” on social issues in 2010. When asked if, as president, he would reinstate the Reagan-era “Mexico City Policy,” which prohibits government funding of abortions abroad, Daniels told the Weekly Standard: “I don’t know.”
Thus far, Daniels and Banks have yet to directly criticize each other on the public record. But as Politico notes, “party officials and insiders are girding for an increasingly nasty primary battle for [the] open Senate seat.”