Tamyra d’Ippolito, a little-known restaurateur from Bloomington, raced this morning to meet a noon filing deadline for the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Indiana. (Daniel Foster has more over at On The News.) To get on the ballot — and block a “ballot vacancy” that would enable state Democrats to handpick the nominee — d’Ippolito needs 500 signatures from each of the state’s nine congressional districts. National Review Online spoke with d’Ippolito last night, and she said her biggest hurdle was in Indiana’s 8th district. “We still have about 500 to go there,” she said.
It looks like she wasn’t able to reach her goal. An election official from Vigo County tells NRO that as of 1:50 p.m. only 39 signatures for d’Ippolito have been recorded on the state’s internal election system for all of IN-8. By 2:00 p.m., an election official in nearby Vanderburgh County told NRO that a few more had trickled in, bringing d’Ippolito’s signature total to 44 in the entirety of IN-8. Of course, more signatures will be logged throughout the day, but these numbers are not a good sign for the political neophyte.
If she doesn’t get on the ballot, d’Ippolito predicts that Rep. Baron Hill (D., Ind.) will be the party’s pick. “He had a private fundraiser with Rahm Emanuel last month and I think this entire thing was very much planned,” she said.