How to Win Indiana

Bobby Kennedy was flummoxed. It was April 1968, and voters in Indiana would be the first he’d have to woo after announcing his presidential candidacy weeks earlier. In the state’s May Democratic primary, he faced Indiana Gov. Roger Branigan and Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota. At first, Kennedy couldn’t divine the Hoosier ethos. He “had a difficult time getting his message through to Indiana voters,” writes Indiana historian Ray E. Boomhower in his book Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary. Kennedy enlisted the help of John Bartlow Martin, an Indianapolis freelance reporter and true-crime writer who moonlighted as a Democratic speechwriter. In a memo, Martin needed only two sentences to distill Indiana’s conservative but nuanced politics. Indiana is a state “suspicious of foreign entanglements, conservative in fiscal matters, and with a strong overlay of Southern segregationist sentiment,” Martin wrote. “Hoosiers are phlegmatic, skeptical, hard to move, with a ‘show me’ attitude.”

That advice helped Kennedy, an underdog, deliver a surprise victory. Fifty years later, it’s still helpful in decoding the politics of a state that from 30,000 feet seems as red as the barns that dot its corn-lined countryside. But the state that President Donald Trump won by 19 points in 2016—one he dubbed “Importantville” during the 2016 Republican presidential primary—also flirts with Democrats, voting for Barack Obama in 2008.

Indiana calls itself the “Crossroads of America,” on account of being situated at the intersection of several major highways and byways—U.S. Highways 40 and 41, and Interstates 65 and 70. But Indiana has always had something of an inferiority complex, and its nickname is the most proud way of confessing that you can’t get anywhere truly important without passing through—or over—it. As McCarthy observed after campaigning here in 1968, Hoosiers have “a rather general defensiveness in Indiana against outsiders.” He wrote in his book The Year of the People: “In northern Indiana … people seemed worried about the prospect of being taken over by Chicago. In the south, they were threatened by Kentucky, in the west, by Illinois, in the east, Ohio. It was as though in Indiana they have to think ‘Indiana’ for fear that if they do not it will be absorbed by the outside world,”

The state has 11 different media markets that campaigns must be mindful of, making it logistically difficult to formulate an ad strategy. Outside of Indianapolis, many Hoosiers get their news from out of state. “Indiana has so many media markets, and you’re an absolute fool if you don’t segment your money and message,” says Peter Hanscom, the campaign manager for incumbent Sen. Joe Donnelly, a Democrat. “Each has an identity that’s not just Indiana. If you live in Richmond, you’re getting Dayton news.”

We really are an agrarian and industrial crossroads, one that could affect the Senate race between Donnelly and Republican Mike Braun. Indiana is a farm-belt state—the nation’s fourth-highest soybean producer and fifth-highest corn grower—and a rust-belt state. Many would be surprised to learn that Indiana, not Pittsburgh, houses the nation’s largest steel mill. Indiana leads the U.S. in the growth of manufacturing jobs. It’s the only state to have Honda, Subaru and Toyota assembly plants, according to the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, a public-private partnership that tries to lure jobs to the state. Oh, and it’s home to a little bit of coal country, too. In southwestern Indiana, a 15-county stretch can feel like West Virginia. In Booneville earlier this summer, Donnelly accepted the endorsement of the United Mine Workers of America and launched a “Miners for Joe” constituency group.