By Nate Hochman
Tuesday,
January 17, 2023
This morning,
Congressman Jim Banks (R., Ind.) officially announced his 2024 candidacy for
the U.S. Senate election in Indiana. The news, which was first reported by
the Indiana Capital Chronicle, makes Banks the first candidate
to throw his hat in the ring for what will be the Hoosier State’s first Senate
race without an incumbent candidate since 1958. (The seat’s current occupant,
Senator Mike Braun, announced last month that he would be
retiring to run for Indiana governor.)
The
upcoming Republican primary has already begun to attract interest from national
media as a flash point in the ongoing debate about the future of the party.
Banks, a rising star in the populist–nationalist wing of the House GOP, is
widely expected to face off against former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, a
heavy hitter in the Republican old guard whose interest in the Senate seat has
been the subject of significant
speculation —
though he has not yet announced a bid. Last month, an early survey of the field from a Daniels
pollster showed the former governor atop the field with support from about a
third of the GOP primary electorate, an early advantage likely owing in part to
Daniels’s relatively strong name recognition in the state.
I sat
down with Banks last week to discuss his then-unannounced Senate bid. The
congressman has represented Indiana’s third congressional district since 2017;
before that, he served for six years in the Indiana senate, punctuated by a
leave of absence to deploy to Afghanistan in 2014 and 2015. (A unique Indiana
law allowed Banks’s wife to serve in the state senate in his place.) As
chairman of the Republican Study Committee, Banks has developed a pedigree as
an intellectual leader among populist-minded conservatives. His widely
discussed March 2021 memo, “Cementing GOP
as the Working-Class Party,” was a comprehensive outline of the Senate hopeful’s political
philosophy: Urging Republicans “to embrace our new coalition” as “the Party of
the Working Class,” Banks called for a “Main Street” agenda organized around
immigration restriction, China hawkishness, anti-wokeness, and a more
aggressive posture toward big business and Big Tech. “President Trump’s gift
didn’t come with a receipt,” Banks argued in the memo. “Members that want to
swap out working-class voters because they resent President Trump’s impact on
the GOP are wrong.”
That
style of conservatism, Banks says, has its roots in his upbringing in Indiana.
“Indiana is as red as it has ever been in my lifetime,” he told me. “Trump grew
the Republican Party in Indiana with working-class blue-collar voters who were
traditionally Democrats. . . . My dad is a great example: Union factory worker,
made axles all of his life in a factory in Fort Wayne. I remember when I was a
kid, he loved Ross Perot — he had a Perot bumper sticker. He didn’t get excited
about another candidate for office until Trump came down the escalator. He was
for him from the beginning. I thought he was crazy.”
What was
the appeal for his father? “Trump excited him because Trump was talking about
holding China accountable” — something that “no other Republican was talking
about,” Banks said. “When I was a kid, my dad used NAFTA as a four-letter
word.” Trump’s criticisms of the trade deal appealed to voters such as his dad,
he said: “The question is if we can keep them there. Will the Republican Party
go back to the old-school Republican Party that was beholden to corporate
interests that send our jobs overseas, or will we be the party that reflects
blue-collar, working-class Hoosiers and Americans?”
That’s a
debate Banks has been at the forefront of during his time in Congress. The
congressman, who narrowly lost a recent bid for House GOP whip,
maintains a more muted, institutionalist streak than many of his bomb-throwing
counterparts, visible most recently in his decision to back Kevin McCarthy’s
run for House speaker. His record on immigration, China, Big Tech, and a
variety of culture-war issues has earned the admiration of many
national-conservative pundits. It has also invited the support of high-profile
Republicans in that mold: This morning, Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) endorsed
Banks’s Senate run, calling him “an indispensable partner in the House” who
“will be an even stronger partner in the Senate.”
Banks’s
public profile will make the 2024 GOP primary in Indiana’s U.S. Senate race a
study in contrasts. If Daniels does enter the race, the 73-year-old former
governor — who recently retired from a nine-year run as president of Purdue
University — would likely be Banks’s most formidable rival, and Banks his. In
many ways, Daniels embodies the traditional GOP that Banks counsels a departure
from — a recent Politico report on the looming “Republican
free-for-all” in the 2024 Indiana Senate race described the former governor as
“a classic Reagan conservative with mainstream moderate impulses known for
advocating a truce on the culture wars and being critical of Trumpism.” (And a
recent Club for Growth ad preemptively slammed Daniels as “an old-guard
Republican clinging to the old ways of the bad old days.”) Banks, on the other
hand, has pushed for the GOP to engage more aggressively on culture-war issues:
“This is a war that’s being waged for the future of this country,” he told me.
Wokeness “is a cancer that will kill America if we don’t fight back against it.
. . . And for too long, we’ve had a generation of establishment Republican
leaders in this country who turned a blind eye to the culture fight. I’m not
one of them. I’m never going to be one of them.”
Notably,
there might be less daylight on fiscal issues between the two primary
front-runners. Daniels’s famous
comments calling
for a “truce” on social issues were made in the context of his staunch fiscal
conservatism: In 2010, Daniels told John
McCormack that
“maybe these [culture-war issues] could be set aside for a while” so that the
nation could concentrate on the “genuine national emergency” surrounding the
budget. But Banks, too, has routinely enjoyed top rankings from
fiscal-conservative groups, and repeatedly emphasized reining in out-of-control
spending in our interview — a break from some of the more economically
heterodox strains of conservative populism. “I’m a conservative. I’ve always
been a conservative, I’ll always be a conservative,” he told me when asked
about how his fiscal philosophy squares with his populist streak. “I just think
we’ve got to do the tough work and cut wasteful spending to protect the
financial health of our country.”
The
culture war, then, should be watched closely as it is debated within the
confines of the Indiana Senate primary: The result could shape the GOP’s
political future. When asked about Daniels himself, Banks — whom Daniels once described as “the future of the
Republican Party” — is cautious. “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 told me. But “this isn’t a normal America”
anymore, he added: When “the Biden administration is pushing reforms to Title
IX that would allow for biological boys to compete against my three young
daughters in sports,” the “top leaders in our military are pushing critical
race theory and anti-Americanism on our troops,” and “critical race theory in
our schools is telling our kids that America is inherently racist and evil,
it’s not sustainable.” And it “just, to me, underscores how important these
social-conservative issues are.”
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