By Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Esq.

Let me say this up front: I didn’t predict Tuesday’s primary. We called most of it in real time as the returns came in, and the polling and the spending told the story before the votes did. The one I missed was Travis Holdman. I figured his northeast Indiana roots and three decades of constituent service would carry him. They didn’t. Fair enough.

So let’s talk about what actually matters: November.

The Scoreboard

Six Republican state senators who voted against the President’s redistricting demand got knocked off Tuesday. The Trump-Banks-Turning Point USA coalition dropped north of $13 million on races that normally don’t crack six figures. For perspective, total Indiana state Senate primary ad spending in all of 2024 was about $280,000. They got their money’s worth.

Schmutzler beat Rogers 59-41. Fiechter beat Holdman 61-39. Powell ran up 65-35 on Buck. Davis took out Walker 59-41. De Vries blew out Dernulc 75-25. Jay Starkey, riding Governor Braun’s endorsement instead of Trump’s, knocked off Niemeyer 56-44. Greg Goode survived with 54%. Spencer Deery and Paula Copenhaver are separated by four votes, and we’re headed for a recount.

And then there’s Liz Brown — the odd woman out, who’s in. Brown was the incumbent who voted for redistricting and got primaried from the right anyway by a Banks staffer with Todd Rokita’s endorsement. She won. Which tells you something about the difference between voting with the President and voting with your local AG. The redistricting line was the line that mattered.

Average the challenger races out, and the TPUSA-aligned candidates won 60-40.

The Un-Retirement Tax

A note worth flagging: Buck and Walker were both victims of the un-retirement. Both had announced they were stepping down. Both reversed course and filed again, in part because the redistricting fight made them feel like they couldn’t leave the caucus shorthanded. They got rewarded for that loyalty by becoming the most expensive targets on the board. The next senator thinking about coming back for one more term in a hostile environment might want to think about that.

The Mourdock Mirror

Sixty-forty. Where have we seen that before?

May 2012. Richard Mourdock unseated Dick Lugar 60.5 to 39.5. Tea Party. Club for Growth. Outside money pouring into a state where Lugar hadn’t faced a serious general opponent since the 1980s. Pull up the county map from that primary and lay it next to Tuesday’s. Big challenger margins in northeast Indiana, the Kokomo corridor, southern rural counties, rural Lake. Tippecanoe County — Lugar’s pocket of resistance in 2012 — was the one place Tuesday where the institutionalist didn’t lose. Deery and Copenhaver tied to four votes. Same map. Smaller districts. Fourteen years apart.

Then came November. Mourdock lost to Joe Donnelly by six in a state Romney carried by ten. A 21-point swing between primary and general. Yes, there was the rape-and-pregnancy comment. But most of the swing was simpler than that. The 39.5% of Republicans who voted for Lugar didn’t all come home. Some crossed over. Some went Libertarian. A bunch just stayed home.

That last part is the part nobody wants to talk about. A lot of what happened to Mourdock can be explained by Republicans staying home, or voting against the new nominee on principle, regardless of who was on the other side of the ballot. That isn’t a gaffe story. That’s a math story. And the math doesn’t care who you endorsed.

Where the Math Bites

Most of these districts are too red for any of it to matter. 19, 21, 41 — R+15 or worse. A five or ten percent drop-off makes the margins ugly and doesn’t flip them. (For the Republicans nominated Tuesday, that’s the good news.)

District 1 and District 6 in Lake County are a different story. Dernulc won in 2022 with 52.3%. Niemeyer hasn’t been seriously tested in years. If Democrats can field credible candidates — and that’s a real “if” given the bench — and even a slice of the losing primary coalition stays home, we are going to see real races in places that haven’t had one in a decade.

That’s not a prediction. That’s just what happens when 40% of your primary electorate spent the spring being told the other guy was a sellout, and then the guy they were told was a sellout disappears from the ballot. Some of those voters move on. Some of them don’t.

The Bottom Line

The challengers won 60-40. Mourdock won 60-40. We know how that one ended.

Past is prologue. Take that for what it’s worth, but don’t ignore it.