After longtime Indiana Senator Dick Lugar went down in an historic primary defeat last week, Democrats were aglow over the sudden competitiveness of Lugar's seat. Lugar would have strolled away with the election; extreme right wing candidate Richard Mourdock was a different story entirely.
Polling suggests the Democrats may have be right. In the first poll taken since the primary, Mourdock and Democratic challenger Joe Donelly are tied at 40 percent. While more people know Mourdock—he's the state treasurer, and has a knack for garnering headlines by threatening to sue the federal government and calling Medicare and Social Security unconstitutional and so on—he's also quite unpopular after the grueling primary, as is the tea party that backed him. Donnelly, meanwhile, suffers from poor name recognition, but is well liked among those who know who he is.
This information suggests the election could come down to fundraising. Now that the Dems have a competitive race on their hands, Donnelly will start getting funds from the DNC and elsewhere, which should be able to help him with name recognition. If Mourdock can't turn his negatives around, Donnelly might swipe the election from him.
If so, it would be another case of the tea party shooting the Republican Party in the foot on the Senate. Tea party-backed candidates Sharon Angle, Joe Miller and Christine O'Donnell helped cost the Republicans the Senate in 2010 by knocking more centrist candidates out in primaries. The dynamic is not the same here—those candidates were political novices, whereas Mourdock has been around the block—but the same politics are in play. At the very least, it means the Republicans now have to spend time and money defending a seat that otherwise wouldn't have had to worry about. If the Republicans want to take the Senate, every seat is of utmost importance; they were surely not execting to have to fight over Lugar's.
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Related: Dick Lugar Loses, But The GOP May Be The Biggest Loser Of All
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