Importantville: Buttigieg inches closer to 2020—Hogsett commissions oppo research on Merritt—Pence's next chief of staff?
What's happening—and what's next—at the intersection of Indiana politics and business?
By Adam Wren and design by Kris Davidson
Days to Mayoral Election: 323
Days to 2020: 687
NEW: South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg will make an announcement about his future in South Bend as early as tomorrow. And on Thursday, he’ll visit Iowa for the Progress Iowa Holiday Party.
DROPPED TODAY: Buttigieg’s first glossy magazine profile—I spent several days with Buttigieg in South Bend over the last few months on assignment for Indianapolis Monthly. The story went live this afternoon. You can read it here.
Buttigieg has checked four key boxes on FiveThirtyEight’s “Who’s Behaving Like A 2020 Presidential Candidate” rubric. Until now, left unchecked: A visit to New Hampshire, a poll, and a magazine profile. He’s now checked that “magazine profile” box.
Pete Buttigieg is running. Today, it’s along the St. Joseph River on a crisp and gray October morning in South Bend, as the mayor tried to clear his mind in the middle of a packed day. A meeting with the NAACP. A meeting with staff to discuss the city’s $368 million budget, which is scheduled to go in front of the City Council in a few days. And some political time. He’s trying to get back into shape. He’s working his way up from 5 miles a day to 9. That’s what he ran when he was deployed with the Navy as a counterterrorism intelligence officer in Afghanistan, where he set his half-marathon personal record of 1:42 back in Bagram, a pace of about 7:46 per mile. “It’s actually a hauntingly beautiful place, and the daylight started to come up over the mountains and it was March or April so it was still snow-capped peaks,” Buttigieg says. “The best race of my life.”
In the very near future, Buttigieg might be running less literally, on the campaign trail in Iowa or New Hampshire. Right? I asked him, as his slim 5-foot-9 frame was bounding over still-green grass yet to turn brown ahead of another unforgiving Northern Indiana winter.
“I don’t know,” Buttigieg answered. It’s a question he’s been getting a lot lately. These are heady times for the South Bend mayor and possible 2020 Democratic presidential contender. You’ll be forgiven if the juxtaposition of those two makes you scoff. Buttigieg has become a dark horse for the Democratic nomination, one who trades calls with former Vice President Joe Biden, lands plaudits as the future of the Democratic Party from former President Barack Obama, emails with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, keeps counsel with former Obama strategist Axelrod, and has Lis Smith, the New York City–based, celebrity Democrat-communications guru, on a five-figure retainer.
IMPORTANTVILLE TAKEAWAYS:
After Election Day’s results, Buttigieg has all but sworn off an Indiana race. “It complicates any path for me in Indiana more than what was already the case,” he said.
Fundraising could be a challenge: He has roughly $70,000 in his Hitting Home PAC. But he has a record of earning contributions from big players such as Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, a Harvard University classmate.
A Buttigieg campaign would be headquartered in South Bend and would focus on Iowa—a state his team thinks is similar to Indiana, and where they think he can perform well.
Read more here.
IMPORTANTVILLE TAKE: “Even if he runs in 2020 and loses the Democratic primary, many see him landing a plum cabinet position. You don’t have to try too hard to imagine the former management consultant running a federal agency like the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development—or even the vice presidency. Indiana, after all, has produced more of those—six—than any other state except New York, which claims 11. “Any president would benefit from his gifts,” says [David] Axelrod. Buttigieg is seven years younger than John F. Kennedy was when he became president. If he runs and wins, he’d be 39 when he was inaugurated. He has an entire political lifetime to win the plush toy of the presidency. There’s time. But you can tell he hears the electronic carnival music of running for national office getting faster in his head.”
Good Sunday afternoon, and welcome back to Importantville. Thanks for your patience as I acclimated to dad life.
FIRST IN IMPORTANTVILLE: Here’s a photo of our daughter, Adison Elise Wren. Her name is a portmanteau of Adam and Alison. To be honest, we didn’t know whether we’d have a boy or girl. For me, now, the future is female. Thanks to Importantville denizens Heather and Davey Neal of Heather Tees for the t-shirt.
WHERE’S VEEP? He has lunch with the president Monday.
PENCE’S NEXT CHIEF OF STAFF? In the wake of news that Pence COS Nick Ayers is headed back to Georgia, Pence is looking for a new chief. One possibility, Jarrod Agen, a former aide to Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and Pence’s current deputy chief of staff and communications director. Politico Playbook named Agen to their Power List 2019:
In the two years since he signed on to Pence’s team, Agen has become one of the vice president’s most trusted advisers — and the vice president a constant presence in Agen’s life. Colleagues joke that one of the only times Agen has managed to escape weekend phone calls was one Sunday last month, when he was busy running in the 43rd annual Marine Corps Marathon and left his work phone at home.
BANKS MOVIN’ ON UP: Rep. Jim Banks drew No. 1 in the office lottery for the congressional sophomore class, so he had the top pick amongst incoming sophomores.
MERRITT FOR MAYOR? State Sen. James Merritt made news Friday, resigning from his perch as chairman of the Marion County GOP, a move that could signal a serious run for mayor—or a step back to focus on lawmaking.
MERRITT told Fox 59’s Dan Spehler he’ll consider a run over the holiday season.
HOGSETT THINKS MERRITT IS RUNNING: Mayor Joe Hogsett has commissioned an opposition research report against Merritt, which you can find on page 14 of his expenditures in his latest filing—a $7,552.09 job with Point Loma out of San Diego.
Ted Feeney told Indy Politics he will not enter the mayoral race.
IMPORTANTVILLE READS
“THE TOLL”—A COOL NEW INDY STAR PROJECT by James Briggs and Ryan Martin. Briggs and Martin, two of the city’s best reporters, will tackle Indianapolis’ crime problem in a weekly newsletter. They’ve been given freedom by editors to pull back from daily deadlines to explore what’s behind “years of growing violence.” Subscribe here. It’ll debut in January.
Tunku Varadarajan, The Wall Street Journal: “College Bloat Meets ‘The Blade’”
Mitch Daniels teaches a course on World War I at Purdue University, where he is president, and loves to talk about Woodrow Wilson. Wilson left the presidency of Princeton in 1910 and was elected governor of New Jersey the next year—“sort of the opposite of the thing I did,” says Mr. Daniels, who served two terms as Indiana’s governor (2005-13) before taking his current job on campus: “Explaining his decision to abandon the academy for a statehouse, Wilson said, ‘I can’t take the politics anymore.’ ”
I’ve just asked Mr. Daniels—who, unlike Wilson a century earlier, decided against seeking the U.S. presidency in 2012—how running a university differs from running a state. The silver-tongued Mr. Daniels offers a quip that must play well at the meet-and-greets that clog up a college president’s calendar. “I use an old line,” he says without missing a beat, “which is that in my last job it was dog-eat-dog, and here it’s just the opposite.”
Mr. Daniels, 69, is the most innovative university president in America. Like his counterparts at other schools, he believes higher education has been “a competitive advantage” for the U.S.—“a nice little export industry, if you add up all the dollars that come here to purchase the education of students from other places.” He regards the rumbling in Washington about curbing visas for foreign students to be “very shortsighted.” But he also thinks American higher education has grown fat and complacent. He’s making inventive, even radical changes in the way his institution finances itself and imparts an education.
Dan Carden, Northwest Indiana Times, “Holcomb eyeing 2020 re-election bid, but focus now is on upcoming legislative session”
Gov. Eric Holcomb is laying the groundwork to run for re-election in 2020, but the Republican insists that for at least the next four-and-a-half months he's solely focused on enacting what he considers to be a "bold" agenda.
State campaign finance records show Holcomb is poised to end the year with close to $3 million in his campaign account, an amount similar to the fundraising totals of his two Republican gubernatorial predecessors as they entered the third year of their first terms.
In an exclusive interview with The Times, Holcomb said he can't think of any reason why he wouldn’t run for re-election.
“We’re in a strong position to do so,” he acknowledged.
Though Holcomb quickly added: "That is a long commitment, and one that won't be made by just myself. As a matter of fact, my wife may have a higher percentage of the decision than me."
No Hoosier governor has chosen not to seek a second, four-year term since the constitution was amended in 1972 to permit consecutive terms, a record Holcomb knows well as a student of Indiana history and 2008 campaign manager for Gov. Mitch Daniels.
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