Importantville: Hogsett's budget details—Donnelly's Kavanaugh week—AP's Braun investigation
By Adam Wren and design by Kris Davidson
Days to Election Day: 85 days
THE WEEK AHEAD: Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett will submit his third budget, which will include an infrastructure plan in the neighborhood of $120 million. On Wednesday, Sen. Joe Donnelly will sit down with SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh. On Thursday, Indiana Democrats will descend on French Lick for the three-day 138th Annual Indiana Democratic Editorial Association Convention.
ABOUT HOGSETT’S BUDGET: Thanks to a strong local economy, Hogsett will have new dollars to dole out in the realms of both public safety and infrastructure.
The spending will come from a $120 million bond issuance over 3 years, thanks to the state’s gas tax increase.
That money will pay for improvements to city roads, bridges, greenways and sidewalks.
Hogsett is expected to allocate enough money his his campaign pledge of funding 150 new IMPD officers.
THE BIG POLITICAL QUESTION…Here’s what Team Hogsett is wondering: How does Republican County Chair and prospective mayoral candidate Sen. Jim Merritt whip Republican council votes against a road plan fueled by a tax increase he voted for in the state senate?
Good Monday morning, and welcome to Importantville. It’s going to be a busy news week.
WHERE’S VEEP? Pence will join Trump for a signing ceremony for H.R. 5515, the “John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019.” Rep. Jim Banks has called this one of the most important bills of the Trump administration.
.@RepJimBanks: "In many ways, @POTUS and his administration have been tougher on Russia than any president since President Reagan." #OutnumberedOT pic.twitter.com/LLLyJqOrJL
August 9, 2018Importantville Reads
BREAKING THIS MORNING…
POLITICO: 'Sleepin' Joe' hears alarm bells in Indiana Senate brawl
Privately referred to by some colleagues as the “accidental senator” because of his good fortune in drawing a deeply flawed GOP opponent in 2012, the first-term Indiana senator's presence is often barely noticed in the Capitol. His heads-down style distinguishes him among a quintet of centrist Democrats scrapping to survive this fall.
Donnelly rarely gives news conferences and stays away from cable news. For years, he assiduously avoided reporters who blanket the Capitol hallways. Now, the burly 62-year-old is running for reelection like a city council candidate, highlighting small-bore accomplishments and projecting an agreeable demeanor that contrasts sharply with what comes out of the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue most days.
What’s more, Donnelly’s approval numbers are middling and his race against Republican businessman Mike Braun — who impressively dispatched two seasoned House members in the Republican primary — is essentially tied, according to people in both parties. After Richard Mourdock collapsed in 2012 for calling rape-induced pregnancies "something God intended," Braun poses danger to Donnelly because he's a "generic white guy who isn't going to talk about rape," said one Democrat working on Senate races.
IMPORTANTVILLE TAKE: There's a lot to like in this if you’re Braun: "the accidental senator"..."small bore accomplishments"..."middling" approval numbers.
But if you’re Donnelly, you have to like this line, where Braun says he spends 80 percent of his time fundraising.
Asked by GOP activists in Mishawaka whether he would be able to run enough ads to tell his story, Braun bemoaned his slim war chest. He estimated he spends “about 80 percent of my time trying to put my resources together.”
AP’s BRIAN SLODYSKO STRIKES AGAIN! “Outsourcing critic Mike Braun's brand sells foreign parts”
The off-road accessory was shipped in a box emblazoned with the logo of an auto parts brand owned by Mike Braun, a multimillionaire businessman who often rails against foreign outsourcing in his bid to become Indiana’s next senator.
The words “Made in China” were stamped across the packaging.
Braun frequently criticizes his opponent, vulnerable red-state Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly, for once owning stock in a family business his brother runs that operates a factory in Mexico. However, the Republican nominee’s own parts brand, Promaxx Automotive, sells products that were similarly manufactured abroad, according to a review by The Associated Press.
The Daily Beast: Can No-Frills Senate Democrat Joe Donnelly Win in the Age of Donald Trump?
Joe Donnelly is the polar opposite of President Donald Trump in nearly every way.
On paper, he’s an ideologically centrist, mild-mannered, largely reserved Democrat. He doesn’t get into Twitter fights with his political enemies. He eschews the spotlight and rarely, if ever, goes on national television. He doesn’t care much for Trump’s bombastic personal style. He’s a throwback to the era when mundane was normal and voters rewarded the work and not the show.
But that was then. In modern political times, the landscape Donnelly faces is daunting. He is running in a state that Trump won big in 2016 and at a time when politicians seem preternaturally inclined to be bombastic. His task is to convince Indiana voters to re-elect him to the U.S. Senate. And his strategy is to convince them that moderation—in both temperament and ideology—is precisely what the country needs in these very immoderate times.
To do so, however, requires some strategic breaks from—and occasional rebukes of—the party he has called home his entire life. Aboard his RV on the last leg of a seven-day tour around the state, making his way from South Bend to Kokomo, Donnelly made clear that he felt Democrats had lost their political compass and that the evidence was in the drift of white working-class voters toward Trump.
New York Times: At Carrier, the Factory Trump Saved, Morale Is Through the Floor
By the time the sun comes up, Nicole Hargrove knows if it’ll be a struggle to meet her quota at the Carrier furnace factory in Indianapolis. Six days a week, she’s on the assembly line by 6 a.m., when a buzzer sounds and starts a shift that is supposed to conclude with 1,100 newly built units. But lately, the line sometimes grinds to a premature halt, as supervisors wait for employees to straggle in — or give up and pull people off forklifts to fill in for no-shows. At the end of shifts like that, Ms. Hargrove and the others who bothered to come in have only 800 furnaces to show for their efforts.
Twenty months ago, a freshly elected Donald J. Trump came to Carrier to claim credit for disrupting management’s plans to shut the factory and shift its jobs to Mexico. The plant stayed open, and more than 700 workers kept their positions. The deal dominated the news and became a political Rorschach test: Mr. Trump’s critics saw a minuscule victory, bought with tax credits, but for many of his supporters, the episode was proof that the incoming president would revive Rust Belt fortunes by sheer force of personality.
After three earlier visits, I wanted to know what Carrier workers themselves thought of the outcome, long after Mr. Trump and his media hurricane had moved on. From afar, one might assume the picture is rosy: Indiana has an unemployment rate of just 3.3 percent, and for people without a college degree, few employers offer the kind of salary and benefits that Carrier does. But when I got to Indianapolis in July, I found that the factory Mr. Trump is often credited with saving is plagued by rising absenteeism and low morale.
“People aren’t coming to work, which is sad because we really need these jobs,” said Ms. Hargrove, who has worked at Carrier for 15 years. “They had a chance to prove that staying was good, but this is ruining it for everybody. It’s killing us. It’s pushing us out the door that much sooner.”
Know a Hoosier at the intersection of politics and business who has a birthday or just moved to a new gig? Send me that intel!
That’s all for today. Get the Importantville shirt you’re seeing everywhere here. Thanks for reading. Send me tips at cadamwren@gmail.com.