The Interview: Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch

Can she survive the anti-Holcomb fervor sweeping the party's base ahead of a possible 2024 gubernatorial run?

Suzanne Crouch—Gov. Eric Holcomb’s lieutenant governor and a fundraising force within the party who is eyeing a possible 2024 gubernatorial bid of her own—says she isn’t worried.

She would have cause to be, of course, given the wake of intra-party turmoil that led to an anti-establishment backlash at the Indiana GOP’s state convention earlier this month. But Crouch is betting that the nearly 1,800 party insiders who chose two brash outsiders to the statewide ticket are further to the right than the average Hoosier Republican primary voter.

At least that’s what she told me in a wide-ranging interview last Friday, as we talked about the future of Indiana’s small towns and her own ambitions amid a still-inchoate Republican primary field that could include Sen. Mike Braun, former Mike Pence-appointee Eric Doden, retiring Rep. Trey Hollingsworth and too many more to mention.

Crouch, according to a source familiar, has in recent weeks raised more than $600,000 and has more than $2 million in the bank.

The Evansville native who spent eight years as the Vanderburgh County auditor before ascending to state representative and, in 2014, state auditor, is a road warrior. A Republican source familiar with her thinking told me that she warned Holcomb last year that his handpicked secretary of state candidate Holli Sullivan, dethroned by Deigo Morales, wasn’t resonating at Lincoln Day dinners on the hustings long before her convention faceplant.

But what of her own standing among the hard-right base?