EVANSVILLE — By redirecting the pipeline of candidates for public office, the new breed of conservative activists who say they have the numbers to control the Vanderburgh County GOP could affect local and state government for years to come.
It happens in caucuses of precinct committee members ("PCs") — the same group of which conservatives claim to now have control — to choose someone to serve the remainder of a departing elected officeholder's term. It happens in private meetings of aspiring candidates who want a party chairman's support for a first venture into politics, whether it's in a precinct committee caucus or a primary election before the party's voters.
The list of past and present local Republican officeholders who climbed the political ladder by winning party caucuses somewhere along the way is long and illustrious — Lloyd Winnecke, Vaneta Becker, Suzanne Crouch, Russ Lloyd Jr., and Holli Sullivan among them.
But those are gold-plated members of a once dominant and mostly moderate GOP establishment that has little in common with the new breed, which values fealty to conservative principles over name recognition, fundraising prowess, connections and past involvement in party affairs.
The next few Republican caucus winners could look more like Sean Selby instead.
Selby, a longtime local conservative activist, might have ascended to a reliably Republican seat in the Indiana Legislature in 2021 if the present group of PCs had been in place when he squared off against Tim O'Brien and Alfonso Vidal one night in a church sanctuary.
The men were competing in a caucus of PCs in House District 78 for the right to serve the remainder of Sullivan's two-year term in the Legislature. Sullivan had departed when she was appointed Indiana secretary of state.
O'Brien, an Evansville realtor, had been a favorite of local GOP movers and shakers since he made his first campaign, an unsuccessful 2019 bid for the Ward 1 City Council seat. He ran that campaign with then-Mayor Winnecke's active political and financial support. On the night of the caucus, Winnecke's wife, fellow F.C. Tucker Emge realtor Carol McClintock, nominated O'Brien for the vacancy. Kyle Hupfer, then chairman of the Indiana Republican Party, was there, too.
Vidal was eliminated in the first round of balloting. Running for a Board of Commissioners seat five years earlier, Selby — a longtime acolyte of former 8th District Congressman John Hostettler — had been unable to wangle even a public statement of support from Winnecke.
That O'Brien would defeat Selby in the caucus at Faithway Baptist Church never seemed seriously in doubt.
The differences between the two men — and a reminder of how different things could have been had Selby won the caucus — came into sharp focus a year later, when Selby challenged O'Brien in a primary election.
Selby campaigned against COVID "lockdown/mandate mentality" and frequently insinuated that O'Brien was a toady for unnamed power brokers in Indianapolis. He touted his endorsement by Liberty Defense, an anti-vaccine mandate political committee then backing conservative challengers to Republican House incumbents all over the state. The group touted its "no-compromise view on the issues of the Sanctity of Life, the 2nd Amendment, and Religious Freedom."
With the power of incumbency and the support of GOP establishment figures, O'Brien won the primary convincingly.
Three years after the caucus that night at Faithway, he is well into his career in the Legislature. And he continues to be embraced by party establishment figures.
At the June 15 state GOP convention, O'Brien posed for photos wearing a sticker for Rep. Julie McGuire, gubernatorial candidate Mike Braun’s choice for lieutenant governor and the candidate of the party establishment. McGuire ultimately lost a convention vote to conservative pastor Micah Beckwith in what conservatives statewide considered a litmus test race.
Candidate recruitment would change
In all, 84 candidates for slots on the GOP's precinct committee were elected after being recruited by conservatives. The number is down to 81 with the removal of Michael Daugherty, Cheryl Batteiger-Smith and Ken Colbert at current party chairman Mike Duckworth's instigation.
But on a body that can have no more than 135 members, that is still a substantial majority.
The successful conservative PC recruitment campaign in Vanderburgh County extended to positions as delegates to the convention. There was a boom in the number of local individuals willing to stand for the positions, which required that they travel to Indianapolis at their own expense — and it wasn't unusual.
The competitive lieutenant governor race drew a large tide of new delegate candidates in this year's primary, especially in Hamilton County, where Beckwith recruited heavily. There were about 2,750 Republican candidates in the primary, up from about 2,300 in 2022. In Hamilton County, some townships drew more than 50 candidates to fill 10 or so delegate seats ― three times as many as in 2022.
In Vanderburgh County, 88 Republicans sought positions as delegates to the convention, up from 50 in 2022.
If the insurgent conservatives succeed in a cherished objective — the removal of Duckworth as GOP chairman before his term expires in March — it likely would affect a wholesale change in the way candidates for elected office are recruited.
Daugherty is still bitter about the way he says Duckworth turned him away when he inquired about running for mayor of Evansville as a Republican in 2023. It is a conversation Duckworth says he doesn't remember.
"Mike Duckworth, as he’s told many other candidates, says, ‘You’re not well-enough known. You don’t have name recognition,'" Daugherty told a local podcast host. "So what choices did I have? I had two choices: I could run as an independent. I could sit and wait, and wait until I’m worthy enough in Mike Duckworth’s eyes to run, or I can get up and I can challenge them."
Daugherty challenged them, running for mayor as a Libertarian and garnering 11% of the vote. It was modern history's most successful third-party campaign for Evansville mayor.
Marc Toone, Vanderburgh County's chief deputy clerk, also saw his potential Republican candidacy to succeed the departing Carla Hayden as the county's chief elections officer short-circuited.
The reason: Republicans had someone better-known, Toone said. It was County Treasurer Dottie Thomas, Duckworth's party vice chair and a friend of Toone's who he didn't want to oppose. When Toone inquired about running for a lower-profile position, he said, he got boxed out again for the same reason. There was someone else, someone with a much bigger name than his.
"(Duckworth) told me that I needed to run for something less prestigious, like (county) recorder, and that I do not have the weight, the means to make enough campaign contributions, I had not gotten involved and I had not made a name for myself," Toone said.
“... So then I asked about running for recorder a few weeks after that, and I was told they would let me know in a few weeks. Well, exactly in a few weeks to the day, they announced that (former Mayor) Russ Lloyd (Jr.) was running for recorder."
Duckworth has acknowledged he told Toone he didn't have the necessary political assets yet to run for county clerk.
Toone sees the whole episode in a much different light.
"You know how it works up there," he said. "It’s a member of the good ol’ boy club. And I’m not that."
GOP would grow its own candidates
Daugherty told the Courier & Press a new GOP organization would find reliably conservative candidates with qualities that are projectable — and then apply itself to creating name recognition and the necessary buzz to raise money.
"Let’s interview all of them and then we can take any candidate and introduce them around at all the events, as they did with (eventual GOP mayoral nominee Natalie Rascher), and you can get somebody’s name recognized within the Republican voters pretty quickly," he said.
Rascher did have a 2019 campaign for City Council under her belt, so she wasn't completely unknown to Republican voters. Republican leaders purposed to raise her profile enough that she could compete with County Commissioner Cheryl Musgrave in the GOP's mayoral primary — and with their help, she won.
But in the end, Rascher reported raising just over $1 million and spending all but $8,328.40 of it for a campaign that garnered just under 40% of the vote.
Money and support from establishment figures isn't what wins campaigns, Daugherty said. As a Libertarian, he got more than a quarter of the vote Rascher received while spending a fraction of what she did.
"(Candidates) would have to follow the Republican Party platform — and if they don’t, they would have to have a valid reason, and that would weigh on their choice against another candidate," he said.
If they do oust Duckworth sooner than later in favor of one of their own, GOP conservatives could have an immediate opportunity to show what kind of candidate they could produce in a caucus.
Republican County Auditor Brian Gerth is running to replace Thomas as treasurer. If he is elected — and he likely will be, because Democrats don't have a candidate for treasurer and don't expect to find one — someone will have to serve the remainder of Gerth's term as auditor.
How important is that job?
"The Auditor's Office is the very heartbeat of county government," the agency's website states. "Every county office deals directly with the Auditor's Office on a regular basis to obtain important financial and tax-related information.
"The Auditor literally keeps the books for the county government."
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