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It would become the first election Jill Long Thompson would win, a campaign in the crosshairs of the national media that would stun observers. A Democrat had won in newly minted Vice President Quayle's district, one of the most Republican in the country.
Thompson's 1989 victory was the end of a path paved in losses—first in the 1986 U.S. Senate race against Quayle, who beat her 61-39%, and then in the 1988 fourth district congressional campaign, which she lost to Dan Coats 62-38%.
Indiana's first female gubernatorial nominee has a history of defying political odds in a big way, but her record as a campaigner is muddied a best—marked by both unforeseen victories and defeats. As a congresswoman, Thompson emerged as a popular but erratically inconsistent campaigner, and indeed, she hasn't won an elected office for more than a decade, since 1992. The lessons of her six campaigns—three victories, three losses—are sure to define the biggest political challenge she's faced yet: unseating governor Mitch Daniels.
Thompson hasn't ever shied from an improbable political battle. She launched an audacious campaign for the United States Senate just three years after her election to the Valparaiso City Council, a body that represents a city of just 25,000 people. The thirty-three year old candidate "took one for the team," according to Andy Downs, a political science professor at Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne and director of the Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics, to enhance her name recognition and lay the groundwork for another campaign.
"She wanted to develop support not only among the party leaders in terms of her willingness to take one for the team, but also just as a way of raising her visibility throughout the entire state. It was sort of a daring move. I think a lot of people in hindsight would have recommended she pursue [a U.S.] House race instead, and she was outspent tremendously," Downs said.
The race was a prelude to the losing matchup against Coats the following year, and by the time 1989 rolled around, the state party and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, convinced that her previous losses were forerunners to continued failure, were looking for a candidate other than Thompson to contest the special election.
But Thompson, with help from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union and EMILY's List in DC, rallied members of Indiana's congressional delegation—Frank McCloskey, Lee Hamilton, Andy Jacobs and Jim Jontz, in particular—to support her candidacy. The four congressmen encouraged the DCCC to invest in the campaign, which it did.
"This was a big deal," then fourth congressional district chair Charlie Belch said. Indeed, it may have been one of the most fiercely contested elections in Indiana's history.
Thompson was buoyed by a scramble of ambitions Republicans seeking the approval of the party's caucus—a mandate that at the time likely would have meant a lifetime seat in Congress. Eight candidates in all sought the nomination, splintering an establishment that had only a short time to immediately coalesce.
Dan Heath, an aide at the time to Fort Wayne mayor Paul Helmke, was finally chosen after multiple ballots, but struggled to break out during the campaign. Thompson attacked Heath's relationship to Helmke, connecting her opponent to an unpopular city annexation plan and linking him to tax increases his boss had passed. Heath proved unable to gain traction against Thompson, despite the Republican-leaning nature of the district.
"Dan Heath was not viewed as the strongest candidate, and Jill exploited that. He was largely undefined and her campaign did what they could to define him for him," Thompson's media consultant Chris Sautter said. "She assigned to him the sins of his bosses."
National Republicans took interest in the race as well. The National Association of Realtors devoted more than a hundred thousand dollars to advertising in the district, and First Lady Barbara Bush was offered up in television ads on Heath's behalf. Vice President Dan Quayle left the White House to campaign for Heath.
"On the national front, I think there was a feeling that this was an unwinnable race, because this was a better than two-to-one Republican district, it was right after Bush had soundly defeated Dukakis and had won by close to a landslide proportion in Indiana, and it was Dan Quayle's old seat," Sautter said. "One would have thought that if there were anywhere where he had coattails, it would have been in his old district."
Yet Thompson was able to win by fastidiously creating an independent image.
"She has always showcased her background of growing up on the farm, about learning on the farm about hard work and honesty," Sautter said. "When she grew up on that farm, she did the farm chores just like her brothers did."
"She is someone people have found to be likeable," Downs said. "It's hard for people to get a lot of anger ginned up against her, so it was easy enough to run based on her biography. She's not a lefty crazy liberal; she's a moderate Democrat, which made it easier for people to find her acceptable," he said. Longtime media consultant (and onetime elementary school crush) Sautter filmed Thompson atop a tractor at her family farm, depicting her as a conservative, from-the-heartland Democrat.
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She then mounted the advantages of incumbency in her 1990 reelection campaign against megachurch preacher David Hawks. "She still had a lot of name recognition going for her," Downs said, also pointing to Hawks's occupation as something that made voters wary. Thompson's office focused on constituent services and did it well, according to Downs. In Congress she proposed the first gift ban, Sautter said, never voting for a tax increase and returning pay raises to the Treasury. She won with 60% of the vote, and then dispensed of Chuck Pierson in 1992 with 62% of the vote.
In 1994, Thompson's fortunes changed.
"People were willing to label her liberal, probably more liberal than she really was," Downs said. "And Mark Souder probably doesn't get the credit he deserves as a very strong campaigner. So I think you put those two things together and you have a conservative guy like Mark Souder who knows how to campaign, is very conscious of how to deliver message, what resonates with voters, running against someone who can be labeled as a liberal—and then throw on top of that the fact that she was not particularly engaged in the campaign in 1994," he said.
Thompson didn't take Souder's challenge seriously, Downs said, and didn't visit her district often enough—all adding up to a "worst case scenario" for the Democrat.
Belch called Thompson "cocky" in 1994, a wave election year that national Democrats were slow to recognize. Thompson's star faded further when she became embroiled in the House banking scandal. That scandal changed voters' perceptions of Thompson, according to Belch, who came to believe their congresswoman was "part of the problem."
The contentious race's tipping point, Downs said, was a Souder commercial with the candidate's mother exclaiming, "Shame on you Jill Long!"
Thompson attempted a political comeback in 2002 when Tim Roemer vacated his seat in the second congressional district.
Shaw Friedman, a Democrat who worked for Thompson in 2002, supported Schellinger in this year's primary, and now regularly consults with Thompson's campaign, laments the 2000 redistricting process, in which Republicans in the General Assembly denied Democrats' plans to gerrymander the second congressional district more Democratic. The redistricting partially prompted Roemer to voluntarily leave Congress for fear of losing reelection.
The demographics became such that either party could win the seat, and the race quickly turned nasty, with both candidates exchanging attack ads on television.
"The amount of money raised in that race was really very surprising. National organizations threw money into as well. Democrats saw a former, multi-term [U.S. Representative] running against a newcomer, and they thought, what the heck, let's give it a shot," Downs said.
Republicans, pessimistic about the party's chances against Tim Roemer, the popular Democrat who long represented the district, saw an opportunity to "paint Thompson as more liberal than Roemer was," Downs said.
Butch Morgan, the second congressional district chair, backed Thompson in the 2002 primary but Schellinger in the gubernatorial primary, maintains that Roemer would have outperformed Thompson against Chocola. With "no question" Roemer could have "absolutely" won his seat again, Morgan said.
He laments the "overwhelming money difference" that allowed Chocola to negatively define Thompson.
Thompson attacked Chocola's wealth, calling the self-financing millionaire candidate out of touch. "She has proven herself a pretty tenacious campaigner," said Friedman. "She can land a punch, and certainly wasn't afraid of going after Chocola too. But the dynamics were very different at that point."
True enough, the the race was striking for a number of reasons, particularly because it was the first national election since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the country was gripped by war fever with Iraq. Thompson, and countless other Democrats like her, were caught between supporting a nation on war footing and the Republicans who were in control of it. Attempting to diffuse such attacks on her patriotism, Thompson went so far as assuring voters that the only differences between her and GOP opponent Chris Chocola were economic. "We will support our president, and we will support our troops," she said.
The 2002 race is enigmatic because though it provides the most recent illustration of Thompson's electoral ability, it came at an extraordinarily crippling year for Democrats across the nation. Yet that, more than whatever spunk Thompson may have, could be what's decisive in her gubernatorial campaign.
"I have to tell you," Sautter said. "The longer I am in this business, the more I think that the objective circumstances of a race count a lot more than anything in the campaign. People spend a lot of time analyzing all of these things, but usually in a favorable year, an incumbent is going to win a seat. And when it's an unfavorable year, all bets are off, just as in the case of the governor's race."
Thompson's campaign in that 2002 race, like in 1994, was swept off its feet by a national trend. In 2008, she's hoping to be the one to benefit from a national wave threatening to drown Governor Daniels. The Wall Street Journal, at least, is not calling it "unwinnable" this time.
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