INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Republican Rep. Jim Banks, a combative defender of former President Donald Trump, announced on Tuesday that he is running for the U.S. Senate seat in Indiana being vacated by GOP Sen. Mike Braun.
Banks is the first candidate to formally enter the Senate race since Braun said in December that he would forgo a 2024 reelection bid and run instead for Indiana governor. Banks’ announcement comes days after Donald Trump Jr. and the Washington-based anti-tax Club for Growth began attacking former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels as insufficiently conservative while Daniels ponders whether to also seek the Senate seat.
Banks criticized current Senate Republicans for cooperating too much with the Biden administration and allowing passage of a massive $1.7 trillion spending bill just before Christmas.
“I just believe now more than ever that we need conservatives in the Senate who are going to fight back against radical Democrat policies instead of going along with it,” Banks told The Associated Press. “Republican primary voters are looking for a conservative fighter, someone to go to Washington and fight for Hoosier family values and against the radical, socialist and woke agenda that Democrats are pushing in Washington.”
Banks, 43, was first elected to Congress from a heavily Republican district in northeastern Indiana in 2016, the year after he returned from an eight-month military deployment to Afghanistan with the Navy Reserve.
He has since become a frequent Fox News Channel guest and Trump ally who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s presidential election victory after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., months later rejected Republican leader Kevin McCarthy’s pick of Banks as the top GOP member on the committee investigating the deadly Capitol insurrection, citing the need to protect the review’s “integrity.”
Banks backed McCarthy throughout his fight to become House speaker this month and has kept up ties with Trump, visiting with him since he left the White House and joining him on a 2021 trip to the U.S.-Mexico border. Banks said that last week he told Trump — who won Indiana by wide margins in 2016 and 2020 — of his decision to enter the Senate race.
“I told him I’d like to have his support, hope he comes to Indiana and campaigns with me,” Banks said. “I was proud to fight alongside him for the America First policies and agenda that he pushed when he was president and believe strongly we need to go back to that.”
Banks’ announcement could be the start of a competitive race for the Republican nomination in the GOP-dominated state, with one potential candidate being Ukrainian-born Rep. Victoria Spartz, who has been critical at times of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began last February.
But the biggest factor could be whether Daniels decides to enter the race. The 73-year-old Daniels completed two terms as governor in early 2013 with high approval ratings and finished a decade as the high-profile president of Purdue University at the end of December.
Not waiting for Daniels’ decision, the conservative Club for Growth released an ad last week reaching back to his time as President George W. Bush’s budget director to criticize him for increasing the federal debt. It calls Daniels an “old guard Republican clinging to the old ways of the bad old days.”
Club for Growth President David McIntosh, who was an Indiana congressman in the 1990s, said the deep-pocketed group is “ready to spend what it takes to make sure Hoosiers have a conservative in that Senate seat.”
McIntosh said the group hasn’t decided whether to back a candidate in the race.
“We think very highly of Jim Banks,” McIntosh said. “He is that type of new, young Republican leadership that people are looking for.”
Mark Lubbers, a longtime Daniels friend and adviser, said the Club for Growth helped push failed Republican candidates as the party fell short of recapturing the Senate in last year’s election.
“Sad to see that Jim Banks has thrown in with them,” Lubbers said. “And apparently they think it’s political genius to poke the bear with a sharp stick. We’ll see how that works out.”
Banks has been eager to pull at political divides.
His congressional office Twitter account was suspended for a couple weeks in 2021 after he responded to a post about Biden administration official Dr. Rachel Levine becoming the first transgender four-star officer in the U.S. uniformed services by writing: “The title of first female four-star officer gets taken by a man.”
Banks also lined up last year against Republican Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb’s veto of a bill banning transgender females from competing in girls’ school sports. He urged state lawmakers, who later overrode the veto, to “send a message to the rest of the nation that Indiana values women.”
-
Caitlin Clark swaps three-pointers for par threes at LPGA event
Basketball fans are used to seeing Caitlin Clark produce out of this world feats on an almost nightly basis, but Wednesday served as an important reminder that the phenom is human after all.
Fortville woman charged with cheating on gambling game
A Fortville woman is accused of cheating on a gambling game at the Harrah’s Hoosier Park casino in Anderson.
Perfect season has turned Indiana into the toast of college football
Even the start of basketball season at one of the sport’s true blueblood programs cannot diminish the excitement of college football’s biggest surprise and best story.
Colts give Anthony Richardson the starting QB job for rest of season
Richardson will move forward as the starting quarterback for the Colts. This comes two weeks after coach Shane Steichen benched Richardson in favor of 39-year-old Joe Flacco.
