Brown County Republican Party Chairman Mark Bowman thought it would be a good night, but he had no idea how good until the final precinct tallies came in.
For the first time he can remember in his 30 years in Brown County, local Republicans swept nearly every partisan office, including the only four that Democrats had been occupying: judge, auditor, clerk and a county council seat.
The only exceptions were two of the three board seats in Washington Township which went to Democrats, and one of them was going to have to go blue anyway because there were only two Republicans on the ballot.
“I had a premonition that if the stars aligned, we could have a win like that, but I never thought that we’d take everything,” Bowman said last Thursday.
He had just written an email to his fellow Republicans telling them about the historic nature of this red wave.
“It’s been a very, very long road for Republicans to get to this point, because historically, Brown County has been a Democratic county across the board,” he said.
“There was a point in time when the exact same thing happened to Republicans that just happened to Democrats, except for minority races like township advisory board,” he said, about the GOP’s nearly clean sweep. “But never has it ever been where the tables have completely turned.”
Our vote history
In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, results were almost the exact opposite of what we saw last week.
The post-election paper in 1992 read: “Democrats dominate county election.” The only local Republican to win an office at the county level was Juanita Bainter, a four-term council member.
The story was similar in 1988, 30 years ago. All Democrats won their local offices, even though the county voted strongly for Republicans George Bush as president and Richard Lugar for senator.
The local Republican wave began to roll in 1996, the year of the Bob Dole-Bill Clinton presidential election. The top headline read “Voters sweep Republicans into offices’; the GOP won four of six contested races locally.
David Critser, one of the Republicans to win a county council seat that year, said the results showed that “Brown County voters are voting for the man, not the party.” He also attributed the change in tide to more conservative people moving into the area.
In 2000, it was more of the same. The top headline read “BLOWOUT: GOP loses only one contest.” That one holdout was Brown Circuit Court judge Judith Stewart, a Democrat incumbent seeking her second term.
“I think it’s a sign that our organization (Republican Party) is coming of age,” said Dave Anderson, county Republican chairman at the time. “It’s not going to be a slam dunk for Democrats anymore.”
For the most part since then, Brown County has continued to trend red, following the majority of the state.
The 2008 election — with the Barack Obama/John McCain presidential race on the ballot — was the most balanced the results have been since then. Votes were nearly evenly split up and down the ballot, with seven Republicans and eight Democrats winning this county among national, state and local offices. Obama, of course, won the presidency that year; McCain won Brown County, but only by 208 votes.
Brown County Democratic Party Chairman Rick Bond still remembers the election night 40 years ago when his dad — also party chairman back then — came into their living room and told him Democrats had won everything but an advisory board seat.
Since then, a lot of the old-time Democrats have died or moved away, he said. Even his friends — who are considered “strong Democrats” where they moved — won’t come back because Brown County is “too Republican,” he said.
Now, it’s getting tough to get Democrat candidates to run in Brown County. Bond focused this year on getting the core five — four county council seats and commissioner, who have control of the county’s finances.
“I really thought that we were going to win them, all five of them,” he said. “I thought there were lots of issues out there that the county council has that money never should have been spent. I had candidates come to me and say, ‘I knocked on these people’s doors and they knew nothing about Maple Leaf (county-owned performing arts center under construction). Never even heard of it.’ But they’re going to vote. How can you not know about the Maple Leaf situation?
“So, this proves to me that they’re not reading,” he said. “… They don’t know what’s actually going on in the county. … And there, I think, is the problem: People that are not learning who the people are that are running for office.”
Straight tickets
Over the past 10 years, straight-ticket voting — automatically voting for all members of a particular party — has been on a fairly steady upward march.
In 2008, 18 percent of Brown County voters voted straight-ticket; 55 percent of them were Republican, 43 percent Democrat and 2 percent Libertarian.
This year, 56.7 percent of voters chose to vote strictly along party lines. Republican ballots were 65.6 percent of that total, 33.3 percent were Democrat and 1.1 percent were Libertarian.
Melissa Myers voted straight-ticket this time because “what party you choose to affiliate with says a lot about how you are going approach life, people and major issues,” she said on a newspaper Facebook post devoted to that topic.
“How can I expect someone to have respect for me and my special needs child if they don’t respect the life of a tiny, helpless, defenseless baby?” she wrote. Sixteen people showed agreement with a “like.”
“I don’t vote blindly or ignorantly, I do research,” she added. “If I don’t care for the Republican candidate, I withhold my vote for that race. But what I said above is definitely my standard.”
Kate May said she voted straight-ticket for the first time because she didn’t like the way Republicans had “aligned themselves,” racially speaking.
Party is one basis for Eve Bare’s decisions, but it only pushes her if she doesn’t know about the candidate in particular. “Never straight ticket, but I do the research if I can,” she wrote. “Party is my default, if that makes sense.”
Most of the 52 people who answered that question on Facebook said they never vote straight-party; they vote for the individuals they think will do the best job.
In this election, 2,600 Brown Countians voted straight-party Republican and 1,319 voted straight-party Democrat. Forty-five people voted straight-party Libertarian, though there were only three Libertarians on the ballot.
Two incumbents who lost, Democrats Brenda Woods and Beth Mulry, said they believe straight-party voting was a factor based on their margin of loss — 421 votes in Woods’ race and 397 in Mulry’s.
“I think I had support from both sides, just not enough to pull me through,” said Woods, who’s worked in the clerk’s office since 2005.
“If we voted the candidate, then I don’t know if the outcome would have been any different, but I think when you get within that margin of straight-party votes, then you’re definitely affected by straight-party,” Mulry said.
Even as a party chairman, Bowman said he doesn’t like to see so many voters choosing the straight-party option. To him, that shows voters lack knowledge about the candidates. The choice listed from one’s own party isn’t always automatically the best choice for the job, he said.
“We need to protect the community with the best people, not just because you have a favoritism towards a certain party,” he said. “I view local elections totally separate. Obviously, you want your voters to vote for the best person even statewide and nationally too, but locally, it really affects us all.”
Bond said that if straight-ticket would have gone the way of the Democrats, he would have been fine with it, “because I would have put up the best candidates. I believe I had the best candidates.
“I had the best county auditor in the state of Indiana get beat. The clerk’s office … I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “I just don’t know how to explain it.”
Why is it partisan?
Most candidates on this year’s ballot were associated with a political party. However, town council and school board members ran nonpartisan races.
School board elections are nonpartisan according to state law, said Brad King, co-director of the Indiana Election Division.
However, town and city council members can affiliate with a party, he said. “The General Assembly has enacted legislation that requires town or city council offices to be elected in a partisan election, if a candidate chooses to run as the candidate of a political party.” he wrote.
“In some small towns, it has become a tradition for candidates to run as ‘independent’ or ‘citizens party’ candidates, but if a candidate wished to run as a candidate of a political party, that is the candidate’s choice. Under state law, the municipality could not prevent that,” he wrote.
Some voters this election cycle have questioned why some offices are partisan at all, especially ones such as judge, prosecutor and sheriff which require the officeholder to interpret and execute laws fairly.
Basically, they are that way because they’ve always been that way.
“The question of whether to elect the offices you mention, or others, by using a partisan process is a policy decision made by the Indiana General Assembly when it enacts election laws,” King wrote. “Generally speaking, these offices have been elected on a partisan basis since political parties began to be organized following the 1824 election.”
However, a community couldn’t just decide that it didn’t want to do partisan elections anymore. That would require a change in state law, he said.
“The ‘home rule’ powers of a local government do not include the power to ‘order or conduct an election, except as expressly provided by [state] statute,” he wrote. “Therefore, a legislator would have to introduce a bill in the General Assembly to provide for any such change, and then persuade a majority of both chambers to adopt the bill for consideration by the governor.”
Town council candidates Nancy Crocker and Anna Hofstetter, who won their first elections this year, said they loved not affiliating with a party. Town elections have traditionally been nonpartisan.
Crocker would like to see county elections be nonpartisan as well.
“In the Constitution, it doesn’t say we have to vote for a party,” she said.
Hofstetter said being an independent required her to campaign harder and help voters realize what she stood for, and she was happy to do that rather than win on name recognition or party affiliation.
“I feel strongly about the two-party system; it inherently brings division and what we need is unity,” she said.
“There is no Democratic or Republican way of cleaning the streets,” she added, quoting Fiorello LaGuardia, a Depression-era New York mayor.
It hasn’t been unheard of for local candidates to switch party affiliations — even midway through their campaigns.
Most recently, during this spring’s primary, Ron Sanders, a former Democrat township trustee, ran for county commissioner in the Republican primary.
Party switches happened twice in 2008. Mid-campaign, county council candidate Jerry Pittman switched from Democrat to Republican because he appeared in a political ad alongside Republicans under the banner “Leadership you can trust,” and was denounced by Democratic Party leadership, according to newspaper archives. In 2016, he was elected county commissioner as a Republican.
David Rudd went the other way in 2008 when he was in his third term as a county councilman because he was concerned that local Republicans weren’t listening to their constituents. He won re-election to a fourth term that year as a Democrat.
“Ultimately, government is about people, not politics,” Rudd told the newspaper in 2008.
[sc:pullout-title pullout-title=”How was voter turnout?” ][sc:pullout-text-begin]
- Turnout for this election was 56.7 percent — not a record overall, but on par with turnouts for elections since 2008. The record in that time period was 64 percent for the 2016 presidential election.
- It was, however, a record year for turnout for a midterm election — one that doesn’t coincide with a presidential election.
- Early voting didn’t set a record, but it wasn’t far off. In the 2016 general election, 3,037 people voted early; this time, 2,598 voters did. The highest early-voter turnout before 2016 was in the 2012 general election, at 2,162.
- Early-voting results did not reflect the end totals for several candidates. When absentee votes were released early in the evening on Election Day, Brenda Woods, Beth Mulry, Kyle Birkemeier, Roger Kelso, Paul Hardin, Stefanie Gore and Arthur Omberg were winning; all eventually lost when the votes cast on Election Day were counted.
- Jackson 2 was the precinct with the highest turnout, at 66.88 percent.
- Washington 3 had the lowest turnout, at 35.57 percent.
