Both Republican candidates claimed victory in the Indiana Senate District 23 primary before the final results were known. The vote was extraordinarily close, so there is going to be a recount, and we still don’t know who will be declared the winner. But I know who lost.
The voters of the 23rd District, which contains all of four counties, Warren, Fountain, Parke and Vermillion, and parts of Montgomery and Tippecanoe counties, including West Lafayette, home of Purdue University, lost. Our presence on the national political stage was a circus of absurd and false accusations and character assassination.
Each Republican candidate accused the other of being a “liberal.” I’m not sure why that is a term of opprobrium, but I know both candidates, and I can assure you that neither is a “liberal” in the contemporary American political sense. It is embarrassing that the impression that the rest of the country has received about us is that those who compete for political leadership here are like children brawling on a playground with no regard for the truth and disdain for the intelligence of the electorate.
The two Republican candidates have lost:
(1) Their ability to represent their constituents, because their campaigns have demonstrated that they completely lack any independence;
(2) Their integrity, because they have been bought by dark-money political action committees;
(3) Their credibility, because of the vicious and deception-filled advertising campaigns that they have run against each other; they certainly can never be trusted to tell the truth when disparaging their opponents again; and
(4) All right to public respect by each prematurely definitively declaring a triumph in a race that was not over.
Therefore, as the candidate who has maintained his independence, integrity, credibility and right to respect, I have distinguished myself from the Republican contenders. I don’t believe that the voters of the 23rd District will ultimately support candidates who have so compromised their dignity as to engage in such antics.
On election day, I spoke with many individuals who were planning to vote in the Republican primary. Overwhelmingly, the impression I was being given was that they were voting against one of the candidates rather than because they liked one of them. There is substantial evidence, for example, that the victory of Spencer Deery was dependent on voters who specifically opposed Paula Copenhaver and who will likely support Democrats in contested elections in November. On the other hand, for Copenhaver to be attempting to have voters interrogated about for whom they voted in the primary election and for whom they intend to vote in the general election is a total invasion of privacy and an undermining of the secrecy of the ballot.
It would appear that I am the candidate that would best represent both Republican and Democratic as well as independent voters, because I am focused on the issues that are important to the majority of all voters in the 23rd District: supporting home rule, opposition to state preemption, encouragement of citizen participation in governance, and opposition to the corporate welfare that uses our taxpayer money to bribe companies to site data centers, semiconductor plants, and carbon-dioxide storage facilities in communities that do not want them.
In the general election, I will continue to fight for clean water and against large-scale transfers of water, building on my success with allies across the political spectrum in terminating the LEAP pipeline from Tippecanoe County through the founding of the Stop the Water Steal movement. I will continue to advocate for high-quality health care, public education, and broadband internet and telephone service for the rural areas of the district.
Ultimately, there is only one candidate with both experience and independence; I am not a stand-in for either a former governor or a current lieutenant governor. The voters of District 23 deserve a senator who will serve only his constituents and not dark-money interests.
David Sanders is a Purdue professor and West Lafayette City Council member running this fall as a candidate for Indiana Senate District 23.
This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: Opinion: Indiana Senate candidate Sanders calls out primary rivals
Reporting by David Sanders, Lafayette Journal & Courier / Lafayette Journal & Courier
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By David Sanders, Lafayette Journal & Courier | USA TODAY Network
