The Waterman Candidacy (?)

Probably not so much a question mark anymore; word I hear is that he is serious and he is running.

And with a bit of help from grassroots conservative email and mailing lists, to say nothing of angry and disaffected Republican base voters, he'll have no trouble getting the necessary signatures (and those lists will yield him enough money to be a serious spoiler).

Kurt Luidhardt doesn't think so:

Mitch Daniels is a great Governor. Despite suggesting some things I would rather not see happen, I think he should be resoundingly re-elected.

Daniels is a good governor, but if you had told me in the fall of 2004 that the winner of the election was going to raise the sales tax, hike taxes on cigarettes, enact new government health care and education programs, expand gambling, and ignore social conservative issues, I would have told you that Joe Kernan won the election.

Despite what the Dems want you to believe, Waterman is not a major (and maybe not even a minor) challenge to the Governor- even as an independent candidate for Governor. I find that opposition to the Guv (where it exists) is strong among certain people due to the toll road or Daylight Savings Time. Waterman just gives people two places to go instead of one. In addition, he'll never have enough money to garner more than a small percentage of the vote.

This is sadly misinformed. In this area, there is deep and abiding opposition to the Governor, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the toll road or Daylight Savings Time.

Get outside of the mile square, and better yet outside of the Indy media market, and you find a world and a political environment that is very different from the one that most Indianapolis pundits and politicos dwell in; it might as well be an entirely different state.

Can Waterman win? Almost certainly not.

Will he give angry Republicans and conservatives an alternative that they did not have before? Yes.

Will that alternative harm Mitch Daniels' reelection prospects? Yes; potentially fatally. See more below.

Even if Waterman was a strong challenger, Jill Long Thompson will have a hard time winning enough votes in Southern Indiana and other rural counties. Keep in mind, when the Dems win Indiana it's not with a candidate who looks more like San Francisco then Jasper. People like Congressmen Brad Ellsworth and Joe Donnelly that vote pro-life frequently and support gun rights. In this case, the Dems went with a candidate that will make Andre Carson look Conservative.

What is saving Mitch Daniels is that conservatives (and base Republicans) that are unhappy or even angry with him have nowhere to go. He didn't have a primary challenger, and has been able for four years to take his party and its base for granted (and that doesn't leave many of them happy).

But the moment that those that are upset with Mitch have somewhere to go, a good proportion of them are going to leave him in a heartbeat.

They won't leave the GOP in droves sufficient to make Waterman the next governor of the state of Indiana, but enough of them will leave it to put Jill Long Thompson in the big office at the State House.

And Mitch will have done it all to himself.