Sabotage Fail
When Evan Bayh announced his retirement, it suddenly put a fringe Democratic candidate Tamyra d’Ippolito into the spotlight. In Indiana to qualify to be on the ballot, you need to gather 500 signatures from each of Indiana’s 9 Congressional districts. On the Democratic side, only Evan Bayh had qualified. On the Republican side, there are 5 candidates including former Senator Dan Coats and former U.S. Rep. John Hostettler.
Evan Bayh’s announcement was timed so that there would be no time for Republicans to find better candidates and so that the Democratic party could pick its own candidate and avoid a primary. The only possible spoiler – Tamyra d’Ippolito, who had been gathering signatures to run in the Democratic primary. If she could qualify for the ballot she would be the Democratic candidate. She announced that she was short only 1000 signatures to qualify with 1.5 days to gather them. Republicans sensed an opportunity, and not long after this came out the blog Red State published a post (“An Inconvenient Democrat: meet Tamyra d’Ippolito (IN)”) urging their readers in Indiana to help get d’Ippolito on the ballot.
d’Ippolito filed her petitions yesterday and failed to qualify for the ballot. Not only did she fall short, she fell way short:
Terry Burns, the Democratic member of the Board of Voter Registration in Marion County, Indiana, informs TPMDC that Tamyra d’Ippolito does not have the required ballot-petition signatures needed to run in the Democratic primary for Senate. In fact, he said, she hardly has any in his area.
…
“We received this morning three signatures. And that is all we have received, so she will not qualify to be on the ballot,” said Burns. He also added: “Once the noon deadline passes, that’s it.” In addition, only two of the signatures came from the 7th District — the other was from the 5th District, which is partially located within Marion County.
I guess the Red State effort fell short, huh? Democrats will choose their candidate and right now their top choice looks to be former Sheriff and current Rep. Brad Ellsworth. The Republicans will have to battle it out in a May primary. So, even though the possibility of a Republican pick-up of Indiana’s Senate seat is more likely, it certainly isn’t guaranteed.
There is progressive movement to draft “John Mellencamp” to replace Bayh!
JOhn Nichols in “The Nation” writes: Bayh traded on the gold plated legacy of his liberal father to promote “unnessary wars, free trade and misguided domestic policies”. Bayhs idea of bipartisanship was to call oneself a democrat in the caucas while promoting center right policies in the chamber. He worked to turn the Democratic Party into a kinder, gentler version of the GOP! What an opportunist!