Former Sen. Dan Coats triumphed in Indiana’s Republican Senate primary Tuesday night, beating out two candidates who had sought to upend the longtime legislator by tapping into the energy of the national Tea Party movement.
Coats, who was heavily recruited into the Senate race by national Republicans, collected 39 percent of the vote, with nearly all precincts reporting. State Sen. Marlin Stutzman was second with 30 percent, and former Rep. John Hostetter was third with 22 percent.
Indiana was one of three states that held primaries Tuesday.
In Ohio, Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher bested Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner to win the Democratic Senate primary. He will face former Rep. Rob Portman, a Republican, in November.
Fisher has struggled badly to deliver on the initial promise of his candidacy, but national Democrats insisted that a staff shakeup several months ago had led to a turnaround. Fisher also benefited from Brunner’s inability to raise much campaign cash, which allowed him to run several weeks of TV ads with no response from his opponent.
In North Carolina, Secretary of State Elaine Marshall and former state Sen. Cal Cunningham are headed for a June 22 Democratic runoff after neither candidate broke 40 percent of the vote.
That result buys national Democrats a bit more time to assist Cunningham. The national party helped recruit Cunningham into the race under the belief that he was the candidate best equipped to beat Sen. Richard Burr, but he underperformed on the fundraising front and struggled to make up ground against the better-known Marshall.
Democrats view Burr, who won the seat in 2004, as one of the most vulnerable Republican incumbents in the country.
The Indiana race drew the most attention of all the races on Tuesday’s ballots because some cast it as a referendum on the power of the Tea Party movement. Coats’ victory came after a surprisingly difficult primary campaign in which he struggled to adjust to Democratic attacks on his past lobbying work, and to deflect a statement he made in 2008 that he planned to move to North Carolina when he retired.
Polling suggests that Coats starts the general election as a slight favorite, although Democrats insist that the problems he encountered in the primary will be magnified come November.
