Indiana Republicans in disarray and the risk of intra-executive branch drama
Saturday's Republican convention picked a lieutenant-gubernatorial nominee who wants to be a check on gubernatorial nominee Mike Braun
On Saturday, delegates to the Indiana Republican Party’s convention saddled Senator Mike Braun, the party’s nominee for Governor, with a running mate with whom he assuredly does not want to govern. Braun wrapped up the Republican nomination on May 7, when he handily won the primary, but in Indiana, lieutenant-gubernatorial nominees are determined by party conventions. Prior to this weekend’s convention, Braun had endorsed State Representative Julie McGuire—as had Donald Trump.
But there was more than one candidate for the nomination. Delegates had the choice between McGuire and far-right Micah Beckwith instead. Beckwith, a self-professed Christian nationalist, campaigned as being a check against Braun when in office—“I will not be a rubber stamp Lt. Governor,” he declared. In the end, Beckwith narrowly defeated McGuire, receiving 891 votes to her 828. Braun feigned satisfaction with the result thereafter, but he’s clearly not a happy man about this unexpected arrangement. It’s also possible that Beckwith’s nomination might give Braun trouble in the general election, but that remains to be seen.
That executives don’t always have happy relationships with their deputies is not, itself, a revelation. But in a state like Indiana, it’s unusual—though the state has used post-primary political conventions to nominate lieutenant-gubernatorial candidates since 1981, the gubernatorial nominees have usually dictated to the convention who their preferred running mate is, which has then been rubber-stamped by the convention delegates. So the fact that the convention rejected Braun’s choice and instead picked someone who pledged to antagonize Braun is surprising.
In other states, intra-executive branch divisions are almost guaranteed. Seventeen states elect governors and lieutenant governors entirely separately, creating the possibility that a state might have a governor of one party and a lieutenant governor of another. (Seven other states don’t have a lieutenant governor at all.)
Yet of the remaining twenty-six states that elect governors and lieutenant governors on the same ticket, a surprising number open the door to internal divisions within the same ticket. Though not all of these states have seen these divisions take place, growing ideological polarization and divides between party establishments and grassroots seem to increase the likelihood of these divisions going forward.
The idea of electing governors and lieutenant governors on the same ticket is surprisingly new. First, though lieutenant governors are ubiquitous state officials today, they haven’t always been. It wasn’t until the 1850s that most states had elected lieutenant governors.
But even in the states that have had lieutenant governors for a while, team-ticket elections are still quite new. The Twelfth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provided for team-ticket elections for President and Vice President and was ratified in 1804—yet the first state to elect its governor and lieutenant governor on the same ticket did not do so until 1954.
New York was the first state to adopt team-ticket elections, which it did with a 1953 amendment to its state constitution. The state held its first team-ticket election in 1954, and the winning duo—Averell Harriman and Georga DeLuca—were inaugurated in 1955. From there, the idea spread pretty quickly. Within about twenty years, 40 percent of states had governors and lieutenant governors who had been elected together.
Electing the governor and lieutenant governor together helped reduce the possibility of intra-branch divisions—and also reduced the odds that a governor of one party might be succeeded by a lieutenant governor of another party. Yet the possibility for divisions, while reduced, absolutely continued with team-ticket elections.
Though states quickly adopted the team-ticket model of electing governors and lieutenant governors, few of them seemed to contemplate what the best way to do so was. As a result, most of the early states to use team-ticket elections nominated the governor and lieutenant governor in separate primaries.1 Over time, this practice has fallen out of favor.
Today, of the twenty-six states that use team-ticket elections:
15 allow the gubernatorial nominees to pick their running mates
7 nominate the gubernatorial and lieutenant-gubernatorial nominees in separate primaries
4 nominate the gubernatorial nominee in a primary and the lieutenant-gubernatorial nominee in a convention
In other words, 11 states put the identity of the gubernatorial nominee’s running mate beyond their total control.
Historically, separate primaries been likeliest to produce statewide tickets with internal divisions. Illinois has seen some of the most prominent examples of this. In 1986, when an acolyte of Lyndon LaRouche won the Democratic nomination for Lieutenant Governor of Illinois, the Democratic nominee for Governor, Adlai Stevenson III, refused to run on the same ticket with him. Stevenson then formed a third party—the Solidarity Party—and reformed the ticket, but ultimately lost. Then, in 2010, Scott Lee Cohen won the Democratic primary for Lieutenant Governor with just 26 percent of the vote. When Cohen faced allegations of domestic violence, the Democratic establishment called on him to drop out of the race—which Cohen ultimately agreed to do, allowing the party to replace him on the ticket. The entire debacle persuaded the state legislature to replace the lieutenant-gubernatorial primary with pre-primary selection by gubernatorial candidates in 2011. Other states have seen similar, but far less dramatic, episodes that have motivated similar changes. Even here, however, while gubernatorial nominees are deprived of the ability to personally select their running mates, actual conflict is comparatively rare.
Will that continue, though? Gubernatorial primaries are usually high-profile affairs, and the ideological stakes are pretty clear. It’s impossible to say the same of lieutenant-gubernatorial primaries. There are occasions in which a gubernatorial candidate might try to form an informal “ticket” with a lieutenant-gubernatorial candidate, but there are huge risks in doing so. While Republican primary voters aren’t shy about picking extreme candidates even for important races in swing states, there are moments when the pressure to nominate the establishment’s preferred candidate wins out. In these cases, however, they might be more willing to “balance” the ticket by picking an antagonistic candidate for lieutenant governor. (Or, at least, one could imagine that there might be a market for such a candidate.)
On the other hand, the idea that conventions might produce similar drama has not been true in the past. In the four states—Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, and South Dakota—that use conventions to nominate lieutenant-gubernatorial nominees, the convention delegates have usually rubber-stamped the gubernatorial nominees’ selection.
Yet that might be changing. In many states, there is a significant ideological divide between the people who attend state party conventions and those who vote in primary elections—in that convention attendees are usually more extreme than primary voters. This has been most noticeable in Colorado and Utah, where Republican conventions have endorsed candidates that have been subsequently rejected by primary voters. Twice in the last decade, incumbent governors in Utah have been defeated at state party conventions. In 2016, Governor Gary Herbert was narrowly defeated, 55-44%, by Overstock.com executive Jonathan Johnson at the convention, yet defeated Johnson in a landslide in the primary election. This year, incumbent Governor Spencer Cox was defeated by State Representative Phil Lyman at the convention in a landslide margin, 68-32%, yet most polling shows Cox comfortably ahead.
A similar dynamic could have played out in Michigan in 2022. After Tudor Dixon won the Republican primary for Governor of Michigan, she picked former State Representative Shane Hernandez as her running mate. But Hernandez had to be formally nominated by the state party convention, and he faced an opposition campaign from delegates who doubted whether he was conservative enough. Hernandez ultimately won approval from 80 percent of convention delegates, avoiding a drawn-out convention fight. Yet if Hernandez had faced a better-organized opposition, the convention might well have picked a different nominee—the same convention nominated election deniers Matthew DePerno and Kristina Karamo for Attorney General and Secretary of State, respectively.
So while the rejection of Mike Braun’s hand-picked running mate by the Indiana Republican convention is likely the first example of how conventions could saddle gubernatorial nominees with more extreme running mates, there’s little reason to believe that it’s the last. Even if more mainstream Republican candidates win gubernatorial primaries, they might well be coupled in the general election with extreme running mates with polarizing views.
A more detailed note on this: state legislatures rarely opted into separate primaries. Instead, separate primaries took place because there was no other way under state law to conduct the elections. In most states with separately elected governors and lieutenant governors, the nominees of the major political parties were selected in primary elections. When team-ticket constitutional amendments were ratified, the governor and lieutenant governor were elected together in the general election—but the state laws providing for separate primaries were unaffected. As a result, separate primaries continued not because of any conscious choice, but because legislatures frequently didn’t rewrite state election laws after the team-ticket amendments passed.