The Loneliest Democrat in Trump Country
Meet Joe Donnelly, the nation’s most vulnerable senator, who frustrates Democrats and Republicans alike. Can he survive this hyper-partisan era?
By ADAM WREN December 05, 2017
CROWN POINT, Indiana—Joe Donnelly was in a tight spot. It was a cold November night in northwestern Indiana, and the Senate’s most vulnerable Democrat had spent nearly 12 hours on the road, ensconced on a couch in a 15-year-old, 2002 Indiana-made Forest River Georgetown RV. “It’s something that people of this state like, and we got a good deal,” the notoriously thrifty Donnelly had told me of the rig, as he swigged a cup of gas station coffee and we split a bag of caramel corn he had purchased earlier that day from Indianapolis City Market.
On that busy Friday, he had already shuttled from an 8 a.m Veteran’s Day breakfast at a YMCA in Lebanon to a Farm Bill listening session 100 miles north in the small town of Plymouth that afternoon. And now, as the temperature fell to 26 degrees and Donnelly wrapped up his last stop, a high school playoff football game in Crown Point, the only thing that stood between him and a steaming plate of meatloaf and mashed potatoes with his wife Jill was a frosty hour and a half ride back in the heatless RV to his home in Granger. But as the senator returned to the RV from the stadium, he noticed a small problem. What had been an empty parking lot more than an hour ago had filled up with cars, all but blocking his exit.
Donnelly, a 62-year-old former general practice attorney who has the affable awkwardness of a sitcom dad, enlisted a few nearby volunteer traffic directors. His driver, deputy political director Mike Lindburg, and some other staffers spent the next few minutes strategizing how to back out. The Forest River ambled backward and forward. By now, I had returned to my own car, where I watched the scene unfold. Wearing a Fitbit on one wrist, a black wool overcoat and a navy blue Hoosier Veterans Assistance Foundation sweatshirt, which he had pulled over a blue collared dress shirt at a gas station somewhere off Highway 30, mussing up his dark brown hair, Donnelly swung a side door open, inspected the margin between a nearby car and the RV’s back end, and mouthed imperceptible instructions to his driver. How would they get out of this one? Finally, after another minute or two, the 32-foot RV managed to magically shimmy of what had seemed minutes ago to be an impossibly narrow space.
It was a familiar exercise for the first-term senator, this shimmy. An incumbent Democrat in a state Donald Trump won by 19 points, Donnelly is constantly dogged by Republicans aiming to unseat him when he runs for reelection next November, including House Republicans Todd Rokita and Luke Messer. An America Rising tracker who only identified himself to me as Randy literally stalks Donnelly’s in-state events, lying in wait for a gaffe. On the other side, Donnelly faces disgruntled Democrats who think he’s far too conservative. A fiscal and military hawk who shares the president’s views on trade, Donnelly is the nation’s second most moderate senator, according to an April study released by the Lugar Center and the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. That means he’s a more finely tuned weathervane than any poll or political pundit, a one-man focus group. So if you want to know which way the political winds are blowing—who’s going to triumph in the upcoming midterms, and perhaps beyond—you need to watch Joe Donnelly.
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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/12/05/the-loneliest-democrat-in-trump-country-216012