Reticent Mitch Daniels walks to the line again, but bows out of Indiana Senate run

Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, widely considered a top-tier potential candidate for Indiana’s open Senate seat, announced Tuesday that he would not be running, dashing the hopes of the old GOP establishment, much as he did almost a dozen years ago when he declined a bid for the White House.

“After what I hope was adequate reflection, I’ve decided not to become a candidate for the U.S. Senate,” Daniels said in a statement. “With full credit and respect for the institution and those serving in it, I conclude it’s just not the job for me, not the town for me and not the life I want to live at this point.”

Daniels’s decision leaves Indiana Rep. Jim Banks as the lone candidate in the Republican primary for the seat being vacated by Sen. Mike Braun — for now.

For a few weeks, it appeared as though Indiana could serve as the stage for a showdown between the old Republican Party establishment embodied in leaders like Daniels, President George W. Bush’s former budget director, and the ascendant hard right of the party represented by Banks, who shot to prominence in the Trump era.

But after a jaunt through the Capitol last week and meetings with top Senate Republicans, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Daniels backed away. He said he would easily win but the fight just wasn’t for him.

Daniels made similar remarks when he stepped back from a White House run in the spring of 2011. (Four years later, he amended the comment to say he would have beaten Mitt Romney in the GOP primaries but would have likely lost to Barack Obama.)

“Mitch is a rare thinker, the likes of which we may not see again in our lifetimes. He has the ability to challenge the status quo without trashing those who think smaller thoughts,” veteran Indiana Republican strategist Mike Murphy tweeted Tuesday. “He didn't need to run to ‘be somebody.’ He is already the most consequential Hoosier of his time.”

Daniels has long been seen as a fighter, and during his time as Indiana governor from 2005 to 2013, he picked many fights that seemed impossible — including leasing the state’s toll road for 99 years with a cash windfall of $3.8 billion and instituting daylight saving time.

As he was leaning toward a White House bid in 2012, Daniels also picked a fight with the state’s unions — crafting new limits on collective bargaining for teachers and pushing a sweeping overhaul of the state’s education system and pushing a so-called right-to-work law.

His rare ability to drive an agenda as the chief executive of the state bolstered calls for him to run for president and served as a playbook for many top candidates who later jumped in the race in 2016, including then-Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and then-Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

But Daniels also struggled with competition. The key determinant in his decision against running in 2012 was his family. After he separated from his wife in the '90s, he raised his daughters in Indiana. He and his wife later reconciled, and she even took on a prominent role in the run-up to a possible 2012 race.

Tim Miller, then a young opposition researcher working for the 2012 presidential campaign of Jon Huntsman, which viewed Daniels as a critical threat, slipped details to reporters about the messy divorce. The day after Daniels announced he wouldn’t run, a withering piece detailing their divorce was published in RealClearPolitics.

It’s unlikely he would have faced a repeat of 2012 this go-round. Indiana Republicans who spoke with Yahoo News over the past week or so repeatedly said they believed Daniels would run only if the polling backed it up, and the party had changed dramatically since he left office years before Donald Trump overhauled the GOP.

But behind the scenes, opposition research on Daniels was being shopped to reporters again, this time regarding his decade-long tenure as president of Purdue University.

In bowing out of contention, he said he would never have served more than one six-year term in the Senate and would have focused on government spending — his usual territory.

“I would have tried to work on these matters in a way that might soften the harshness and personal vitriol that has infected our public square, rendering it not only repulsive to millions of Americans, but also less capable of effective action to meet our threats and seize our opportunities,” Daniels wrote.

Of course, getting to that point would have meant surviving a withering campaign filled with the exact same vitriol. The Club for Growth, helmed by veteran Indiana Republican David McIntosh, whom Daniels pushed out of the race for governor in 2004, gave Daniels an early taste of what would have been a grueling battle with an attack ad dubbing him a member of the “old guard” and supporting “big government.”

The group then endorsed Banks for Senate.