Donnelly celebrates Senate win

INDIANAPOLIS — Hoosier Democrats, adorned with stickers and buttons and clutching bottles of beer, let out explosive cheers as Sen.-elect Joe Donnelly made his first appearance of the night.

“We love Joe! We love Joe!”

Surrounded by family, friends and supporters at the Indiana Democratic Party election watch party in Indianapolis, Donnelly promised to be a bipartisan senator on a polarized Capitol Hill.

“You gave us a chance, and what we said was we think the most important thing is Hoosier common sense going to Washington, D.C.,” Donnelly said to the assembled crowd.

He defeated Republican State Treasurer Richard Mourdock and Libertarian candidate Andrew Horning with just shy of 50 percent of the vote, although Mourdock had not conceded the race before Donnelly began celebrating.

The result wasn’t clear earlier in the night. Despite opinion polls reporting as high as an 11 percent lead for Donnelly last week, early election results showed Donnelly with a 2 percent margin of victory until just after 10 p.m.

The Donnelly and Mourdock campaigns had been neck-and-neck until the Oct. 23 senatorial debate, when a Mourdock statement about abortion policy gained national attention.

“I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that is something that God intended to happen,” Mourdock said in the debate.

In the weeks following, Mourdock lost a 5-point lead reported by Rasmussen Reports on Oct. 11, setting the stage for Tuesday night’s Donnelly victory.

“I think Donnelly is a moderate Democrat, a conservative Democrat and just a nice person,” said Mary Scifres Grabianowski, a Zionsville, Ind., schoolteacher and 1971-’72 IU Student Association president. “I believe he’ll work very well with others no matter what. He understands the legislative process and wants to get things done.”

Donnelly will replace longtime Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., in the Hoosier congressional delegation. Since Lugar was first elected in 1976, Hoosiers have elected three Democrats as governor and one Democrat to the U.S. Senate. Lugar has remained despite these shifts in state party voting patterns.

“I’m a lifelong Democrat,” Scifres Grabianowski said. “I’ve never actually voted for Lugar, but I’ve been proud to call him my senator. What Mourdock did to him in that primary was terrible.”

The Hoosier common sense platform Donnelly campaigned on echoed Lugar and former Sen. and Gov. Evan Bayh, who traveled with Donnelly during the final week of the campaign.

“He’s humble, he’s hardworking, he’s honest and he will do us right,” Bayh said Tuesday night. “It’s no secret that Washington needs a breath of fresh air, and that’s exactly what Joe Donnelly is going to provide. He understands that America can no longer be divided in red states and blue states.”

Donnelly is a member of the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of congressional Democrats with centrist ideologies and voting patterns. Lugar developed a similar bipartisan reputation in the Senate and was attacked by Mourdock advertisements for this during the May primary campaign.

“We have a tradition in Indiana in the United States Senate,” Donnelly said. “In that tradition are people like Richard Lugar and Evan Bayh, who work together, who only focus on what’s right for our country.”

After leaving the stage, Donnelly received a phone call from former President Bill Clinton, who campaigned for the senator-elect.

“Thank you so much for coming out with us and traveling with us,” Donnelly said. “Thank you so much, Mr. President.”

Indiana Democratic Party Chairman Dan Parker said the Donnelly campaign has been a long journey — more than a year in the making. In recent weeks, the Indiana Senate race has catapulted Donnelly, a U.S. House representative from northern Indiana, into the national spotlight.

Donnelly, though, is focused on the six-year term ahead. He said his top priority will be improving the economy through deficit reduction and increasing employment, and he plans to work closely with Lugar and Bayh while he prepares to join the Senate.
“My passion is jobs, and so I’ve been working on a bill, the America Works Act, over in the House,” Donnelly said. “And then, we obviously have big things ahead in terms of the budget deficit, and so I want to be part of the solution.”

The end of the Senate race focused largely on abortion, but Donnelly, a pro-life Democrat, explained his goal for Indiana to lead the nation as a state built on bipartisanship and common sense.

“We need to focus on moving forward, and we need to make sure we build everybody together in our state,” he said. “Our state is a model for the rest of the country, which is Hoosier common sense. We’re not about partisanship. We’re not about extremes. We’re about results.”