Bailey, Young lead in funds

With less than one month until the May 6 primary election, candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives are deep into fundraising.

Incumbent Rep. Todd Young, R-9th District, and challenger Bill Bailey, a Democrat, have raised and spent more than the other five candidates running for the seat, according to quarterly filings with the U.S. Federal Election Commission.

Young, in particular, raised more than $200,000 from contributions in the first three months of the year, though this will be his third congressional election. Bailey has raised close to $5,000.

Young and Bailey’s fundraising advantage to this point is hard to compare to other candidates running for the seat. Most of the other people who have declared candidacy with the Indiana Election Division have not filed campaign finance data with the FEC for this quarter.

“The candidate listing is not campaign finance,” said Abbey Taylor with the Indiana Election Division. “They’re candidates in the state of Indiana, but they file their campaign finance with the Federal Election Commission.”

Candidates do not have to file a statement of candidacy or any campaign finance disclosures until they have raised or spent $5,000. Still others might have filed by mail, which takes two days to process. The deadline was Tuesday.

In the May 6 primary, voters will choose from a slate of candidates within a party, and the winners will run in the November general election.

Republican candidates are Young, Kathy Lowe-Heil and Mark Jones.

Young first won the seat in 2010 against then-incumbent Baron Hill, a Democrat.
Lowe-Heil is a Southern Indiana native and was a delegate to the state Republican Party in 2012, according to her campaign website.

Jones described himself as a fiscal conservative in a March primary debate.

Democratic candidates are Bailey, James McClure, J.S. Miller and William Thomas.
Bailey is a former Seymour mayor and Chamber of Commerce president.

McClure describes himself as a “Jeffersonian Anti-Federalist Democrat.”

Miller, who has filed expenditures with the FEC, was a policy analyst for six years at IU. Thomas’s campaign information could not be found online.