Republicans are unifying around Rep. Jim Banks’s (R-IN) 2024 Senate bid despite primary day being over eight months away.
The Indiana Republican Party announced at its annual dinner on Thursday evening that the state GOP had given the Republican National Committee approval to finance Banks’s run before the general election. The rare move, announced by state party Chairman Kyle Hupfer in a speech at the dinner, marks a shift from the group’s historic precedent of staying neutral in primaries.
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“In layman’s terms, you can start calling him the presumptive nominee and the next United States senator from Indiana,” Hupfer said of Banks, who was in attendance as the keynote speaker.
“I’m proud to have your endorsement,” Banks said in response to the news. “When I go to Washington, D.C., as your United States senator, I won’t back down on fighting the fight every day for our conservative values. I’ll make you proud.”
“I promise you that I really don’t take it lightly, Mr. Chairman,” he added.
Banks has ostensibly cleared the GOP primary field in the race to replace outgoing Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN), who is leaving to run for governor of the Hoosier State. His sole challenger is John Rust, who chairs a major egg farm in the state, though Banks has secured every major endorsement a Republican primary hopeful could wish for.
Former President Donald Trump endorsed Banks, one of his most vocal allies in the House of Representatives, in February. Banks also has the support of the conservative Club for Growth, which has long feuded with the former president.
The Club for Growth, an influential conservative group that spent some $100 million in the 2022 cycle, launched an advertising blitz against former Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-IN) earlier this year as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, tried to recruit him into the 2024 race.
While it is unclear what motivated his decision, Daniels decided against challenging Banks for the GOP nomination.
Rep. Victoria Spartz’s (R-IN) name was also thrown around as a possible candidate in the Senate race, though she announced in February she would leave public office to spend time with her “two high school girls back home.”
Also in Banks’s corner is Donald Trump Jr., who, along with his father, has coordinated with Daines on primary endorsement strategy in hopes of avoiding another lackluster general election showing after Republicans underperformed expectations in the 2022 midterm elections.
Daines and McConnell got behind Banks’s candidacy after Daniels opted against running. Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-SD) endorsed Banks in March.
As of Friday, nine of their Senate GOP colleagues have gotten behind the Indiana congressman’s senatorial bid, including Sens. John Barrasso (R-WY), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Tom Cotton (R-AR), Kevin Cramer (R-ND), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), and J.D. Vance (R-OH).
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On the Democratic side, two candidates have gotten in the race thus far: Marc Carmichael, a former Indiana state representative who lost a House bid in 1996, and Keith Potts, an Indianapolis city councilor.
Former Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly, who lost the seat to Braun in 2019, and Ron Klain, President Joe Biden's former chief of staff, both declined to run this cycle.