Young said his opponent, U.S. Rep. Marlin Stutzman, earned respect and was a strong opponent.
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Five Republicans ran for the seat, including Attorney General Greg Zoeller, state senators Erin Houchin and Brent Waltz and businessman Robert Hall.
Young socked away a war chest and spent more than twice what Stutzman was able to raise, by positioning himself as a conservative Marine on the powerful House Ways and Means committee who advanced bills through the chamber.
Young served as a Marine intelligence officer.
But the deputy director of Marion County’s clerk’s office, Russell Hollis, says it’s too early to say whether turnout out is heavier than normal for the primary.
Young’s campaign almost foundered at the start when Democrats and Stutzman complained that he had failed to collect enough voter signatures from one congressional district to qualify for the ballot.
An AP investigation reported that Stutzman dipped into his campaign coffers to pay for a family vacation.
Candidates from both parties have traversed the state over the past two weeks, visiting local hotspots and flooding the airwaves with ads. As a result, Politico reports, “Young and his supporters have outspent Stutzman 9-to-1 on TV”.
“What sealed the deal was the drip, drip, drip of these finance stories”, said Indiana GOP consultant Pete Seat, a former spokesman for President George W. Bush.
But Hill says Young is still an ideologue and only looks pragmatic when compared to the most extreme of tea-party hardliners. Seat is not affiliated with either campaign. He also played up his membership in the House Freedom Caucus, a Republican faction that wanted to confront Democrats and made the GOP-controlled House so unruly that former House Speaker John Boehner resigned.
The shock among establishment figures of Trump’s rise has them concerned that not only will the wider public reject him in the presidential race, but that Republicans could also lose their slim majority in the Senate.
And among Stutzman’s base, that message resonated.
Endorsements for Young have come from such high-level officials as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Young’s campaign wasn’t without bumps. In February, the Stutzman campaign, along with the Indiana Democratic Party, challenged Young’s eligibility to be on the ballot. And that helped him overcome doubts about the campaign after its signature snafu. Rep. Casey Cox of Fort Wayne, who sponsored the law approved this year that bans abortions sought because of genetic abnormalities, was defeated by Dave Heine, a former executive with hardware retailer Do it Best Corp. Sen. Dan Coats called the challenge “unseemly” and threatened to rethink his neutrality in the race. The Young campaign used the incident to tie to Stutzman to the Democrats. The Club for Growth spent $12,392 for Stutzman and the Senate Conservative Fund spent $82,816.
Young and Stutzman grew more embittered as their campaigns wore on, fed in part by political action committees that supported one candidate or the other. Young was carrying 64 percent of the vote with about half of the vote counted.
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“Baron Hill has a habit of saying popular things here in IN, often conservative-sounding things”, Young says.
