GOP insiders: Mike Braun has a big Micah Beckwith problem
GOP insiders: Mike Braun has a big Micah Beckwith problem
They believe the Indiana Republican gubernatorial nominee will end up having to run with far-right firebrand Beckwith as his lieutenant governor
Republican gubernatorial nominee Mike Braun and State Representative Julie McGuire, his pick for lieutenant governor, made headlines last weekend at a series of campaign events — dubbed the Freedom and Opportunity Tour — they appeared at across the state.
These meet-and-greets weren’t just for show. Unlike most of the party’s nominees, who were selected in the May primary, the lieutenant governor will be chosen by a vote of 1,814 delegates to the state convention in Indianapolis on June 15.
Traditionally, that’s just a formality, but this year, they will be choosing between McGuire and Noblesville-based pastor Micah Beckwith, who has been waging an outsider campaign since last summer.
The day after winning the primary for governor, Braun announced he preferred McGuire, a first-term state legislator from the Indianapolis area, to be his running mate. It was a clear sign that he did not want Beckwith to be his lieutenant governor, though publicly Braun has said he welcomes the competition.
Braun and McGuire’s events over the weekend were designed to pitch her to GOP convention delegates across the state. Saturday morning at the Hilton Garden Inn in Fort Wayne, they addressed a room of fifty Republicans – many sporting Julie McGuire for Lieutenant Governor stickers — and appeared confident that she would prevail over Beckwith at the convention. (In fact, Braun spoke much longer than McGuire did, and much of what he said was about his campaign, not hers.)
According to several GOP insiders I’ve spoken with, however, it is actually Beckwith — and not McGuire — who they think is likely to win the nomination.
One described for me the moment they realized McGuire was in trouble. They were speaking with a delegate they thought would be supporting McGuire “100 percent,” only to have that person say they were firmly committed to vote for Beckwith.
A pastor who courts controversy
Beckwith is a native of Hillsdale, Michigan who first moved to Indiana to attend Huntington University (then Huntington College) in 2001. He told a group of convention delegates at an event in Fort Wayne last night that his father invented Moose Tracks ice cream, and in an interview with Fort Wayne Politics afterwards, said his dad also worked on televangelist Pat Robertson’s 1988 presidential campaign in Michigan.
Now a pastor at Life Church in Noblesville, the younger Beckwith first made waves in the political scene in 2020, when he finished third in the GOP primary for Indiana’s 5th District Congressional that was won by then-state representative Victoria Spartz.
He put his faith front and center in that campaign, as he did in a series of Facebook Live videos he started doing before running for office. According to Beckwith, at one point those videos were garnering “about 150,000 views.” In one he posted after January 6th, he said God told him, “‘Micah…I sent those riots to Washington.’ He said, ‘What you saw yesterday was my hand at work.’”
In 2022, Beckwith was appointed to the Hamilton East Public Library Board of Trustees and quickly made waves, supporting a controversial policy requiring library staff to read thousands of books in the young adult section to determine if they should be re-shelved in the adult section.
The resulting controversy — which attracted the attention of Indianapolis-based best-selling author John Green — generated national headlines. Library staffers estimated they spent approximately $60,000 to move around 3,500 titles before the policy was suspended.
After a survey of community members revealed that only 1.4% wished to continue with the policy, the board rescinded it. Beckwith was the only board member who voted to keep the policy. Less than two months later, he resigned from the board.
Beckwith told the delegates at last night’s event that after his 2020 Congressional campaign, he approached the Hamilton County GOP and said he wanted to donate $5,000 from his leftover campaign funds to them. The party chair, he said, refused to accept his donation and told him “there is no place for you in the Hamilton County Republican Party.”
According to Beckwith, the chair said it was because he had been openly critical of Governor Eric Holcomb during COVID and “we don’t do that in the Republican Party.”
Beckwith said he responded, “Well, yeah we do now.”
After meeting with current Lieutenant Governor Suzanne Crouch during “the middle of this whole shutdown,” he said she revealed that she disagreed with Holcomb but couldn’t say that publicly because “I was appointed by Eric Holcomb,” Beckwith recounted.
“In that moment, I knew what God was calling me to do: to run for lieutenant governor, to force the conversation,” he said. “In the end, who does the lieutenant governor work for? Does the lieutenant governor work for the governor? Or does the lieutenant governor work for the people?”
Beckwith officially declared his candidacy exactly one year ago today. Attorney General Todd Rokita called him, he recalled, and said, “Micah, what you just did here today, brilliant. Brilliant. You just put the establishment between a rock and a hard place. You’re calling them to the mat to say, ‘Is this office really the people’s or is it the establishment’s?’”
McGuire’s uphill climb
Unlike Beckwith, who has had a full year to woo convention delegates, it’s only been four weeks since Braun announced McGuire as his lieutenant governor pick. Since then, she’s been playing catch up, calling “hundreds” of delegates each week, she told me, and meeting as many as she can at events across the state.
A first-term state representative, McGuire defeated incumbent Republican John Jacob in the 2022 primary for House District 93, which stretches from the southern part of Marion County into Johnson County.
At an event in Fort Wayne on Saturday, McGuire said State Senator Jack Sandlin, whom she worked for as a staffer, is the one who recruited her to primary Jacob. She said yes even though it was “outside my comfort zone.” According to campaign finance records, the House Republican Campaign Committee provided her at least $490,000 in support.
McGuire is aiming to be Indiana’s fourth consecutive elected female lieutenant governor, dating back to Becky Skillman, who was elected with Mitch Daniels in 2004. Sue Ellsperman was a first-term state representative like McGuire when Mike Pence tapped her to be his running mate in 2012. At the Fort Wayne event, Braun noted the similarity, saying Ellsperman had “a fairly productive career with some gyrations in there.”
In early 2016, Holcomb, who had been a candidate in the GOP primary to replace Dan Coats in the U.S. Senate, suddenly dropped out of the race. A month later, Ellsperman resigned her position as lieutenant governor to become president of Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana.
One longtime GOP insider told me that wasn’t a coincidence. “[Party leadership] made Ellsperman resign to put Holcomb in that position,” they said.
When Donald Trump selected Pence as his running mate that summer, the Indiana Republican Party’s Central Committee picked Holcomb to replace Pence as their nominee for governor. Holcomb then chose Crouch to run with him as lieutenant governor.
Crouch, the same insider said, has had it even worse than Ellsperman. “The treatment of Suzanne Crouch was just incredible,” they told me. “There seems to be this tradition now of nominating women that they can just walk over. Strong, capable women who don’t have their own power base that they can ignore.”
In an anti-establishment mood?
More important than how Braun and the leadership of the Indiana Republican Party treat McGuire is how she is viewed by the 1,814 convention delegates who will decide whether she’ll be the GOP’s lieutenant governor nominee.
If recent history is any indication, it might not be favorably.
In 2022, incumbent Secretary of State Holli Sullivan lost to challenger Diego Morales, despite Morales having been previously fired from a job in the Secretary of State’s office in 2009. Sullivan was the party leadership’s choice but only received 34 percent of the votes compared with Morales’ 52 percent.
That same year, Elise Nieshalla — another establishment candidate — narrowly lost the GOP nomination for state treasurer to Daniel Elliott, who was considered the outsider candidate.
“The people who want to run for [convention] delegate are people on the fringes of the party,” a longtime convention delegate told me in explaining those results. “They’re susceptible to someone like Micah.”
One longtime state legislator — who is also a delegate — agrees. “These people are going to be loyalists [to Beckwith]. They don’t like the establishment. They don’t like Mike Braun.”
That same person told me that, in addition to being seen as an institutional candidate, McGuire is hurt by being relatively unknown and lacking Beckwith’s presence and skill at retail politics. “I’ve had a number of people call me who said they’re not gonna support her.”
Being Braun’s handpicked choice also plays right into Beckwith’s main message to delegates: he, not McGuire, is an insurance policy against Braun betraying the party’s conservative principles.
“If you elect me to be your lieutenant governor on June 15th at the convention,” Beckwith told them last night, “you will know there’s going to be somebody in [Braun’s] ear that can see through all of this agenda, woke, leftist nonsense that’s being shoved down our throat.”
A veteran Republican leader told me they fear Beckwith will do just that, being a very public thorn in Braun’s side for four years and putting his re-election in jeopardy in 2028.
The state legislator I spoke with said they were afraid of the same thing.
“If Micah is the lieutenant governor, it’ll be an absolute shit show.”