Bipartisan PAC Wants to ‘Jump-Start’ Political Marketplace
By Leslie Bonilla Muñiz
A bipartisan Indiana political action committee that aims to fund moderate political candidates, regardless of party affiliation, are hosting a kickoff event later this month. The goal? Tame polarizing partisanship into more collaborative, dialogue-heavy politics.
“We intend, through our PAC, to support candidates on either side of the spectrum, Republicans or Democrats, who we think represent more moderate values — not necessarily moderate views, politically, but moderate values,” said ReCenter Indiana President Donald Knebel, a Democrat and retired Barnes & Thornburg partner.
That means, he said, candidates who are “willing to debate, willing to get engaged in bipartisan discussions, willing to stop name-calling, … those kinds of things.”
Knebel and Republican Jim Obermaier, a longtime politico and ReCenter board member, said they’re noticing both political candidates and everyday Hoosiers of all parties drawing further from the center.
The PAC, the duo said, will fund moderate candidates so they don’t have to appeal to extreme, but wealthy, organizations and individuals — thus providing moderate voters more options. It’ll also recruit candidates on a bipartisan basis.
“In my mind, it’s about really jumpstarting the [political] marketplace to work the way the marketplace is supposed to work,” Obermaier said.
ReCenter will officially launch at an invite-only event September 22 but filed campaign finance paperwork earlier this year.
Knebel declined to specify a fundraising goal but said he thought it was “realistic.”
He and Obermaier are assembling a bipartisan board of directors and advisory board; they’re adding members in Democrat-Republican pairs to keep the numbers even, and will have at least one member affiliated with a different political party.
They’re hoping to be a factor in the fast-approaching November elections, but will otherwise focus on elections in 2023.
The PAC will be joined by 501(c)(3) nonprofit ReCenter Indiana Inc., which will emphasize voter education. For instance, it will explain that voters of any political affiliation can vote in either Democratic or Republican primaries for a moderating effect.
Knebel said he’s gotten pushback from a small number of Democrats and Republicans who couldn’t stomach their dollars going to candidates of the other party — or who couldn’t be public about their support for such an initiative. But the feedback overall, he said, has been overwhelmingly positive.
Adrianne Slash, one of ReCenter’s Republican board members, said the decision to join was a no-brainer.
Slash said she worked for the Indiana Republican Party on a Carl Brizzi campaign after graduating college in 2006, and has spent about a decade participating in nonpartisan initiatives for specific issues. But her a-ha moment came when she was recruited to run as a Republican in Indianapolis’ 2015 City-County Council election.
“I realized that there is no Republican or Democrat way to plow snow, or to provide constituent services,” Slash said. “But there could be different ways that you go about creating legislative initiatives, potentially. There’s not one side to the answers.”
“I was running as a Republican, but most people assume that because I was a Black woman that I was a Democrat,” she said. “And on Election Day, every person I’d meet at the polls would say, ‘You tried to trick me into voting for a Republican.’ And the answer is no … I wanted you to see me as worth your support.”
“This comes down to how we are trained to participate in politics,” Slash said. “… I think that a lot of times we were just trained to go one way when … our civic responsibility is hiring the best person for the job.”
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