Brian Howey

In the coming days or weeks, Mitch Daniels will make a decision about whether to return to politics by running for the Senate seat Mike Braun is vacating to seek the open governor seat. After serving as White House budget director, then two terms as Indiana governor followed by a decade at the helm of…

When it comes to switching parties, the list is a long one and recently dominated by the Southland, which in the wake of the 1965 Great Society Voting Rights Act prompted an overt migration from the Democratic to the Republican party, as President Lyndon B. Johnson aptly predicted. The list includes some titanic American figures,…

When my State Affairs Indiana colleague Kaitlin Lange asked Gov. Eric Holcomb what he was playing on his Spotify music list, he responded, “Feeling Stronger Every Day” by the legendary rock band Chicago. It was a revealing answer because after U.S. Sen. Mike Braun announced he would seek the open governor’s seat in 2024, I…

It’s been a little more than three years since Andrew Luck shocked the wide, wide world of sports when he retired as a 29-year-old star seemingly at the top of his game two weeks before the season was to begin. What is clear is that the Indianapolis Colts have been plunged into quarterback purgatory, cycling…

To understand Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch’s governing philosophy, one only needs to look south of the Ford Center to the beautiful Stone Family Center for Health Sciences that houses the Indiana University School of Medicine’s southernmost regional campus. In 2012, then-State Rep. Crouch was in the process of dealing with a rare career setback. When…

In mid-May 2003, in what Howey Politics described as “Mitch Mania during Mitch Week,” it was President George W. Bush who coined the political slogan for a Hoosier generation. Daniels was the man of the hour when President Bush came to the Indiana State Fairgrounds. Bush lauded Daniels, his departing OMB director as “my man…

Did Mike Pence save the republic and American democracy? What we didn’t realize last June when the House Jan. 6 Committee began its hearings was that it was the recalcitrance of Vice President Pence that kept the American democracy as we knew it from unraveling before our disbelieving eyes. We didn’t realize that if Pence…

In gauging the dynamic of Trump/Pence 3.0, look no further than star-struck U.S. Rep. Jim Banks. “Donald Trump remains a very popular figure in the Republican Party in each corner of the country,” Banks told “Fox News Sunday” last weekend in the aftermath of Nov. 8. “I believe that Donald Trump was a very effective…

Indiana remains, essentially, a one-party state after Tuesday’s mid-term election. Republicans are poised to increase their state Senate and House super majorities; elected Diego Morales as secretary of state by a 14 percent plurality despite numerous allegations of vote fraud and sexual harassment, and came within several points of picking off the 1st Congressional District…

What do you get when you cross an elephant with RINO? It’s an ancient joke with a contemporary twist, with the answer rhyming with “Hell if I know!” But that seems to be the final homestretch tagline from pundits and operatives. As journalist Mark McKinnon observed on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” earlier this week, “Things are…