On primary night, with less than a handful of votes separating them, Indiana Sen. Spencer Deery, R-West Lafayette, and his Republican challenger Paul Copenhaver both declared victory.
At the time, only three votes separated them, with Deery on top.
Since then, he’s added another vote to his total, pushing him up to a tentative — oh so tentative — four-ballot lead.
I know there’s a legal theory that argues that a candidate in a tightly contested election — particularly one with a lead, however temporary that lead might be — should declare victory. The thinking is that doing so creates an implied presumption and forces the other candidate to bear the burden of proving otherwise.
Even so, declaring that one has won a race that anyone with more than two functioning brain cells could see was headed to a series of recounts strikes me as absurd.
But, then again, we live in absurd times.
We have one battle after another over things that make no sense and that gain even the victors little or nothing, even in symbolic terms.
This primary election’s results are but the latest example.
President Donald Trump and his allies — the most prominent of them being Gov. Mike Braun, Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith and U.S. Sen. Jim Banks, R-Indiana — spent both financial and political capital freely to punish seven Republican members of the Indiana Senate for defying the Donald’s will. Those seven GOP lawmakers chose to honor the wishes of their constituents when it came to adopting the president’s desperate and quite possibly illegal plan to redraw the lines defining Indiana’s congressional districts in the middle of a decade.
Their constituents’ wishes.
Not Trump’s.
That, in addition to possibly being illegal, the president’s plan also was a bad one that could have blown up in his face or that of the Indiana Republican Party never seemed to trouble Trump and company.
Indiana is a solidly Republican state with 57% of Hoosiers who voted in 2024’s congressional races casting their ballots for GOP candidates. Moving some of those voters in an attempt to pick up an extra seat in Congress could result in Indiana’s 7-2 Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives shifting to 6-3 or 5-4 just as easily as it could produce Trump’s desired 8-1 or 9-0 outcome.
But being right has never been Trump’s priority — or that of his Hoosier lackeys.
Being in charge has.
Even if the Republican members of the Indiana Senate had good reason for defying Trump — even if they might have saved him from himself — they still had to be punished.
So, he and his Indiana bootlickers spent at least $14 million targeting those seven lawmakers.
It’s important to remember how that money wasn’t spent.
It wasn’t spent battling Democrats, the purported opponents of Trump, Braun, Beckwith and Banks. Nor was it spent attacking the inflation and economic insecurity that are the primary worries of this state’s citizens.
In fact, it wasn’t spent pushing for any larger policy goal. It wasn’t spent in the service of lowering prices at the gas pump or grocery store, building better schools, putting more police on the street or making health care more affordable for Hoosiers.
No, it was spent to vent this president’s highly developed sense of pique, his capacity for petty resentment.
It was spent attacking his friends — waging war on members of his own party.
Afterward, when the president and his Indiana pawns had succeeded in telling other Republicans not to vote for the GOP anymore, they did happy dances.
This just highlights the absurdity of this age.
Because Donald Trump and his followers stand for nothing other than establishing their own dominance, even their supposed “victories” often are defeats. The circularity of their mission — we fight to dominate to prove we are dominant — shrinks the circle with each rotation.
So, it’s not surprising that both Spencer Deery and Paula Copenhaver declared victory when any sane, sentient person would have said:
“Elections are the day when the voters’ voices must be heard. These results are too close to call, so we must check the count carefully and wait patiently to determine what the voters have said.”
But doing that and saying that would make sense.
And making sense just isn’t acceptable in Donald Trump’s America.