Joe Donnelly is running hard against the wind in Trump country

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NEWBURGH, Ind.Up before dawn to greet the stream of workers arriving for their shift at a sprawling Alcoa aluminum plant, Sen. Joe Donnelly alluded to his challenges with blue-collar voters, a critical bloc that has shifted allegiances to President Trump.

The Democrat will have a hard time winning a second term without attracting a sufficient number of Trump supporters in once deep-blue Southern Indiana. The president is formidable here and throughout the state, a figure with the personal popularity and credibility of accomplishment to boost Republican campaigns and shield his party from the Democratic wave that threatens to crash ashore elsewhere.

“We just want to know that hard work counts; loving your country counts; looking out for one another counts; making sure we take care of our men and women in the armed services counts; that for all of us, we’ve invested everything we have in this incredible nation, and we want to know we’re being heard, and I think Donald Trump understood that,” Donnelly told the Washington Examiner on a recent August morning.

“I hope and believe I understand that every single day,” he said.

Wearing hard hats and toting lunch pails as they entered the Alcoa plant just outside of Evansville, the workers, some donning union attire, were cordial as Donnelly extended his hand and asked for their votes in the upcoming midterm election. There was talk about the baseball game the night before, and how the job was going. Some offered the senator a “Hey Joe, how you doing?”

But the region’s political makeover — more than a decade in the making, but solidified with Trump’s ascendance — has erected barriers between Donnelly and his constituency. “Are you a Republican?” one middle-aged worker asked the senator as he hurried toward the entry gates. After Donnelly told him that he was a Democrat, the man said: “Sorry buddy, you won’t get my vote.”

Donnelly is hustling across Indiana in a bid to outmaneuver Republican Mike Braun, a wealthy businessman and major employer in Jasper, about 90 minutes northeast of the Alcoa plant. In 2012, Donnelly, from up north near South Bend, won an open-seat race after his Republican opponent uttered a major gaffe about abortion in the closing days of the campaign that boosted the Democrat in the GOP-dominated Indianapolis suburbs.

The senator probably can’t rely on Braun to commit a similar mistake — although some Republicans worry Trump’s trade policies could boomerang on them.

So Donnelly is chasing crossover voters with centrist appeals to a bulky legislative record, putting a spotlight on the items in sync with the Trump agenda. The senator has distanced himself from key liberal positions, bragging that he’s voted with the White House 62 percent of the time, even more so on the president’s nominees.

Hoping to earn Republican voters’ forgiveness for opposing Trump’s tax overhaul and other signature measures, the senator is touting his work on bipartisan legislation to improve healthcare for military veterans; stem the opioid crisis; reduce the exodus of manufacturing jobs overseas; and the Right to Try Act, the law the president signed to make experimental drugs available to the terminally ill.

“My job is — I work for you. I’m the hired help,” Donnelly said during a town hall meeting with about 100 managers at the headquarters of OneMain Financial, a national firm specializing in small loans that is among the largest employers in Evansville, a city of about 120,000 nestled along the Ohio River in Southwest Indiana.

Of course, the first question posed to the incumbent after he promised to always prioritize what’s best for Indiana over the Trump agenda, was about Brett Kavanaugh, the president’s Supreme Court nominee. Yet another OneMain Financial employee asked Donnelly why he was a Democrat given that “it would be much easier for you to run with an ‘R’ behind your name” in Indiana.

The good news: Neither the self-described conservative Trump voter who asked about Kavanaugh and supports his confirmation, OneMain Financial lawyer Brad Chapman, nor policy analyst John East, who pointed out Donnelly’s problematic party affiliation, are opposed to voting for him.

“I’ve been favorably impressed, I’m certainly leaning towards him,” Chapman, 57, said.

Donnelly can also count on Pam Hart, 60, whom he met while making the rounds at lunchtime at The New White Steamer, an 81-year-old, cash-only burger joint and popular politician campaign stop along Main Street in Washington, Ind., a working class community in heavily Republican Daviess County.

Hart is a swing voter who backed Donnelly in 2012 but pulled the lever for Trump four years later. She’s a bit uncomfortable with the president’s behavior, saying “he seems to be wanting pick a scab every time he opens his mouth.” Still, Hart likes Trump’s work, and believes the country is better off for it. Crucially for Donnelly, that sentiment isn’t stopping her from sticking with him.

“He’s open-minded, he will listen. He will talk with both sides of the table, he’s not just straight line, and I like that,” said Hart, who works in a dental office.

Democratic energy here, as elsewhere, is high. The big question is whether Donnelly can attract enough independents and soft Republicans to build a winning coalition and hold off Braun. The senator’s healthcare pitch, centered around promises to preserve government protections for pre-existing conditions, is a big part of the message he’s leaning on to get it done.

It’s a tall order in a state that delivered 57 percent of its vote to Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, the former Indiana governor, and shows scant evidence of buyer’s remorse. What about Donnelly’s victory nearly six years ago? It was something of a fluke.

In a late October 2012 debate with Donnelly in that campaign, Republican nominee Richard Mourdock, then the state treasurer, declared his opposition to abortion in cases of rape and incest, saying: “I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

The comments were fatal. Mourdoch’s standing was irreparably damaged with swing voters, Republican voters in the conservative Indianapolis suburbs, and voters in loyal GOP counties in Central Indiana that he could have otherwise counted on to carry him to victory. Braun has never run for statewide office before, but appears savvier than Mourdock ever was.

Donnelly’s biggest supporters, though optimistic and convinced swing voters will rally to the Democrat, concede that he’s got a tough road to hoe.

“The politics of Indiana, obviously, have turned Republican,” said David Hadley, 68, a union activist and retired coal miner from Southern Indiana’s Warrick County. “It’s going to be a tight race, it’s going to be a tough race. If it follows party lines he probably would lose. I think that he would probably recognize that.”

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