Indiana Senate Race: It's MAGA-Man Banks vs. 'Our Very Own Mitt Romney'

In the last 48 hours, the all-important Republican primary to succeed Indiana’s outgoing GOP Sen. Mike Braun is shaping up as one of the proverbial “fights for the soul of the Republican Party.”

On Monday, MAGA (Make America Great Again) Republican Rep. Jim Banks declared for the Senate nomination. In vowing to fight “radical socialist Democrats” and hailing Donald Trump as “the strongest president in my lifetime,” Banks, past chairman of the conservative House Republican Study Committee, made it clear where he is coming from politically.

His announcement came days after former two-term Gov. Mitch Daniels sent strong signals that he was also eyeing the Senate primary in May of 2024.

“He’s like our very own Mitt Romney,” is how one veteran Hoosier Republican characterized Daniels, likening him to their party’s 2012 presidential nominee who is now U.S. Senator from Utah.

Daniels, 70 and now president of Purdue (Ind.) University, had a generally conservative record as governor and signed right-to-work into law.

But Daniels’ pedigree is very much that of an “establishment Republican” — from being the top aide to the late centrist Sen. Richard Lugar, R.-Ind and later Office of Management and Budget director under George W. Bush.

The analogy to Romney aside, many conservative Republicans actually promoted the Hoosier State governor for president in 2008 as an alternative to front-runner Romney. Daniels chose not to run.

Much as like fellow Republican Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and the late Democrat Terry Sanford of North Carolina, Daniels would enter the Senate in the latter part of his life after serving as governor and president of a major college.

Daniels began fueling greater talk of a race over the weekend, after the conservative Club for Growth unleashed a TV spot denouncing the former governor as “[a]n Old Guard Republican clinging to the old ways of the bad old days.”

Club President and former Indiana Republican Rep. Dave McIntosh signaled that there will be similar media broadsides against Daniels when and if he becomes a candidate.

The former governor is also under fire over his call more than a decade ago for a “truce” on cultural issues such as gun control. In an obvious reference to Daniels, Banks told Politico recently that “I’ll never be calling for a truce on social issues and cultural issues” and that issues such as abortion and gender “matter more than at any point in my life.”

Although the race is more than a year away, the contest between Jim Banks and Mitch Daniels is shaping up for now as one Republican nationwide — and the national press — will be watching closely.

John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.