U.S. Congress - Indiana's 2nd District
Incumbent: Joe Donnelly (D)
Challengers: Luke Puckett (R), Mark Vogel (L)
Indiana's 2nd congressional district covers north-central Indiana. South Bend and Notre Dame University are the most prominent fixtures in the district along with Kokomo due to a nice bit of gerrymandering.
Joe Donnelly was elected to the House in the 2006 elections and has aligned himself as a conservative, "Blue Dog" Democrat. He is pro-life and pro-gun rights. While he calls for fiscal responsibility, he did vote for the recent $700B bailout. He explains his vote here - remarking that it was needed to protect Americans' savings and that Wall Street will "get theirs".
Luke Puckett has no political experience to speak of, but won his primary handily earlier this year. He is a small businessman. Puckett's discussion of the issues paints him as a run-of-the-mill Republican. He calls for lower taxes, energy independence, pork reform, national security, immigration reform... nothing too surprising or inspiring.
Mark Vogel is the Libertarian Party's candidate. His website offers a good volume of content on his positions which echo the Ron Paul wing of the party. You can probably imagine how I feel about that, so I won't go into too much additional detail.
(One thing that strikes me in my research today on the first and second district is that the websites of the candidates are quite stale. There is hardly any discussion on the recent financial issues. It seems as if many of them haven't updated their websites for several weeks if not months. On the whole, they are poorly designed with inconsistent branding and navigation.)
Endorsement: Vogel
Prediction: Donnelly
No comments:
Post a Comment