State GOP aims at teacher Wright in mass mailings
Thanks to statewide help, Republican Scott Alexander is far ahead of Democrat Melanie Wright in campaign financing.
MUNCIE — Republican Scott Alexander has raised 22 times more in campaign receipts than Democrat Melanie Wright in the race for the open seat in state Senate District 26.
The president of Delaware County Council and the owner of Alexander and Co. Real Estate Appraisers, Muncie, Alexander’s campaign receipts this year totaled $285,087 as of Oct. 14, compared to only $13,191 collected by Wright.
The end of the pre-election campaign finance reporting period was Oct. 14.
Senate District 26 was redrawn to now include all of Delaware and Randolph counties. There is no incumbent in the election.
Wright is a music teacher at Daleville Community Schools and a former three-term state representative who was unseated two years ago by now state Rep. Elizabeth Rowray, R-Yorktown.
At a September candidate forum that Alexander did not attend because of a simultaneous county budget hearing, Wright said she has loved knocking on thousands of doors in East Central Indiana, “forming relationships with all kinds of people — Republican, Democrat or independent.”
A first-time candidate for state office, Alexander is addressing any lack of name recognition in part by flooding mailboxes in the district with mass mailings, sometimes also known as junk mail.
The direct-mail flyers — about half of which were negative and at least one of which was an attack ad — have cost around $90,000 so far. They were funded by the Indiana Republican State Committee.
The Indiana Senate Majority Campaign Committee spent another $48,000 on behalf of Alexander for surveys/research, video production and digital ads.
Alexander’s campaign paid $55,000 more to Strategic Media Placement, Delaware, Ohio, for media air time.
During the candidate forum, Wright described herself as a moderate who recognizes that the district is “very conservative,” including a lot of agriculture and small towns.
The state GOP, on the other hand, portrayed Wright in campaign flyers as Joe Biden’s radical, reckless-spending, job-killing “Wright-hand” woman who is also “the wrong choice for Hoosier kids.”
Next to a photo of school child with a troubled look on her face, the flyer reads:
“Melanie Wright does a lot of talking when it comes to supporting Indiana’s kids and her record as a public-school teacher. But her record as a legislator tells a different story.
“Had a chance to support record funding for our schools. DIDN’T. Could’ve voted for more resources to keep Hoosier kids safe in schools. CHOSE NOT TO. Had an opportunity to give parents more educational choices. VOTED NO. Every time Melanie had a chance to choose, she chose the Biden liberal agenda. NOT Hoosier kids.”
Wright is spooky-looking in one of the flyers, and in another she is pictured next to a Band-Aid-covered piggy bank below a photo of President Biden fist-bumping the Saudi crown prince.
Wright told me she first learned the state’s GOP/Senate campaign committees were targeting her when she started receiving the negative flyers in the mail.
“Perhaps they feel they need yet another seat in the Senate,” Wright said.
Republicans already hold “supermajorities” of 71-29 in the Indiana House and 39-11 in the Indiana Senate.
During the candidate forum, Wright said far-right, out-of-state, corporate lobbying groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have succeeded in getting bills passed in state Legislatures to privatize public education — including taxpayer-funded vouchers for kids to attend private, mostly religious schools as well as publicly funded but privately run charter schools.
For many Indiana lawmakers, privatization is more important than retaining teachers and supporting public education, Wright said, adding that charter and voucher schools lack transparency and accountability.
Responding on social media to GOP flyers criticizing her for voting in 2019 against House Bill 1001, Wright said:
“HB 1001 awarded a minuscule 2% increase in funding to traditional public schools, while awarding a 5% to 10% increase in funding to out-of-state, for-profit charter schools, under-scrutinized virtual schools as well as voucher schools. A majority of the schools in our district are traditional public schools and will receive a less than 2% increase … Our schools deserve better.
“I am always willing to work across the aisle to increase school funding and teacher pay, but that is not what HB 1001 did. Public school funding has decreased since 2009, and HB 1001 did not fix this important issue. Three separate plans to increase teacher pay this legislative session were stymied …
“These were plans that I endorsed, but the majority party, that is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to mislead you, did not support a single one of them. I will continue to support public schools because they are the backbone of our communities, they accept all students and are vital to promoting community cohesiveness.”
Regarding the mailers, Alexander told me in a telephone interview that the so-called negative flyers were actually “contrast ads based on her voting record. That’s what they call them. Those in the business don’t consider them negative campaign ads.”
(At least one of the mailings focused exclusively on negative information about Wright, lacking any information about Alexander).
Wright’s campaign collected a $1,000 donation from the Indiana Political Action Committee for Education (I-PACE), the political action division of the Indiana State Teachers Association (ISTA).
But Wright has raised only a fraction of the money she did when she ran for re-election to the House two years ago, when I-PACE alone gave her $75,000 (compared to $1,000 this year) and the House Democratic Caucus donated $88,000 (compared to nothing this year). Wright raised another $2,700 this year from several American Federation of Teachers PACs.
Meanwhile, Alexander’s donors include Hoosiers For Quality Education ($1,500), whose funding sources include the American Federation for Children (AFC) and one of its projects, the Indiana Federation for Children.
AFC is a conservative 501(c)(4) dark-money group that promotes the school privatization agenda via the American Legislative Exchange Council, according to SourceWatch, published by the progressive 501 (c)(3) Center for Media and Democracy. (CMD also publishes ALECexposed.org).
Betsy DeVos chaired AFC until being nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to be the U.S. education secretary.
The $1,500 contribution from Hoosiers for Quality Education is “pretty minor in the whole scheme” of receipts, and “will not influence my opinion,” Alexander told me.
Alexander’s own children have attended public schools, and he says he supports public education. But he added that he also supports vouchers and charters, calling the competition between different schools “very healthy.”
On the issue of teacher pay, “that comes back to competition,” Alexander went on. “Schools that want good teachers are going to have to pay them. Teacher pay is not up to the state. That decision happens at the local level.”
One of the Alexander mailers funded by the GOP state committee says that he will keep politics out of the classroom and return to the basics of educating students; give parents more personal control over their children’s education; support more technical job training and college credits in high schools; fully fund local schools, and pay teachers well. Another mailer says he will expand education by allowing Hoosier students and families to choose the schooling that works best for their children.
Besides more than 50 well-known local Republicans, Alexander’s donors include political action committees representing American Electric Power, CenterPoint Energy, Realtors, firefighters, the construction industry, beer, multi-family housing, builders, Indiana Farm Bureau, and the National Federation of Independent Business, the voice of small business.
Wright’s donor list contains only a handful of individuals, and her largest individual donor was state Rep. Sue Errington, D-Muncie, Alexander noted.
Wright is no stranger to attack ads.
In 2014, when she unseated longtime state Rep. Jack Lutz, R-Anderson, Democrats produced an attack ad showing Lutz wearing a birthday hat and blowing a party horn at a birthday celebration for a utility company lobbyist.
The truth, Lutz said at the time, is that the birthday party had occurred nine years earlier, and he wasn't wearing a hat or blowing a horn.
Other ads portrayed Lutz as being biased against women, limiting access to affordable birth control and life-saving cancer screenings, and opposing abortion even in cases of rape or incest.
"The headline should read, 'ISTA defeats Lutz,' " he told The Star Press shortly after losing. "It was all negative ads, lies and character assassination.”
“That’s the nature of the beast in politics,” a political scientist said of the attack ads against Lutz.
“You don’t have to go back to Lutz,” Alexander told me. “She (Wright) ran the worst negative campaign in our area two years ago against Rowray. We know what she’s capable of.”
Alexander also noted that the mailers on his behalf were a project of the state GOP. His own TV and social media ads are“100% positive” messages “that don’t mention her name” and include “some prominent people supporting us,” including those in the education sector.
Previously, in Greater Muncie
Far-right ‘Liberty Ladies’ lose in GOP primaries
The battle for the heart and soul of the local Democratic Party
Campaign finances play a huge roll on my decisions at the Ballot. Push the people making the money OUT OF INDIANA. You are out of touch, we deserve better representation. And all you have to do is look at the voting record of each of these people to know who really cares about Hoosiers, particularly the children. Stop reading into the propaganda and do the research folks. In 2022 you have no excuse for your ignorance and voting against your own interests. In my opinion, Wright is right for the job.
Thank you for covering this, as our local paper has lost the capacity to report on local campaign finance, voter/civic engagement issues. There are two top stories that got lost in the shuffle in this article and completely by the wayside in the press: the local GOP’s absence from public forums and this comparative D-R volume of funding is framed in a misleading way.
Alexander’s and Rowray’s campaign financiers are from outside lobbies that haven’t an interest in our community. So while their coffers are full, it’s from dark money super pacs buying their vote and support from them.
A couple of things that are vitally important when putting campaign finances and engagement into context:
I helped organize our community’s bipartisan voter/candidate forums and there was 29%
GOP participation (and in some cases, complete failure to acknowledge the Bowen Center’s invitation at all. These forums were held at Southside and Muncie Central, and so what message does that send high school students who participated in our forums?)
Elizabeth Rowray did not respond to Dr. Taylor at any point when he invited her participation to be accessible to voters. Basham and Alexander were both no shows.
Look.
Both Alexander and Rowray’s races against Melanie Wright were/are primarily funded by outside money and interests (you mentioned ALEC, also, two of Alexander’s mailers came from Florida) and I will say it again, neither Alexander or Rowray showed up to debate Wright and defend their positions.
And as it relates to public education, their party’s policies have resulted in a teacher exodus, 2,800 vacancies, a 6.1 billion dollar surplus, and and and.
Voters MUST know that GOP state candidates aren’t engaging with voters (except in private circles) and are they are hiding from debate. Their party has seized supermajority control in the General Assembly but their policies are deeply unpopular among Hoosiers.
They are using verifiably false accusations and those ads are funded, again, by outside interests.
Melanie Wright as you pointed out doesn’t have nearly the financial capacity that either one of them has had, so I would argue that if you’re going to accuse her of purchasing negative campaign ads, where are they?
On absenteeism:
The same strategy has been adopted by Sue Errington’s opponent Dale Basham. As someone who has really liked Mr. Basham put in the community I am terribly disappointed in him:
Conflating inflation caused by global instability and Biden to State Representative Sue Errington. It’s absolutely false and shameful.
He runs on education but refuses to show up to defend his positions on education or to even debate his opponent.
The common denominator here in both GOP races against Wright are outside money interfering, and there are severe consequences:
It’s nothing to be proud of and I am disappointed in the lack leadership demonstrated in the path they have chosen to follow. We all need to demand better behavior from them. Own your positions when you run for or hold an office.
Bottom line: It’s okay to have opposing views and policies but show up to defend them- where’s the dignity in ghosting voters and democracy?
These GOP candidates aren’t answering to voters (they don’t show up for them).
They’re answering to ALEC and super pac company.