POLITICO NIGHTLY: Republicans wrestle with their suburban problem

 

View in browser   BY ADAM WREN Voters wait in line to cast their ballots during early voting in Carmel, Indiana, in 2020. | Michael Conroy/AP Photo HOOSIER HOPEFULS — A mayoral primary in the otherwise politically sleepy, tony Indianapolis suburb of Carmel suddenly hit the big time this week. Some of the biggest names in national politics — including former Vice President Mike Pence and former White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain — took an interest in this city of 100,000, situated in one of the fastest growing and most educated counties in the nation. Over the years, this suburb of lush and well-kept lawns, McMansions, and gated communities navigated by golf carts has become the place Republican vice presidents go to retire. Pence — who moved back to Carmel after his vice presidency, joining Dan Quayle who also briefly resided here in the 1990s after his own public service ended — voted here in Indiana’s municipal elections Tuesday, which included the first open mayoral contest in three decades (Republican Jim Brainard, first elected in 1995, announced his retirement last year). Klain, the Hoosier native who still has family ties to the northern Indianapolis suburb situated in reddish Hamilton County, has been closely watching the race, too. He is in talks with Democratic nominee Miles Nelson about campaigning for him (Klain’s recently passed mother, Sarann Horwitz Klain, was the former vice chair of the Hamilton County Democratic Party.) “I’m all in for Miles Nelson,” Klain told me recently, before tweeting about Nelson’s win Tuesday evening. Tuesday’s electoral results show in miniature the national Republicans’ weakening grip on the suburbs. Come November, the race will also be a key post-midterms bellwether for both parties. Democrats made big gains in suburbs nationally in 2018 and 2020. Nowhere else is that more apparent than Carmel. Slowly, this city has become more diverse and seen an influx of younger, more moderate voters who flock here for its award-winning school system, public art, affordability and culture (it’s home to a $126 million concert hall drawing national acts like the singer and songwriter Jason Isbell, and boasts more than 138 roundabouts , more than any other city in the U.S.). Students of the public school system speak 65 languages from 55 countries . Though many of its communities are gated, it’s not been walled-off from social change: Black Lives Matter marches snaked down the Monon Trail in Carmel amid $1 million townhouses and an upscale steakhouse in the summer of 2020. “Young voters from around the country are moving to Carmel, and you know what? They’re bringing their politics, too,” Nelson told me today, just a few days after winning his party’s nomination. Tuesday’s electoral results in the Democratic and Republican mayoral primaries saw more than 82 percent of the Republican voters over 50 years old, according to preliminary analysis of voter data by Peter Hanscom, former Sen. Joe Donnelly’s (D-Ind.) campaign manager and the current Democratic 5th district vice chair. “That’s a gigantic problem for them in the general,” Hanscom said. “The families with kids don’t seem to be on their side.” Donnelly was the first Democrat to win Carmel in his unsuccessful 2018 Senate campaign. A year later, Nelson became the city’s first Democratic elected official as a city councilman. In 2020, Biden defeated Trump, who just four years earlier held a packed rally at the concert hall where I saw Isbell perform. And in 2022, Democratic Secretary of State Destiny Wells won here, too. “Our community in particular is much more international than it ever was,” said Nelson’s Republican challenger, Sue Finkam. “With that comes people that don’t vote and vote on all different aspects along the spectrum.” Now, the Indiana Democratic Party is eyeing Carmel as a potential pickup this November. Mike Schmuhl, Pete Buttigieg’s former campaign manager and the state party chairman, is targeting this suburb in hopes of flipping it blue. “The city has changed a lot,” Schmuhl said over lunch today at Fat Dan’s Chicago Deli in Carmel. “This used to be a rock-ribbed, Republican, conservative area but the Republican Party has changed a lot, too. So what you have up in Carmel is a lot of development, a lot of families, educated voters, hard working people, and the Democratic Party’s values appeal to those people.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at awren@politico.com or on Twitter at @adamwren .     WHAT'D I MISS? — Biden names Neera Tanden as his domestic policy adviser: President Joe Biden announced today that Neera Tanden will serve as the next head of his domestic policy council . Tanden, a longtime prominent Democratic operative, will replace Susan Rice, who plans to leave the administration later this month. Tanden has spent the last year-and-a-half as senior adviser and staff secretary in the White House, after her initial nomination to run the Office of Management and Budget faltered in the face of Senate opposition. — CDC Director Rochelle Walensky is leaving, White House says: Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who guided Biden’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic from his first day in office, is leaving her post, the White House announced today . Her announcement comes days before the Biden administration plans to end the public health emergency in place since early 2020, and at a time when Covid fears have receded and life mostly returned to a pre-pandemic normal. — Proud Boys juror says group’s deleted messages weighed on jury: Andre Mundell, one of the 12 jurors who decided the four-month trial on Thursday, told Vice News that he was convinced that the Proud Boys leaders — including former national chair Enrique Tarrio — had committed seditious conspiracy in part because of the lengths the group took to hide its activities, deleting key messages . “The Proud Boys didn’t want everybody to know the plan, because then I guess it would have gotten out. And they didn’t want it to get out,” Mundell said in the interview, noting that the thousands of messages they reviewed — extracted from the phones of Tarrio and his co-defendants — were peppered with blank slots where exchanges had been deleted.   GET READY FOR GLOBAL TECH DAY: Join POLITICO Live as we launch our first Global Tech Day alongside London Tech Week on Thursday, June 15. Register now for continuing updates and to be a part of this momentous and program-packed day! From the blockchain, to AI, and autonomous vehicles, technology is changing how power is exercised around the world, so who will write the rules? REGSITER HERE .     NIGHTLY ROAD TO 2024 Magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll leaves Manhattan Federal Court after her civil trial against former President Donald Trump rests. | Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images IN THEIR OWN WORDS — E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump rested their cases late Thursday in the civil trial in which Carroll accused Trump of raping her decades ago. She is suing him in Manhattan federal court for battery over the alleged rape, and for defamation over social media comments Trump made last year accusing Carroll of promoting a “hoax.” He maintains the alleged incident “never happened.” While Trump’s lawyers didn’t call any witnesses, Carroll’s team called nearly a dozen over the course of seven days. Read what they said here . SUBPOENA SEASON — Federal prosecutors who are investigating former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents are now issuing a wave of new subpoenas, developing a picture of why and how Trump took documents to Mar-a-Lago that weren’t supposed to be there. The New York Times reports that prosecutors now have the cooperation of someone who worked for Trump at Mar-a-Lago .       AROUND THE WORLD END OF AN ERA — COVID-19 is no longer an international public health emergency , the World Health Organization decided today, marking a major turning point in the global response to the crisis that has killed nearly 7 million people and caused some 65 million cases of long COVID, writes Ashleigh Furlong . The removal of the highest alert level from the global health body comes more than three years since the declaration was first made on January 30, 2020, as COVID-19 spread beyond China and public health officials around the globe became increasingly panicked at what they were witnessing. At that time, the official death toll was just 171. Now, the WHO estimates over 6.9 million deaths. DRUNK ON POWER — On Dec. 31, 1999, while the rest of the world was fixated on Y2K, ailing Russian President Boris Yeltsin tearfully concluded his annual New Year’s address by announcing he was stepping down as president, appointing Vladimir Putin, his little-known prime minister, in his stead. In the months that followed, Putin stood for election in his own right, winning the presidency handily, writes Mark Lawrence Schrad . One day before his formal inauguration, on May 6, 2000, Putin signed a directive that would begin the reconsolidation of Russia’s top revenue-generating industries. But Putin’s first target wasn’t oil or natural gas, or diamonds or gold or nickel. It was vodka. On that date, Putin created a new company called Rosspirtprom — an acronym for Russian Spirits Industry — to seize control of the means of vodka production. It was a move that not only helped Putin amass enormous wealth over the coming two decades, but was a critical first step in cementing his grip on the Russian economy and the Russian people, who would help line his pockets while his vodka helped ruin their health. Read the saga of how Putin amassed so much power in the industry — and what he’s doing with it now — here .   DON’T MISS THE POLITICO ENERGY SUMMIT: A new world energy order is emerging and America’s place in it is at a critical juncture. Join POLITICO on Thursday, May 18 for our first-ever energy summit to explore how the U.S. is positioning itself in a complicated energy future. We’ll explore progress on infrastructure and climate funding dedicated to building a renewable energy economy, Biden’s environmental justice proposals, and so much more. REGISTER HERE .     NIGHTLY NUMBER 253,000 The number of jobs the U.S. added in April , a robust number that’s evidence of a labor market that still shows surprising strength despite rising interest rates, chronically high inflation and a banking crisis that could weaken the economy. The unemployment rate ticked down to 3.4 percent, matching a 54-year low. RADAR SWEEP IT’S OVER — With the shuttering of Vice News Tonight and reports that the company is circling bankruptcy — along with the recent end of BuzzFeed News — there have been all kinds of recriminations about the era in media when those two platforms appeared to be the future, with sky-high valuations from Wall Street and willing buyers across the more traditional media landscape. One of the most interesting comes from Aris Roussinos — a former war correspondent on the front lines for Vice — in UnHerd. Roussinos speaks to his experiences in the field, what it was like to work for the company and where it all went wrong . PARTING IMAGE On this date in 1985: President Ronald Reagan speaks during ceremonies at the site of the former Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp in West Germany. Reagan was on a state visit to honor victims of World War II and the Holocaust and attend ceremonies commemorating the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. | AP Photo Did someone forward this email to you?  Sign up here .       Follow us on Twitter Charlie Mahtesian @PoliticoCharlie Calder McHugh @calder_mchugh Katherine Long @katherinealong   FOLLOW US

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