Indiana at a Glance State Profile - Gov. Kernan (D) - Sen. Lugar (R) - Sen. Bayh (D) Presidential Politics Congressional Districting - 01 - Visclosky (D) - 02 - Chocola (R) - 03 - Souder (R) - 04 - Buyer (R) - 05 - Burton (R) - 06 - Pence (R) - 07 - Carson (D) - 08 - Hostettler (R) - 09 - Hill (D) Almanac 2004 Home - States & Districts - Elected Officials - Committees - Election Cycles - Guide To Usage Almanac 2002 Almanac 2000 Almanac 1998 For district profiles and additional information on the elected officials of Indiana, please use the pull-down menu above.

On Memorial Day every year the nation's eyes turn to Indianapolis, the center of a state with the nation's most distinctive nickname--Hoosier--and some of its least distinctive borders, for a sports spectacle celebrating the knack for tinkering and the taste for powerful machines that make the Midwest the nation's manufacturing center: The Indianapolis 500. This combination of sports and manufacturing is symbolic of Indiana's strengths and successes. The image of its manufacturing base and sports heritage seems as antique as the bricks with which the Indianapolis Speedway was originally paved, though all but one yard at the start/ finish line has long since been asphalted. Throughout the 1990s, Indiana's manufacturing economy was humming and becoming increasingly high-skill, high-employment and high-tech. The Speedway is literally at the center of American manufacturing: Almost precisely half the country's manufacturing jobs are east of Indiana and the other half west, almost half are north and half south. Indiana itself has the nation's second-highest percentage of workers in manufacturing and is number one in percentage of gross product attributable to manufacturing. It is the number one steel producer with its giant, heavily automated steel mills on the south shore of Lake Michigan and mini-mills scattered across the state. Indiana leads the nation in making elevators, refrigerators, engines, engine-electrical equipment, recreational vehicles, mobile homes, and truck and bus bodies. It gave the world canned pork and beans, tomato juice, the Coca-Cola bottle and Alka-Seltzer. Nor are Indiana's days of innovation over. Just as it has attracted new teams and events to Indianapolis's sports facilities, the small factories set amidst farm landscape or at the edge of small cities have become centers of advanced manufacturing innovation.

But there is one downside to a manufacturing economy: It is subject to sharp contraction in times of recession. The economic slowdown of 2000-02 was not by historic standards a major one. But it was enough to bring to a halt Indiana's growth. Between 2000 and 2002, the state lost some 180,000 jobs; its relative standing in personal income declined and it had large numbers of bankruptcies and foreclosures. State government revenue fell well below expectations; Governor Frank O'Bannon, who earned popularity as a tax-cutter, felt obliged to raise the cigarette, gambling and sales taxes. And the long-term trajectory of the state is unclear. Some of its political and business leaders worry that too many of its high school and college graduates leave Indiana for larger metropolitan areas.

Culturally, Indiana is like an earlier America; it retains some of the old norms that in the 1920s and 1930s brought sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd in their search for the typical American place to "Middletown" (actually Muncie). Ethnically, Indiana seems like an earlier America too: Except for the steel area around Gary--really an extension of the Chicago metropolitan area--Indiana has relatively few descendants from the 1840-1924 wave of immigration and only a small flow of recent Hispanic or Asian immigrants. But it does have religious diversity, with 109 denominations according to the Glenmary Center; only six states have more. The major metropolitan area, Indianapolis, now has 1.5 million people but still doesn't have the big singles and gay neighborhoods of larger cities. What it does have is one of the nation's largest foundations, the Lilly Endowment (which gives much of its money locally) and a willingness to create and innovate. In the 1980s, the Lilly Endowment urged Indianapolis to make itself a sports center. The city attracted the Colts professional football team to the Hoosier Dome (now the RCA Dome). In the late 1990s, Indianapolis's downtown filled with new construction projects: the pro basketball Pacers' Conseco Fieldhouse, the new NCAA headquarters, a conservatory and the Indiana State Museum. Meanwhile, the Convention Center and Eiteljorg Museum of Native American Art were expanded and the Circle Center Mall filled with shoppers. Longtime Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, a Republican, pioneered the privatization of city services for everything but police, fire and zoning. He reduced costs by nearly one-quarter and the public work force by one-third, while taxes were cut some $240 million. In the state Capitol four blocks away, Governors Evan Bayh and O'Bannon, both Democrats, also cut taxes. Government has been not a drain on the private economy, but a booster.

The last decade has seen innovation in Indiana's government. But its partisan politics sometimes seems typical of an older America, with preferences anchored in the Civil War era and a small overlay of change from the union-organizing days of the 1930s. Indiana's cultural conservatism has kept it Republican in presidential elections for the last generation, but it was a crucial state from the Civil War to the New Deal in the struggles between Republicans and Democrats. Party identification was handed down like religious affiliation--the Lynds noted that Presbyterians had little to do with Methodists, but that was nothing next to divisions between Republicans and Democrats--in a state still peopled largely by descendants of its original settlers, Yankees from Ohio and New England and ''Butternuts'' (as they were called in the Civil War years) from Kentucky and the South.

Most Yankees became Republicans and most Butternuts Democrats, and that split has persisted over generations and can still be seen in election returns today. Of the 26 Indiana counties carried by Bill Clinton in 1996, 18 are south of Indianapolis, most near the Ohio River. The others are clustered around industrial towns that were organized by the CIO unions, the United Steelworkers and the United Auto Workers, in the 1930s. In the 1920s the Lynds, liberal academics influenced by Marx's idea that political beliefs were determined by economic interests, were puzzled why the factory workers in "Middletown" didn't vote against the bosses; in the 1930s and since in some parts of industrial Indiana they have. But this is not so in other cities, including Indianapolis, which is by far the largest. Why not? One answer is that cultural identity and personal values tend to be permanent and so have usually been the critical determinants of political allegiance in an America where economic status can often be changeable. Another is that the economic interests of Indiana's high-skill workers and its small and large factory owners are not nearly as adversarial as academics and Washington liberals suppose.

Indiana's partisan allegiances have remained remarkably steady. There is an historic base here large enough to allow Democrats to win: Evan Bayh broke a 20-year Republican hold on the governorship in 1988, with his strongest support from southern Indiana and the far northwest industrial zone. His successor, Democrat O'Bannon--from a Butternut town near the Ohio River--with similar moderate policies beat Indianapolis' Goldsmith 52%-47% in 1996 and Congressman David McIntosh by 57%-42% in 2000, with voting patterns much the same as in 1988. Some Hoosier politicians have been able to transcend the ancient allegiances. Richard Lugar, the only five-term senator in Indiana's history, was re-elected by 2-1 margins in 1988, 1994 and 2000; Bayh was re-elected governor in 1992 and won election to the Senate in 1998 by margins nearly as large.