Rep. John Hostettler (R) Elected 1994, 6th term
Born:	July 19, 1961, Evansville
Home:	Blairsville
Education:	Rose-Hulman Inst. of Tech., B.S. 1983
Religion:	Baptist
Marital Status:	married (Beth)
Professional Career:	Mechanical Engineer, S. IN Gas & Electric Co., 1983-94.
DC Office	1214 LHOB20515, 202-225-4636; Fax: 202-225-3284; Web site: www.house.gov/hostettler
State Offices	Covington, 765-793-2161; Evansville, 812-465-6484; Terre Haute, 812-232-0523; Vincennes, 812-882-0632.
Additional Info
Committees · Ratings · Key Votes · Election Results District Demographics
More On Indiana
At A Glance · State Profile District Map Redistricting · Almanac Home
Recent News Coverage
Search the CongressDaily, Hotline, House Race Hotline, National Journal and Technology Daily archives using the form above:
[an error occurred while processing this directive]

"Evansville," wrote John Bartlow Martin in 1947, "is the capital of a tri-state area comprising the neglected tag ends of Indiana, Kentucky and Illinois." It was a factory town then, building car parts and refrigerators, drawing workers from Kentucky, Tennessee and the picturesque but not very fertile hills of southern Indiana. It has seen hard times, such as the terrible flood of March 1997, but it also has Indiana's first riverboat casino and claims to have the nation's second largest street festival, second only to New Orleans's Mardi Gras celebration. In 2004, defective equipment at a coal-fired power plant in Princeton resulted in the spewing of nitrogen oxide emissions across the border into Illinois, and forced Cinergy Corporation to spend nearly $2 billion to repair that and similar generators.

Evansville is one of two major focuses of the 8th Congressional District, which covers most of southwest and west central Indiana. The other, in Vigo County, is Terre Haute, an old manufacturing town and the boyhood home of Socialist Eugene Debs. It hosts a maximum-security penitentiary, which includes the only federal death chamber, where Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was executed in June 2001. This southwest corner of Indiana was the first part of the state settled by whites. Vincennes, now a small town on the banks of the Wabash River, was once the metropolis of Indiana, and Scottish philanthropist and visionary Robert Owen established the town of New Harmony downstream. Owen's son was the first congressman from the area, elected in 1842 and 1844. Southern Indiana is ancestrally Democratic, just as northern Indiana is ancestrally Republican; these southern counties were hostile to the Civil War. In New Deal times, workers in Evansville moved again toward the Democrats.

The result has been a very close political balance, and this district has become known as the "Bloody Eighth" for its tight congressional races. At one point in the 1970s it elected four different congressmen in four successive elections. In 1984, the state certified the Republican as the winner by exactly 34 votes, but the Democratic U.S. House, in a fight that left many Republican members bitterly aggrieved, overturned the result. Since then, it has been as fiercely contested as ever. The trend in presidential politics, however, is away from national Democrats: Bill Clinton twice carried it by 2%, but in 2000 George W. Bush won 56% followed by 62% in 2004.

The congressman from the 8th District is John Hostettler, a Republican first elected in 1994, an ingenuous and idealistic man who seems miscast in politics. Hostettler is from Posey County, just west of Evansville; he went to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute and in 1983 became a Southern Indiana Gas & Electric Company engineer. He had never run for office, but in 1994, at 33, he was the Republican nominee vying to run against 12-year incumbent Democrat Frank McCloskey. Hostettler's great strength was his support from anti-abortion and Christian fundamentalist groups. His biggest fundraiser was a $100-per-family fried chicken dinner with Marilyn Quayle. He attacked McCloskey on taxes, gay rights, gun control, the environment, school prayer, his 65 overdrafts at the House bank, and constantly referred to him as "Frank McClinton." McCloskey accused Hostettler of wanting to outlaw all abortions and called him "John McGingrich." McCloskey carried Evansville and the university town of Bloomington--then but not now in the district--by microscopic margins, but Hostettler carried most of the rural counties and won 52%-48%.

In the House, Hostettler has been a conservative willing to buck conventional political wisdom and his party leadership. He and fellow Indiana freshman Mark Souder were the only two Republicans to vote against the balanced budget amendment in 1995 because it did not require a supermajority to raise taxes. He opposed term limits, saying that he was against amending the Constitution unless there is no alternative. In 2000 Hostettler was one of three members to vote against the Violence Against Women Act in September; the other two weren't running for reelection. Opposed to "hate crimes" legislation, he asked, "What crime is motivated out of love? We should not create a federal thought police." He was one of six House Republicans to vote against authorizing force against Iraq; he kept a low profile on the vote, but argued on the House floor that it would set "an ominous precedent" that the "rest of the world could justifiably follow," and that Iraq was not an imminent threat.

Hostettler has been a leading voice for social conservatives. He won House approval of his amendment to prohibit federal enforcement of the court order to remove a replica of the Ten Commandments from the state courthouse in Alabama. In 2004, the House passed his bill preventing federal courts from examining the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act. On the Armed Services Committee, Hostettler has been a strong support for missile defense, including airborne laser shooting ballistic missiles and solid-state lasers fired from jet fighters. He opposed a change in the highway formula which would have given Indiana more money but which would not have maintained the commitment to build I-69 from Indianapolis to Evansville. As chairman of Judiciary's Immigration subcommittee since January 2003, he has been at odds with the Bush administration over the guest worker proposal.

Hostettler has repeatedly faced serious Democratic opposition. Refusing to raise PAC money, he is among the few incumbents who sometimes gets outspent in reelection contests. In 1996 he eked out a 50%-48% victory. In 2000, he faced Paul Perry, an Evansville orthopedic surgeon who spent $350,000 of his own money. The undertow of the Democrats' national ticket in the rural and small town area was strong that year; Hostettler won 53%-45%. In 2002, Hostettler showed once again that he is a politician who goes his own way, and creates good breaks for himself. Democrats hoped that state House Speaker John Gregg from Vigo County would run in the district he helped draw; Gregg unexpectedly said no, as did Paul Perry and, just before the filing deadline, former Congressman McCloskey. That left the inexperienced Brian Hartke, the nephew of Indiana's former three-term Senator (1959-1977) Vance Hartke. Hostettler's biggest problems, it seemed, were himself and the Evansville Courier & Press. In September 2002, Hostettler said on a local radio program that he would no longer give interviews to the local newspaper because of what he considered unfair coverage of his August meeting in Washington with breast-cancer survivors; during that session, he offended some by discussing controversial studies that link abortion and breast cancer. On Election Day, Hostettler won, 51%-46%. In 2004, Democrats enthusiastically promoted Jon Jennings, a pro-life, pro-gun former Justice Department official and assistant to basketball coach Bobby Knight at Indiana University. Republicans mocked Jennings as a carpetbagger because he had lived in Boston for 10 years as a scout for the Boston Celtics basketball team, some of whose leaders campaigned for him, and roughly half of his campaign funds came from Massachusetts. Jennings returned fire by calling Hostettler a "Washington insider," but the result was familiar: Although outspent by more than 2-to-1, Hostettler won a bit bigger than usual, 53%-45%. Hostettler scored a big gain by taking Evansville's Vanderburgh County 50%-48% plus big margins in the other 14 counties, mostly in rural areas where he was bolstered by support in churches.

He appeared unaffected politically by his guilty plea in Kentucky in August 2004 for carrying a loaded semiautomatic handgun at a security checkpoint in the Louisville airport four months earlier. The judge suspended a 60-day sentence, barred him from carrying a gun in Kentucky for two years, and prevented him from purchasing a gun during that period anywhere except in Indiana or Washington, D.C. Hostettler called his action a "stupid mistake."

Committees

• Armed Services (10th of 34 R): Projection Forces; Readiness.
• Judiciary (13th of 23 R): Immigration, Border Security & Claims (Chmn.); The Constitution.

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2004	20	10	25	9	60	73	81	88	100	100	--
2003	35	--	38	15	--	79	87	88	--	--	--

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2003 LIB	--	2003 CONS		2004 LIB	--	2004 CONS
Economic	48%	--	51%		35%	--	64%
Social	30%	--	65%		20%	--	77%
Foreign	51%	--	48%		45%	--	54%
For National Journal's complete 2004 Vote Ratings, as well as previous ratings dating back to 1995, please click here.

Key Votes Of The 108th Congress (More Info)
1. Drilling in ANWR N 2. Approve Bush Tax Cuts Y 3. Medicare/Rx Bill N 4. Bar Overtime Pay Regs. N 5. DC School Vouchers Y 6. Ban Human Cloning Y		7. Restrict Gun Liability Y  8. Ban Partial-Birth Abortion Y  9. Ban Same-Sex Marriage N 10. Fund Iraq War Y 11. Bar Cuba Embargo Funds N 12. Intelligence Reorg. Y

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
2004 general	John Hostettler (R)	145,576	53%	$494,781
	Jon Jennings (D)	121,522	45%	$1,504,920
	Other	5,680	2%
2004 primary	John Hostettler (R)	unopposed
2002 general	John Hostettler (R)	98,952	51%	$573,220
	Bryan Hartke (D)	88,763	46%	$395,840
	Other	5,150	3%
Prior winning percentages: 2000 (53%); 1998 (52%); 1996 (50%); 1994 (52%)

2004 Presidential Vote Bush (R) 170,390 (62%) Kerry (D) 104,625 (38%)

2000 Presidential Vote Bush (R) 144,848 (56%) Gore (D) 106,850 (42%)

For 1992 and 1996 presidential results in the Eighth District, please see the Almanac 2000 online. Please note that these older returns reflect district lines as they existed prior to 2002 redistricting.

• Cook Partisan Voting Index: R + 9
• District Size: 7,132 square miles
• Population in 2000: 675,564; 58.1% urban; 41.9% rural
• Median Household Income: $36,732; 10.7% are below the poverty line
• Occupation: 31.9% blue collar; 51.9% white collar; 16.2% gray collar; 13.9% military veterans
• Race/Ethnic Origin: 93.7% White, 3.7% Black, 0.6% Asian, 0.2% Amer. Indian, 0.0% Hawaiian, 0.8% Two+ races, 0.1% Other, 0.9% Hispanic origin
• Ancestry: 18.1% German, 11.9% USA, 8.1% Irish
• Click here for statewide demographic data.