Workhorse Braun leans into his business expertise

Just a little over a month before Election Day, U.S. Sen. Mike Braun stood in front of about a dozen of his peers for an endorsement that was never truly in doubt.

In the back room of a Broad Ripple restaurant, Braun nodded and smiled as Natalie Robinson, Indiana director of the National Federation of Independent Business, spoke about his long list of accomplishments. Then he sat on a barstool, root beer in hand, with his fellow NFIB members for an hour.

The campaign stop wasn’t necessarily meant to change any voters’ minds. It was a cherished and comfortable one with voters whose roots are similar to his own as a small-business owner.

After his successful long-shot U.S. Senate campaign in 2018, Braun is returning home to Indiana—and he hopes to swap the title before his name for governor. He says he’s leaving Congress because he’s frustrated with the slow process and feels he can have a larger impact leading his home state.

His cornerstone campaign promise is to treat state government like a business to produce better returns for Hoosiers, primarily through lower taxes and reduced state spending.

Braun was listed early in his Senate term as one of the wealthiest members of Congress by OpenSecrets, a not-for-profit that tracks and publishes data from elected officials’ required financial disclosure forms.

But Braun presents himself as a down-to-earth southern Indiana businessman who is most content in a blue-collared shirt and jeans and driving himself to appearances. Those who’ve politicked and worked with him say that is exactly who he is.

“I don’t think he sees himself as a politician, and it doesn’t really come off that way,” state Rep. Julie McGuire, R-Indianapolis, told IBJ. “He’s ambitious and has a vision—and I appreciate that—without being overly political.”

But during his Senate campaign, Braun embraced association with controversial then-President Donald Trump. And in a crowded field for the Republican nomination for governor this spring, Braun touted Trump’s endorsement.

Heading into November, he’s the favored candidate against Democrat Jennifer McCormick and Libertarian Donald Rainwater. Braun has significantly outraised both, with $9.2 million in contributions through the end of the most recent reporting period.

But recent party and independent polling has led some national analysts to change their ratings for the race from “safely Republican” to “likely Republican.”

People who know Braun say his public façade matches his private life.

“He actually comes off as somebody who’s thinking, ‘Hey, I’m a guy who’s here to get the job done. I’m a workhorse, not a show horse,’ and that’s what he does,” Braun’s Senate colleague Pete Ricketts of Nebraska told IBJ.

McGuire, who campaigned with Braun for a few weeks last summer as his preferred lieutenant governor candidate, said he was often the last to leave a campaign stop. He’d stay until he talked with everyone, sometimes leaving his team in a time crunch heading to the next event.

Those are the types of interactions, she said, that encapsulate who he is.

“I was around him for too many hours. You don’t keep that up” if it’s not real, she said. “That’s kind of where I felt comfortable around him. … he’s definitely not some slick-talker politician.”

Throughout his career, Braun has boomeranged back to his hometown, Jasper, where he is an avid outdoorsman. He feels a close connection to the land, recalling a songbird, the Purple Martin, that he saw outside his fifth-grade window that kicked off his love for birds and his time as a birdhouse “landlord.”

“I hunt and fish a lot more than any senator, for sure,” he told IBJ. “And it is good therapy for my current job.”

Background in business

Braun went to Jasper High School, where he was a varsity football, basketball and track athlete. Four years later, he graduated from Wabash College, earning summa cum laude distinction and a degree in economics.

He went on to complete his MBA at Harvard Business School in 1978 and returned to Jasper, taking a job at cabinet-maker Aristokraft. He worked there for three years before he moved to what would be his career business.

Meyer Distributing was originally a Haysville truck-bed manufacturer called Meyer Body Inc. Established in 1937 by Leo Meyer, the company changed hands and was eventually purchased by Mike Braun’s father, Amos, and his business partner.

By the time Mike Braun took a sales job there in 1981, it was also a used-truck and equipment dealer. He and Daryl Rauscher purchased the company in 1986, with Braun focusing on logistics and Rauscher leading the used-truck sales.

“I left a really good job at the local kitchen cabinet company where the guy wanted me to run it,” Braun told listeners at the NFIB event. “But I was so anxious to have a shot at my own business.”

Although 50 years old, the operation was still modest. Braun remembers the used mobile home that functioned as his office and the bathtub that served as records storage.

“Those early years in the trailer taught me a lot about how to keep overhead low, how to enterprise for new revenues and scale it,” he said. “That’s the American dream.”

He bought out his partner in 1995, the headquarters was moved to Jasper by 1998, and Braun renamed the company Meyer Distributing in 1999.

The now-logistics company saw significant growth in the early 2000s, including a string of acquisitions that expanded the operation into several states, before the 2008 recession. Afterward, the company continued to grow, opening new dock locations coast-to-coast.

“We were no longer a small business,” Braun said. “But I said, ‘We’re going to run it like that.’”

After being involved with Meyer for 37 years, Braun handed the reins to three of his four children in 2018.

Switching gears

Braun’s first election first foray into politics came in 2004, when he was elected to the Greater Jasper Consolidated School Board. He served there for a decade.

In 2014, he ran for state representative to replace Republican Mark Messmer. After defeating a challenger in the primary, Braun was unopposed in the general election. He was reelected in 2016 by a wide margin.

His most notable piece of legislation expanded municipalities’ power to support and fund road projects.

In 2017, Braun resigned from the Statehouse to focus on his primary battle in the U.S. Senate race, which included now-Attorney General Todd Rokita and former U.S. Rep. Luke Messer. After winning the primary by 11 percentage points, Braun beat Democrat incumbent Joe Donnelly in November.

During his Senate run, news outlets reported that Braun had voted in Democratic primaries for years before pulling a GOP ballot in 2012, casting doubt on whether he really was a conservative. Braun and his campaign rebuked the sentiment, saying the Jasper native voted Democrat in order to have a say in local politics. Dubois County, where he lived, had traditionally been a blue county.

Jonathan Lamb, who ran unsuccessfully for Indiana’s 6th Congressional District seat that year, campaigned alongside Braun since the pair were both working-class businessmen trying to break into national politics, he said.

Their similarities were evident, Lamb said, the time they were setting out and needed to decide whose truck to take: Lamb’s was filled with construction materials and Braun’s was full of wood, a few chainsaws and gas cans.

In Congress

As a junior senator, Braun has served on over half a dozen committees and even more subcommittees. He is a ranking member of the Committee on Aging and two subcommittees on food and employment.

Braun has focused much of his attention on veteran support, but he’s most often grabbed headlines for his position on health care bills. He’s voted to increase transparency and lower costs, he said. And he has repeatedly voted against bills that increase the budget.

In 2023, the nonpartisan Center for Effective Lawmaking ranked Braun No. 6 on its list of Top 10 Most Effective Senate Republicans. On its Freshman Senators Exceeding Expectations list, Braun was the highest-ranked Republican.

He’s weighed in on hot-button issues, too. During the pandemic, Braun criticized vaccine mandates. And after the 2020 election, he initially joined other Republicans in indicating that he would object to certifying electoral votes for the presidential race. He later changed direction following the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol.

Mike Dodd, a national security defense adviser, has met with Braun at least quarterly since he was introduced to him on Capitol Hill about five years ago. The Indiana senator is generally accessible as a lawmaker, which sets him apart, Dodd said.

National security is not one of Braun’s specialties, but he puts in extra effort to understand what’s going on and how he can support it, Dodd said.

“He’s got this inquisitive, problem-solving kind of mind,” Dodd said, “So he’s not afraid to ask a lot of questions, which I also enjoy. He doesn’t pretend to know something.”

Not politically driven

After 10 years in politics, Braun continues to paint himself as a political outsider.

These days, that description is less about experience and more about his willingness to break with his party, his supporters say.

One topic he has diverged from his party on is the environment. Braun, a self-described conservationist, has introduced legislation to establish greater environmental protections and address climate change.

“He marches to the beat of his own drum,” McGuire said. “He’s not afraid to do an unpopular thing or make an unpopular statement.”

Lamb said Braun’s decades as a business leader make him a good senator. Successful business leaders, he said, can’t surround themselves with “yes men.” They need to hear from customers, employees and others with a stake in the business.

“It forces you to see all sides of arguments that are not politically driven,” he said. “They’re results-driven.”

Ricketts, the Nebraska senator and a former governor, said Braun’s experience running a business would serve him well as governor.

“All too often, government fails because the people in charge don’t actually know how to run an organization,” Ricketts told IBJ. “And Mike will do a great job of that because he has that experience.”

“One of the things that you need as a governor is to have a principled vision that can’t be swayed,” he added. “And that has been my experience with Mike Braun in the Senate. He is a man of principle. He’s a man of integrity. He knows what he wants to accomplish.”•