Wage garnishments and traffic violations—what impact do candidate legal woes have on voters?

With just two weeks to go until the Nov. 5 election, the race to succeed Gov. Eric Holcomb as the state’s top leader has hit breakneck speed—with the Indiana Republican Party repeatedly sending out mailers attacking the Libertarian candidate.

The latest charges continue to label Donald Rainwater as a “deadbeat loser,” citing his decades old failure to pay child support that resulted in a financial judgments and wage garnishment.

But the wages of the GOP nominee for lieutenant governor have also been garnished, according to records found through MyCase, the state’s online database of non-confidential cases.

Micah Beckwith had his wages with White River Christian Church in Noblesville, where he was a pastor between 2009 and 2014, garnished twice—once in 2010 and again in 2011. The first was for $1,728 in credit card debt while the latter was the result of not paying a $5,000-plus judgment for Embroidme, a personalized printing embroidery company that Beckwith lists himself as a former franchisee of, according to his LinkedIn. Both charges have since been paid in full and resolved.

But how much do the above judgments, dating back as far as 2000, resonate with voters?

“It’s effective and there are people who do it who know what they’re doing,” said Chad Kinsella, a political science professor with Ball State University. “My students would say, ‘I just throw those away as (I) get them’ … (the mailers) have five or six seconds from the time people look at them to the garbage.

“But they’re very, very effective. Otherwise, candidates wouldn’t pay so much money for them.”

Rainwater dismissed the latest round of attacks, pointing to current financial missteps at the state level surrounding Medicaid. The state fund had a $1 billion shortfall nearly a year ago and an ongoing whistleblower lawsuit alleges the state overpaid hospitals and insurers by $724 million. At the same time, certain Medicaid services have a monthslong waitlist.

“While some people might be interested in whether a candidate for public office has had financial problems in their past, I believe that most Hoosier taxpayers are much more concerned with how their current officeholders and bureaucrats have managed and mismanaged their tax dollars,” Rainwater said in a statement.

“It is one thing to encounter personal financial struggles and recover from them.  It is quite another to make a $1 billion accounting error or pay over $724 million in Medicaid overbilling while making thousands of Hoosiers sit on a waitlist for months, if not years, waiting for their promised assistance.”

Beckwith has also been cited twice for not wearing a seatbelt—once in Huntington County in 2007 and another time in Carmel in 2015. His first traffic violation in MyCase was in Huntington County for failing to yield to an emergency vehicle.

Beckwith, reached through his campaign, didn’t respond to questions about the wage garnishments or traffic violations.

Running candidates through MyCase

Most candidates, and likely many Hoosiers, will appear in MyCase for one reason or another—ranging from speeding and evictions to divorce proceedings and business lawsuits.

A search for GOP gubernatorial candidate Mike Braun with his birthday on MyCase brought up two speeding tickets: one in Pike County in 2000 and another in Daviess County in 1992. Braun is the Republican nominee for the top spot and running with Beckwith.

A search for Democrat Jennifer McCormick is complicated by her past public service. She served as the state’s last elected superintendent for public instruction as a Republican between 2016 and 2020. During that time, cases filed against or on behalf of the state’s Department of Education also include her name.

Searching with McCormick’s birthdate and middle initial to winnow out Hoosiers with the same name didn’t yield any judgments against her.

Her running mate, former State Rep. Terry Goodin, also appears in court records as part of a 2012 legal battle over pay that includes the entire General Assembly and for divorce proceedings.

While the name Tonya Hudson—the Libertarian nominee for lieutenant governor—pulled up several cases, none of them could definitively be tied to the Hudson currently running for office by using her birthdate.

Rainwater’s record appears to stem from a series of financial problems from 1998 to 2008. Previously, he said that the legal issues surrounding his failure to pay child support and subsequently being held in contempt had been “resolved.”

Signs of a tightening race?

In a Monday statement, the McCormick-Goodin campaign didn’t shy away from the brewing fight between the other candidates.

“Braun and Beckwith’s hypocritical attacks are a distraction from their extreme agenda. As the men argue over unpaid bills, Jennifer McCormick is committed to helping Hoosiers struggling with stagnant wages after twenty years of one-party rule,” the statement read.

Indeed, the Democratic nominee for governor is campaigning off of the controversies swirling around her Republican opponents, releasing an advertisement this week titled, “Not Mike Braun.” In it, a Delaware County resident named Walter touts his support for the GOP but says he can’t vote for Braun.

“And then his running mate? That guy’s a bat(expletive) crazy, book-banning piece of work,” Walter said. “I’m proud to be a Republican. But we can’t let Mike Braun and Micah Beckwith run Indiana.”

As a library board member in Noblesville, Beckwith was part of a push to review curricular materials that included moving several teen books for not being “age appropriate”—such as ones by Indiana novelist John Green.

McCormick has routinely highlighted party polling that shows a tight race between her and Braun, partly due to Republican voters casting a ballot for Rainwater. However, no Democrat has held a statewide office 2016.

Kinsella pointed to Rainwater’s showing in the 2020 election, when he won more than 11% of the vote and eroded support for Holcomb’s reelection campaign. Rainwater also ran as a Libertarian in that race.

Holcomb still won easily with 56.5% of the vote.

“A lot of times Libertarians … take probably more from potential Republican voters than Democrats,” Kinsella said. “In 2020, he did very well for a third-party candidate.”

Kinsella said that such mailings can be effective for low-information voters and even targeted for areas where voters may have picked Rainwater over Holcomb in 2020.

With his students, Kinsella said they reviewed campaign expenditures and identified several companies specializing in political mailers receiving “huge chunks of money.”

“There’s some sort of perceived threat. Either the race is tighter or maybe there’s just … that fear or some polling or something that would suggest Rainwater is going to get another substantial number of votes,” Kinsella said. “I was driving down in Muncie, down Main Street and there’s a Rainwater sign. In a very red state like Indiana, it’s this idea of the Libertarian candidate as kind of a threat that can really make a dent in an otherwise very successful run.”

But part of the difficulty for the campaigns behind these political attacks is crafting them to be succinct, Kinsella said.

For instance, McCormick’s debate stage attacks against Braun over old labor violations haven’t created the same buzz, potentially because they’re more difficult to summarize than the GOP mailers against Rainwater.

“You have to make attacks simple for people to understand. And if you have to explain it, it’s too much,” Kinsella said.