WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:31 — 3.2MB)
A group of Indiana Republicans chose Eric Holcomb to run for governor during a private meeting today. Holcomb has been the Lieutenant Governor since he was appointed to the position in March. In the gubernatorial race, Holcomb replaces Mike Pence, who was forced to bow out after he announced he would run for vice president alongside Donald Trump.
Although Holcomb has been active in Republican politics for many years, he has never held an elected position. He considered running for Senate this year, but then dropped out of the race in February.
Holcomb has only officially run for office one time. That was in the year, 2000, when he ran for a spot in the Indiana House of Representatives. He lost that race to the incumbent Democrat, John Frenz, after a very expensive and aggressive race. WFHB News Director Joe Crawford spoke with Frenz earlier today about his experience running against Holcomb.
TRANSCRIPT:
CRAWFORD: As the only person who’s actually run against him in the past, do you have any sort of insight into Eric Holcomb as a political candidate?
FRENZ: He was good at fund raising and they did launch early attack ads against me and kept them rolling right up until election day. And I was lucky that the voters saw my side of the story and I got re-elected.
CRAWFORD: And I know it was a very expensive race — is that right?
FRENZ: Right, yeah. It got listed in the Washington Post in the top 10 elections that year — state elections that year. I don’t remember the exact amount but it was probably close to $200,000 spent on that campaign.
CRAWFORD: I was just looking through an old newspaper article. This is from 2000. It said: “Holcomb has accused Frenz…in a newspaper ad of supporting the use of taxpayer money to collect pornography and conduct studies on bestiality, homosexuality and pedophilia.” Do you remember that?
FRENZ: Yeah, that was run on the weekend before the election. They ran those ads in the local newspapers in the district. They’re basically about half-page ads. It went on through and said I supported bestiality and all the things you just read there. Then when you read the details, it was because I voted for House Bill 1001. And House Bill 1001 is the budget. And in the budget was finance for Indiana University. And because in Indiana University is the Kinsey Institute Library, where those documents or those research is stored at, he just sort of twisted that to say, therefore, I financially supported bestiality, pedophiles, homosexuality and things like that. I don’t think the people took that ad serious. It didn’t help him in the polling, but there was a lot of teasing that I got after that on that issue.
