Oft-forgotten Indiana now crucial testing ground in U.S. election

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David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.

The stridently right-wing John Birch Society was born there and the Ku Klux Klan flourished there. Its state university has one of the most distinguished classical-music programs in the United States and its capital city has one of the country's most beloved Jewish delicatessens. Its politics are so ferocious – so competitive – that nearly three decades ago the lower house was divided precisely equally between the two parties and thus the leadership alternated between two men. They were called the stereo Speakers.

On the surface, Indiana – the site of the next confrontation in the American presidential race on Tuesday and a crucial testing ground in both parties – is a bland state, mostly flat, squeezed between two political behemoths (Illinois and Ohio) and just south of an industrial powerhouse (Michigan). In many ways, Indiana is much like the broader country that surrounds it – so much so that when two sociologists looked for the perfect place in 1924 to seat their study of American life, they settled on a city in Indiana, Muncie, and called it "Middletown."

This is the first time in 48 years that the Indiana primary, usually lost in the parade of preliminaries to the presidential nomination, has been a consequential event in both parties. "Indiana ordinarily is the stepchild of the presidential nominating process," says Robert Schmuhl, who holds an endowed chair in American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, in South Bend. "This year it is squarely in the centre of not only the country but also the public's attention."

The last great contest occurred in 1968, when Senator Robert Kennedy defeated Senator Eugene McCarthy by a substantial margin in the state, positioning the New York lawmaker to become the Democratic front-runner. That primary is remembered for the stirring speech Mr. Kennedy delivered in the heart of black Indianapolis the April night of the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King. The remarks, made spontaneously and including a poignant quotation from Aeschylus, now are considered among the most important orations in American history and are credited for keeping the peace in Indianapolis even as other cities exploded into violence.

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Manhattan businessman Donald Trump are calculating that Tuesday's contest in Indiana will bring their respective races to a virtual close. Ms. Clinton holds a small lead, though each recent poll puts Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont within the margin of error. The result in the Republican contest is anyone's guess; within hours on Friday alone, for example, one poll put Mr. Trump, who has been the slight favourite here for weeks, ahead, but another gave the advantage to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and still a third showed a race too close to call.

But there is a consensus that Indiana could be the last chance to stop Mr. Trump even as it is the first testing ground of the new alliance between Mr. Trump's two remaining rivals, Mr. Cruz and Governor John Kasich of Ohio. The two candidates are urging Republicans opposed to Mr. Trump to team up behind Mr. Cruz in Indiana and to do the same behind Mr. Kasich in New Mexico and Oregon. But this alliance frayed from the start – there is no precedence for it in American history – and if Mr. Trump triumphs in Indiana it won't matter much what happens in New Mexico and Oregon. Governor Mike Pence of Indiana said Friday he would vote for Mr. Cruz but also saluted Mr. Trump for providing "a voice to the frustration" with the federal government.

The state has a resilient Republican tradition; its electoral votes went reliably to the GOP candidate in 17 of the last 19 elections, the only exceptions since 1936 being the Lyndon Johnson landslide of 1964 and Barack Obama's first presidential campaign. But that masks the political character of the state, which is more complex than it appears. In recent memory, it has sent a liberal, Democrat Birch Bayh, to the Senate and now has one of the most devoutly conservative governors in the country, Mr. Pence, who in his endorsement of Mr. Cruz saluted the Texan's advocacy for the Reagan agenda, his efforts to repeal the Obama health-care initiative and his "strong and unwavering stand for the sanctity of life." Often political extremes are visible even within a single party; for a good deal of the 1980s, the state was represented by a conservative Republican, Senator Dan Quayle, and a moderate-to-liberal Republican, Richard Lugar. Mr. Quayle became the vice-president under George H.W. Bush and Mr. Lugar, who made an international reputation for his work in securing dangerous nuclear-arms stocks, for years bore the stigma of being Richard Nixon's favourite mayor, a position he held before advancing to Washington.

And it is a state of remarkable diversity, as personified in just three of its native sons: the gangster John Dillinger; the fashion designer Bill Blass; and the scholar Paul Samuelson, the first American to win a Nobel Prize in economics. Half the nation's recreational vehicles (RVs) are manufactured in Elkhart County, in the north-central part of the state, which also is the very place where Alka-Seltzer was first marketed.

Indiana is above all a crossroads, with its borders defined at places by the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. It is both northern (the average snowfall in the industrial centre of Gary is more than 100 centimetres) and southern (the latitude of Evansville is almost identical to that of Charlottesville, Va., which prides itself on its southern cavalier traditions). And while South Bend is a frosty hockey-mad outpost in winter, it is also possible to find grits, the ground-corn breakfast supplement beloved in the Old Confederacy, on Indiana menus.

The state has some of the most remarkable architecture in the nation. Little Columbus, Ind., with a population just under 45,000, has seven National Historic Landmarks, including four Art-Nouveau buildings designed by the fabled Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen.

One of the most recognizable cultural icons in the country is still the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where at 12:04 p.m. on May 30 the cry of "Drivers, start your engines" will signal the beginning of the 100th running of the Indy 500 auto race.

Indeed, the automobile culture and the auto industry are part of the lifeblood and identity of the state. Indiana, which once ranked third in auto gross domestic product, now has nudged into second place behind Michigan, and the $9.9-billion (U.S.) in auto-goods production includes new investments by Toyota and General Motors.

For more than a third of a century, Indiana has led the country in steel, its 23,000 steel workers – a quarter of the nation's total – producing more than 22 million tonnes last year, mounting portions of it in mini mills. Even so, steel towns, especially in the northwest shoulder of the state, remain in Rust Belt distress; a half-century ago, more than 100,000 workers toiled in the steel mills of the region. That figure has fallen by about 80 per cent.

Corn and soybeans year after year top the list of the state's agricultural products, but – surprise! – the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws claims that pot is firmly in third place, representing a cash crop greater than that of hay and wheat combined.

Though it has several important urban centres, Indiana retains a rural feel, the heritage of early agrarian settlements along the Ohio, Wabash and Whitewater rivers. It was at Tippecanoe Creek, near the present Lafayette, Ind., where William Henry Harrison fought a landmark 1811 battle with the Shawnees. That is where the eventual ninth president won his fame, and his nickname. His victorious 1840 Whig ticket, which included running-mate John Tyler, was known as "Tippecanoe and Tyler, too."

Indiana spawned actors James Dean and Steve McQueen and musicians Cole Porter and Michael and Janet Jackson. Among the state's most recognizable figures are Knute Rockne (played by Pat O'Brien, with Ronald Reagan as George Gipp, known as the Gipper, in an iconic 1940 film) and Larry Bird (the Indiana State star who was known as the "hick from French Lick," the southern Indiana town of 1,800 souls, and who later won fame and three NBA championships with the Boston Celtics).

As much as anything else, the state is defined by sports – professional football in the NFL, college football centred around Notre Dame and to a slightly lesser extent Purdue and Indiana universities, and basketball at every level, including what is known in the state as barn ball, where young Indianans master shooting hoops in haylofts.

That rural basketball tradition was celebrated and memorialized in the 1986 film Hoosiers, starring Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey and Dennis Hopper and centred around the heroics of the high-school team from tiny Milan, Ind., which, with an enrolment of only 162 students, somehow won the 1954 state basketball championship. No wonder all of Indiana laughed in derision when Mr. Cruz, an avowed fan of the movie, referred to a basketball "ring" rather than a "hoop" during a speech the other night in the celebrated high-school gym in Knightstown where the movie was filmed.

For two centuries, the residents of the state have been called Hoosiers, though there is no single accepted explanation for the term. Even the Indiana Historical Society has no definitive answer, nor can it determine whether it originated as a disparagement of rusticated Indianans.

That, along with the outcome of Tuesday's primary, is just one of the many mysteries of Indiana.