Mike Braun

Michael Kent Braun (born March 24, 1954) is an American businessman and politician serving as the junior United States senator from Indiana since 2019.

Braun was born in Jasper, Indiana, on March 24, 1954.

He graduated from Jasper High School.

Braun was a three-sport star athlete; he married his high school sweetheart, Maureen, who was a cheerleader.

He attended the all-male Wabash College, where he was a member of Phi Delta Theta fraternity and graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in economics, and Harvard Business School, where he earned an MBA.

After graduating from Harvard, Braun moved back to Indiana and joined his father's business manufacturing truck bodies for farmers.

When the economy of the mid-1980s hit farmers hard and his father's business nearly went under, Braun steered the business in the more lucrative direction of selling truck accessories.

The business subsequently grew from 15 employees to more than 300.

In 1986 Braun and Daryl Rauscher acquired Meyer Body Inc., a manufacturer of truck bodies and distributor of truck parts and equipment.

In 1995 Braun fully acquired the company.

Meyer Body was renamed Meyer Distributing in 1999.

Braun is its president and CEO.

He was a member of the Jasper School Board from 2004 to 2014.

Braun was formerly registered as a member of the Democratic Party, but switched to the Republican Party in 2012.

He claimed that he has always considered himself a conservative Republican, but voted in Democratic primaries for years because his home county, Dubois County, historically voted heavily Democratic downballot.

A member of the Republican Party, he previously represented the 63rd district in the Indiana House of Representatives from 2014 to 2017.

In 2014, Braun was elected to the Indiana House of Representatives, in the 63rd district.

According to Braun, until a massive Republican wave in 2016, even Republican-leaning voters voted in the Democratic primary to have a say in local elections.

He resigned from the state House on November 1, 2017, to focus on his U.S. Senate campaign.

During his last year in the state legislature, American Conservative Union gave him a lifetime score of 82%.

Braun was elected to the United States Senate in 2018, defeating Democratic incumbent Joe Donnelly.

Braun opposes the Affordable Care Act, same-sex marriage, abortion, and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

He has called on the Republican Party to take climate change more seriously.

He supported President Donald Trump's trade and tariff policies, although he was previously an advocate of free trade.

Braun voted to acquit Trump in the impeachment trial related to the Trump-Ukraine scandal.

In 2018 Braun's personal finance disclosure listed assets worth between $35 million and $96 million.

In July 2018, Braun called for the Indiana attorney general, Republican Curtis Hill, to resign amid allegations that Hill had drunkenly groped a lawmaker and three legislative staffers.

Braun won the Republican primary for the United States Senate in the 2018 election, defeating U.S. Representatives Todd Rokita and Luke Messer by over 56,000 votes.

He received 208,520 votes, or roughly 41% of the total.

Braun ran as an outsider, emphasizing his career in business.

He defeated Democratic incumbent Joe Donnelly in the November general election with 51% of the vote to Donnelly's 45%; the Libertarian candidate, Lucy Brenton, tallied less than 4%.

Parnas supplied photographs of him and Braun embracing at a 2018 campaign event to the House of Representatives as part of his cooperation with the impeachment of President Trump.

In late 2019, the Indianapolis Star reported that Braun's 2018 campaign was the beneficiary of $2.8 million in spending by a political action committee with strong connections to indicted money launderer Lev Parnas and one of his shell companies.

On January 3, 2019, Braun was sworn in as the junior United States senator from Indiana by Vice President Mike Pence.

In May 2019, Braun was one of eight senators who voted against a $19.1 billion emergency aid package for states and territories that endured hurricanes, floods and fires.

Braun said the disaster assistance process was "just another path for runaway spending on unrelated projects."

Despite his opposition, the package was enacted with bipartisan support and President Trump's approval.

After Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election and Trump refused to concede, making claims of fraud, Braun defended Trump's efforts to overturn the election results.

Braun is running for governor of Indiana in 2024, having filed election papers on November 30, 2022, and declared his candidacy on December 12.

They were made public in January 2020.