INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Jill Long Thompson said Wednesday that state Democrats would unite behind her in their quest to defeat Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels in November following her narrow victory over Jim Schellinger in Tuesday’s primary.

“I’m very pleased to have received a number of phone calls already this morning from party leaders and they are very enthusiastic about working with me. Some of them endorsed my opponent. Some of them remained neutral,” Long Thompson told reporters in Fort Wayne. “But we are very unified.”

Schellinger conceded defeat late Wednesday afternoon, hours after his campaign issued a statement indicating he was not.

The campaign said there were some precincts where votes were uncounted, that there were provisional ballots to count and sort through, and that a recanvass process could show shifts in county vote totals.

But campaign manager Tim Jeffers said later that Long Thompson’s margin of victory would be too difficult to overcome.

With 99 percent of the state’s precincts reporting, Long Thompson had more than 574,000 votes while Schellinger’s had more than 567,000, according to unofficial tallies by The Associated Press.

One precinct in Hamilton County and one in Hancock had yet to report results. Counties have until May 19 to certify the results to the Indiana Election Division.

“This was a hard-fought race that unfortunately was overshadowed by the presidential campaigns,” Schellinger said in a statement.

Long Thompson, who represented northeastern Indiana in Congress from 1989 to 1995, did especially well in northern parts of the state. She received more than 70 percent of the vote in Allen, DeKalb, Noble, Steuben and Whitley counties, 67 percent in Adams, Huntington and Wells counties, and 63 percent in LaGrange — all parts of her former district.

Schellinger, an Indianapolis architect and a regular donor to the party who was making his first run for office, had an early fundraising advantage and backing from some big-name state Democrats.

But Long Thompson had better name recognition, having been a congresswoman and having run unsuccessfully for the state’s 2nd District congressional seat in a highly publicized contest in 2002.

She said she believed the keys to victory in November would be job creation, education, health care costs and no more privatization.

She has criticized Daniels for outsourcing many state jobs to private companies and leasing the Indiana Toll Road to a foreign consortium.

She had about $485,000 cash on hand at the end of the last reporting period on March 31, but would not say how much she had now.

“We are still crunching those numbers because it’s important for us to be very strategic,” she said. “But as you know, I am a candidate who has always been very good at spending money wisely, as I did in this primary campaign. But it certainly will be a large sum of money, and I’ve always been good at raising money.”

Daniels had about $5.3 million on hand as of March 31, and campaign spokesman Cam Savage said they had raised another $400,000 since then.

Although Schellinger and Long Thompson had run television ads for weeks heading toward the primary, Daniels blitzed the airwaves with commercials of his own even though he had no primary opponent.

He began airing two new television ads statewide on Wednesday, and spokesman Cam Savage said the campaign would be up on the airwaves through the November election.

Robert Schmuhl, a professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame, said Long Thompson faces an uphill battle against Daniels. “When you have such a tight race, uniting behind the primary winner can be difficult,” he said.

“Doing that and raising a lot of money to be competitive are the twin challenge.”

Long Thompson said she expected the race to be a tough fight but expected to win, then took a verbal jab at Daniels. “Four years ago he went through the state wearing a flannel shirt, driving an RV, eating a lot of tenderloins, and voters want more than a flannel shirt and a connoisseur of tenderloin,” she said.

Posted 5/8/2008