Yes his numbers were in the tank and his fundraising numbers were even worse (like his fundraising was abysmal, the second he had to report just how bad, national dems abandoned him, running as far as they could). Any hope at just making this seat competitive with Hill as the candidate (not even talking about actually winning) was going to require a significant sum of money and Hill showed just nowhere near the kind of ability to raise the needed money to be competitive. If that wasn’t bad enough, Hills lackluster fundraising and tanking polling sent outside groups, outside money & allied super pacs running for the hills too. So there was just no backup cover to come to his aid… If he stayed in we were looking at a blowout GOP win, everyone in the party, including Hill could see this.
And that was frustrating because this was a seat national democratic leaders and strategist felt could be competitive and even go our way under the right circumstances (a la 2012 when dems surprised & picked up the other senate seat in the state). This being a presidential year was the 1st key ingredient, due to the more favorable electorate that shows up. Trumps ascendancy to the top of the GOP ticket was another potential coup for democrats. The missing pieces however were a weak GOP candidate and strong Democratic candidate when dems failed to get a truly top tier candidate while republicans avoided their mistake last time of nominating a far far right tea party nut.
Those calculations all change with Bayh being the democratic nominee. Democrats wanted him as the candidate from the start as he’s perhaps the ONLY Indiana democrat right now who could win the race without having to rely on the republican candidate screwing up. The race very possibly goes from “safe GOP” to “leans democratic” or even “likely democratic.” Democrats behind the scenes had been working on changing Bayh’s mind for months after multiple internal and private polls showed he would enter the race with a double digit lead should he be the dem nominee. That taken with his hug war chest of nearly $10 million that he’s been sitting on since 2010 made him a very viable candidate. And one that would totally flip the script on the battle for the senate after dems had bad news in late June with Rubio entering the Florida race, which had been looking increasingly like it would be democrats to loose.
Bottom line is Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid want to regain the senate BADLY (Reid to leave returning dems to the majority and Schumer to be leader of the majority). Hill was going nowhere and essentially everyone had written off Indiana as a pickup opportunity, this suddenly changes that. The GOP will almost certainly have to send in a ton of money from the NRSC and super pacs since Bayh’s cash on hand is dramatically higher than Young’s (which will have the bonus of diverting republican money from other races we’ve targeted). And since Bayh’s funding total is so strong right from the start, dems likely won’t need to send in a lot of money from the DSCC or outside super pacs (thus preserving more money for our other candidates in close races). Believe me I get that Bayh is far from a perfect progressive (but let’s not forget he was one of the final 3 people Obama was considering for VP) but all that said this is very good news for democrats and significantly increases our chance of winning the senate majority (or add to the majority… Let’s not forget we have a tough map in 2018, so we’ll need all the extra padding we can get if we want to retain the chamber for more than 2 years).