Mike Braun is a conservative outsider who spent his career as a main street entrepreneur building a business and creating thousands of good-paying Hoosier jobs before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2018. Mike has lived the American dream and his drive in becoming the next Governor of Indiana is to preserve the same freedom and opportunity to achieve prosperity for future generations of Hoosiers.
After graduating from Jasper High School in 1972 as class president and a letterman in football, basketball, and track, he attended Wabash College. At Wabash, Mike graduated summa cum laude with a degree in economics and as student body president.
After college, Mike married Maureen, his high school sweetheart, and the two moved to Boston where he attended Harvard Business School and earned his MBA. After business school, while the majority of Mike’s classmates took high-paying jobs on Wall Street, he chose to move back to Jasper to raise a family and build a career.
After a few years working for a national kitchen cabinet company in Jasper, in 1981, Mike got the entrepreneurial itch and took over a struggling farm equipment manufacturer called Meyer Body. Over the next 20 years, Mike lived the hardscrabble existence of a small business owner with 15 employees and his office in a used mobile home.
In the early 2000s, Meyer began to grow into a regional company and over the next 15 years grew into a national company that currently employs thousands of Americans with locations in 38 states. During his time growing a national company and serving in the US Senate, Mike never lost track of the lessons learned as a small business owner and has always kept the same main street values.
The values of faith, family, and community guided Mike while growing a business and raising a family, and have inspired his call to serve fellow Hoosiers throughout the years. Mike began his public service as a member of the local School Board for ten years and then as a State Representative from 2014-2017.
Mike has been a conservative voice for Hoosiers since his historic victory in the 2018 US Senate election, having led over 35 bills into law and was recently named the most effective first-term Republican Senator. Mike has also consistently been ranked as one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, earning endorsements from Americans for Prosperity and CPAC, and maintains excellent ratings from the NRA, Family Research Council, National Right to Life, and Susan B. Anthony List.
Mike is an avid outdoorsman and enthusiastic morel mushroom hunter every spring. Mike and Maureen have been married for 47 years and have four adult children and seven grandchildren.