Matthew Tully

State Rep. David Ober is a conservative, fiscally and socially. At 28, he’s the youngest member of the Indiana General Assembly, and he talks thoughtfully about issues such as taxes, the role of government, and the future of Indiana and his Republican Party.

And, so, Ober has been speaking out about the damage being done by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. On social media and elsewhere, he is urging his fellow Republicans to reach out in the style of an intervention to those who support the former reality TV star’s campaign. In an interview with me on Monday, Ober said Republicans must think about what Trump’s nomination would mean for everything from international diplomacy to the GOP’s future.

“Every two years you hear people say that this election is going to be the most important in our lifetime,” said Ober, who represents a largely rural district in northeast Indiana. “But I really do feel like this one is the most important election of my lifetime, and it’s important that we don’t let someone like Donald Trump run away with it.”

Ober’s frustration with the presidential campaign began months ago, long before Trump’s mind-boggling stumble this weekend when asked whether he wanted to disavow support he has received from white supremacist groups. Ober said that controversy was simply the latest in a long line of hurtful episodes in a campaign that has featured hateful comments about Hispanics, women, people with disabilities and others.

“I just don’t understand what people see when they look at Donald Trump and when they listen to him, and how they think that is a temperament we want to see in a president,” Ober said. “I am outspoken because I think we are making a huge mistake as a party if we nominate this guy.”

Ober is in his second term in the Indiana House. He first ran for the Statehouse in 2012 out of concern that nobody in power was focused intently enough on the issues facing twentysomething Hoosiers. He has built a solid conservative voting record but rather than focusing on ideological issues he prefers to spend his time on legislation addressing the unique economic and health challenges in his district. Ask him for a political role model and he’ll talk about “pragmatic conservatives like Calvin Coolidge.”

These days, though, he’s talking a lot about Donald Trump. “How much time do you have?” he said when I asked him why. “There are so many reasons.”

There’s the silliness of Trump’s suggestion that he is a conservative, Ober said, given his past stances on issues such as abortion and taxes. There’s the scary thought of Trump’s bluster representing America on the diplomatic stage. For a policy wonk like Ober, there’s the lack of policy proposals with any depth.

Then there is that deep concern that Trump and his anger-based campaign will damage the Republican Party, costing it not only a general election but also a generation of potential voters. This isn’t simply about politics, Ober insisted, but rather about the need for a strong Republican Party that can expand and win the “war of ideas.”

Ober mentioned his party’s brief period of soul-searching after the 2012 presidential election. Many party leaders encouraged steps aimed at appealing to a changing and more diverse America, arguing that without the support of more Hispanic and black voters the party was doomed to repeat that year’s election time and again.

More than three years later, Ober said, the party is even worse off. And if Trump is nominated the damage may be irreparable, at least for many years. The opportunity to grow party support among millennials may be lost. The challenge of keeping those Republican voters who have long been uncomfortable with the party’s direction would grow even more daunting.

“We talk about being a big tent party but we don’t act like it,” Ober said. “We are forcing moderates out of one end of the tent and barring new voters from coming into the other end. ... I look at Donald Trump and listen to him speak, and I think that he is the antitheses to what we said in 2012 about we needed to do to win another national election.”

Ober is supporting Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s campaign for president and remains optimistic that the GOP will not nominate Trump. That doesn’t mean he isn’t worried — not with polls in Tuesday’s primary states showing the New York businessman with strong support. The reality of those polls led the Indiana lawmaker to Twitter last week, where he urged fellow Republicans to reach out to any Trump supporter they know in order to “shame them” into rethinking their vote.

“The man is a joke,” he wrote bluntly to Trump backers, “and you’re the punchline.”

I asked Ober what would he do on Election Day if Trump were indeed nominated. It would be a tough day as a Republican, he said, because he certainly couldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. In the end, he said he would hope for a third-party candidate who is a strict constitutionalist and true conservative, and who was not running a divisive campaign rooted in anger.

“If I voted for Donald Trump, it would get real hard to look in the mirror and say I was trying to make this country a better place,” Ober said. “I feel very strongly that he has not and will not earn my vote. We are not just on different pages, we’re reading from completely different books.”

Trump’s book has sold well by exploiting and deepening the tale of a bitterly divided America. Let’s hope more Republicans will start listening to conservative voices such as Ober’s and put Trump’s book where it belongs: In the garbage.

You can reach me at matthew.tully@indystar.com or at Twitter.com/matthewltully.