The sig­nif­i­cance of what’s hap­pen­ing in Indi­ana this sum­mer hasn’t quite been ful­ly absorbed or report­ed by the media.

Indiana Tea Party candidate Mourdock makes the argument that the Obama bailout of the automobile manufacturers was equivalent to slaveholders’ exploitation of their slaves. Seriously.

That’s due in part to old habits. With just 11 elec­toral col­lege votes, Indi­ana doesn’t get much atten­tion from the grand poobahs in the nation­al press. It’s been near­ly 25 years since George H.W. Bush picked Indi­anan Dan Quayle as his run­ning mate, which was the last time the state was more than an after­thought in nation­al politics.

It doesn’t help that the state is a lock for Mitt Rom­ney this year, and that the bat­tle for its Sen­ate seat is between two can­di­dates unknown at the nation­al lev­el — Demo­c­rat Joe Don­nel­ly and Repub­li­can Richard Mour­dock. Don­nel­ly rep­re­sents a Con­gres­sion­al House dis­trict in the north­ern part of the state. Mour­dock is the Indi­ana State Treasurer.

But there are two ways that Indiana’s Sen­ate race may well play an impor­tant role in the nation’s polit­i­cal future.

The first is that it could deter­mine which par­ty con­trols the Sen­ate. Real Clear Pol­i­tics ranks it as one of nine ​“toss-up” Sen­ate races. Win­ning at least four of those would give Democ­rats a 51-seat majority.

Nate Sil­ver, the crack polit­i­cal ana­lyst for the New York Times, recent­ly wrote that ​“if I were giv­en just one guess at the com­po­si­tion of the new Sen­ate, I would go with this: 50 Repub­li­cans, 49 Democ­rats and one inde­pen­dent, the for­mer gov­er­nor of Maine, Angus King.” King, who is win­ning by a wide mar­gin, is expect­ed to cau­cus with Democ­rats. So the result of that sce­nario would be an even­ly divid­ed Sen­ate, with the vice pres­i­dent being the swing vote. But Sil­ver pegs the Indi­ana Sen­ate race as ​“leans Repub­li­can.” A Don­nel­ly win would give Democ­rats a 51-seat major­i­ty. The most recent polling indi­cates that the race is a dead heat – Mour­dock is ahead by two points in one poll, Don­nel­ly by two points in anoth­er one.

Beyond con­trol of the Sen­ate, though, there’s an even more impor­tant rea­son that the race mat­ters: Mour­dock is going all-in on Tea Par­ty extremism.

That extrem­ism is actu­al­ly the rea­son he’s still in the race. Mour­dock chal­lenged and beat the long-serv­ing sen­a­tor from Indi­ana, Richard Lugar, in the Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry last spring, and he did so with strong back­ing from Tea Par­ty orga­ni­za­tions, who have long despised Lugar as a use­less moderate.

Lugar’s actu­al vot­ing record doesn’t sup­port the notion that he’s a mod­er­ate. Pro­gres­sive Punch gives him an over­all pro­gres­sive score of 14 per­cent based on his life­time vot­ing record. The two cen­trist Repub­li­can sen­a­tors from Maine, by con­trast, get a score of 37 percent.

Lugar didn’t real­ly lose to Mour­dock because he lacks con­ser­v­a­tive con­vic­tions. It’s his style that makes him so dis­taste­ful to the Tea Par­ty. He doesn’t share their fine­ly honed sense of vic­tim­iza­tion, and he isn’t angry about the betray­al of the ​“real Amer­i­ca” by lib­er­al elites. He also isn’t opposed, on prin­ci­ple, to reach­ing across the aisle to pass legislation.

This mes­mer­iz­ing video illus­trates the dif­fer­ence. It shows Mour­dock speak­ing to a Tea Par­ty con­ven­tion called Free­dom­Works last month, and it’s so nut­ty that it’s hard to look away.

Mour­dock makes the argu­ment that the Oba­ma administration’s bailout of the auto­mo­bile man­u­fac­tur­ers in 2009 was equiv­a­lent to slave­hold­ers’ exploita­tion of their slaves. Seri­ous­ly. The equiv­a­lence being that the bailout hurt state work­ers’ pen­sion funds and ben­e­fit­ed big banks. Mour­dock filed a law­suit in the hope of mak­ing that argu­ment before the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case.

But of course, the fate of the pen­sion funds wasn’t real­ly Mourdock’s point in the speech. The point was to expose Barack Oba­ma as a social­ist tyrant. Obama’s plan ​“is to divide Amer­i­ca, and it is work­ing,” Mour­dock says near the end of the speech. ​“We heard Mr. Oba­ma say, ​‘They didn’t build that.’ When he uses that lan­guage he’s try­ing to build the foun­da­tion so that more peo­ple can have their assets tak­en away by gov­ern­ment under this mas­sive col­lec­tive sys­tem that he sees as the inher­ent future of America.”

In addi­tion to oppos­ing the auto bailout, Mour­dock flat­ly denies cli­mate change; hopes to repeal the Afford­able Care Act; believes that pri­va­tiz­ing Medicare is a good idea; strong­ly sup­ports the rights of gun own­ers; and believes that lib­er­al judi­cial activism is a threat to the nation.

Those are just run-of-the-mill posi­tions in today’s GOP, of course. What sets Mour­dock apart is his tone. There’s an anger and a wild-eyed zeal in him that you just can’t imag­ine in Lugar. After his vic­to­ry in the pri­ma­ry, for exam­ple, Mour­dock sent out a fundrais­ing let­ter that rubbed salt in the wounds of Lugar’s sup­port­ers. ​“Against all odds and with the estab­lish­ment work­ing day and night to defeat me,” Mour­dock wrote, ​“we retired a 36-year entrenched incum­bent sen­a­tor, who rou­tine­ly betrayed con­ser­v­a­tive vot­ers to push through some of the most rad­i­cal aspects of Pres­i­dent Obama’s agen­da.” That let­ter prompt­ed a colum­nist for an Indi­ana news­pa­per to write that in three decades of cov­er­ing Indiana’s polit­i­cal scene, ​“I have nev­er seen any­thing quite like Richard Mourdock’s U.S. Sen­ate campaign.”

If Mour­dock is will­ing to burn his bridges to Lugar’s sup­port­ers in that fasion, you can imag­ine his atti­tude toward Democ­rats. He has promised that, if elect­ed, he will bring more par­ti­san­ship to Con­gress. ​“It is bipar­ti­san­ship that has tak­en this coun­try to the very brink of bank­rupt­cy,” he told the Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence in February.

Indi­ana is an ide­al test­ing ground for whether the coun­try, and the estab­lish­ment GOP, are ready to whol­ly embrace Mourdock’s para­noia and dog­ma­tism. Though it has a rep­u­ta­tion as a solid­ly red state and it clear­ly leans toward the GOP, it does elect Democ­rats. Indi­ana nar­row­ly went for Oba­ma in 2008, and it opt­ed for Demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nors for 16 years before the Repub­li­can incum­bent, Mitch Daniels, was elect­ed in 2005. So Don­nel­ly, who is a cen­trist in the mold of for­mer Sen­a­tor Evan Bayh, is the kind of Demo­c­rat who can win in Indiana.

Mour­dock and oth­er right-wing zealots are fond of say­ing that this fall’s elec­tion is a cross­roads: a fun­da­men­tal choice about who we will be as a nation. The truth is, they’re right. As Nate Sil­ver astute­ly observed on his blog, Mitt Romney’s deci­sion to choose Tea Par­ty favorite Paul Ryan as his run­ning mate is an ​“all-in” strat­e­gy. ​“His bet is that the era of tri­an­gu­la­tion is over: that Repub­li­cans can win elec­tions with­out hav­ing to com­pro­mise.” And if that hap­pens — if the GOP can cam­paign on Ryan’s ideas and win — ​“they will be able to advance a more cred­i­ble claim that they have a man­date from the pub­lic, and that our pol­i­tics real­ly have shift­ed to the right.”

A Mour­dock vic­to­ry in Indi­ana, com­bined with a Rom­ney-Ryan win, would embold­en the Tea Par­ty like noth­ing yet has. The GOP will dou­ble down on extreme par­ti­san­ship and on poli­cies that serve the wealthy and gut the nation’s mid­dle class.

So Repub­li­cans are tak­ing a high-risk, high-reward gam­ble in this elec­tion. They’ve made it hard­er to win by choos­ing hard­core Tea Par­ty can­di­dates. But, as Sil­ver observes, ​“There is a heck of a pay­off if it works.” That was the con­text for Todd Akin’s refusal to bow out of the Sen­ate race in Mis­souri this week, despite blow­back from his ​“legit­i­mate rape” com­ments. Akin, anoth­er Tea Par­ty favorite, under­stands very well that this is an all-in elec­tion. There was no chance that he would be forced out of it by what he no doubt scorns as the p.c. police. And if he actu­al­ly man­ages to win, over­com­ing the estab­lish­men­t’s attempt to silence him will be all the more empow­er­ing for the Tea Party.

On the oth­er hand, if the go-for-broke gam­ble fails in Indi­ana and Mis­souri and at the pres­i­den­tial lev­el, the Tea Par­ty fever in the GOP might final­ly break, and Repub­li­cans’ long-antic­i­pat­ed sea­son of soul-search­ing and ref­or­ma­tion might actu­al­ly begin.

Here’s hoping.