It was a config issue. The SELinux on the machine was not allowing apache to talk to port 8983. I verified this by temporarily turning off the enforcement (setenforce 0). Once I did this I was able to run search as expected. I then turned the enforcement back on (setenforce 1) and added a rule for port 8983:
semanage port -a -t http_port_t -p tcp 8983 -- Sent from: http://lucene.472066.n3.nabble.com/Solr-User-f472068.html
