I did something I’ve never done before: published a column on who I’m voting for.
It’s a weird election year in Indiana. We don’t have main-event-style races for governor or U.S. senator, but we do have a secretary of state race that could transform state politics. Dynastic Democrat Beau Bayh has a real chance to win in a state where Dems have been comatose throughout the Trump era. At the same time, former Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard has left the Republican Party to help launch what could be a viable third party in Indiana.
Here’s where I come out:
Ballard’s Lincoln Party asks for your vote now in order to build a formidable opposition party for the future. That ask is too great, especially when Indiana already has an opposition party.
Indiana voters who are concerned with the present face the same effectively binary choice as the rest of America: Democrats or Republicans. That means it’s either Democrat Beau Bayh or Republican Max Engling in the secretary of state race. Engling, an aide to Sen. Jim Banks, is the face of the status quo. Bayh, even as the son and grandson of senators, is the face of change.
I also explained my thinking on the Rob Kendall Show:
If my reasoning seems a bit tortured, well, that’s because it is. That’s why I wanted to at least try to articulate my vote.
This election is forcing self-identifying independents to take sides in a way that doesn’t feel comfortable to me. If you vote for Republican Max Engling, you’re siding with the Trump-aligned, Jim Banks-led Indiana Republican Party. If you vote for Ballard, you’re likely sacrificing this election cycle and buying into a long-term vision to create that ever-elusive third way. If you vote for Bayh, you’re hoping a moderate nepo baby can deliver where every other Indiana Democrat has failed for the past decade.
I’m casting my lot with the nepo baby.
Bayh, 30, is a sharp, qualified candidate who has shown message discipline by ignoring progressive critics and pursuing Indiana’s median voter. He has a combination of skills and integrity that put him well above the typical Indiana politician of this era.
My colleague Jacob Stewart makes the case for Engling, and it’s a good one. I like his column because I agree with most of what he says. I just reach a different conclusion, mostly based on my revulsion toward the Republican Party.
In truth, I might be voting for Ballard if he had run as a Republican, overturned some tables at the party convention and earned the nomination as a change agent. But that would have been … unlikely. Ballard clearly saw a better path by leaving the party, and I don’t blame him.
I came of age identifying as a Republican, moved left during the Iraq war debacle and have remained somewhere in the squishy center, even in my capacity as an explicitly biased hot-take monger. I still vote for Republicans, though not as often as I used to. I want the Republican Party to be a serious, idea-driven institution that cares about governing more than social media engagement.
That reset can’t happen without Republicans experiencing an electoral bloodbath — probably multiple bloodbaths.
We need to tear down the “GOP’s machinery of corruption and bad faith,” as Brian Beutler put it. Bayh is the person who can do that in Indiana, starting with the secretary of state’s office and continuing with a march toward the governor’s office in 2028.