Republicans have held a state-level trifecta for almost the past 15 years straight. Outside of a small number of competitive suburban districts, Republican campaign leaders have not needed to fret about losing control over most county offices or the state government for a long time.
As primary results demonstrated, the once-assumed incumbency advantage is no longer a guarantee for elected officials. Those results are just the latest example of voters pushing for outsider or anti-establishment candidates to take on elected officials in safe Republican elections.
This should not be much of a surprise a decade after Donald Trump came down his escalator, defeated a dozen big-name Republican candidates and the Clinton election machine to take the White House and flip traditional politics upside down.
Voters in 2016 indicated that they were hungry for something different. Trump’s continued presence at the national level suggests that hunger has yet to be satiated.
Indiana’s anti-incumbency sentiment reaches down the ballot
In Indiana, the anti-establishment push from voters and activists has reached far down the ballot. Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith upset the establishment at the Indiana Republican State Convention in 2024 when he defeated Gov. Mike Braun’s preferred candidate, Julie McGuire.
Two years earlier, Diego Morales accomplished a similar win against Gov. Eric Holcomb’s appointee, Holli Sullivan, for the secretary of state nomination. He now faces his own challengers as the incumbent ahead of the 2026 convention this summer.
Dollyne Sherman, Dan Leonard, Sharon Negele and Bruce Borders are among the longtime House Republicans who have lost primaries to challengers in recent cycles — and now at least six Senate incumbents have lost their reelection bids in a single historic primary night.
Trump’s endorsements, outside political action committee money and a grassroots campaign organized by Turning Point Action certainly played a big part, but they don’t tell the whole story.
Ultimately, Indiana Republican voters in many of these districts made the decision that they no longer wanted the same-old politicians when viable alternatives appeared on their ballots. While the majority of Indiana has broadly rejected Democratic governance, they’re not overly fond of the leadership the current GOP has provided so far.
Indiana Republican Party should listen to its constituents
That poses a dilemma to the powers that be within the Indiana Republican Party: how to move forward.
When an outsider candidate wins at the state convention, the Indiana GOP has had little choice but to include the nominee as part of their statewide ticket. The dynamic is a bit different for state legislative races.
The two campaign organizations that work with the Statehouse candidates, the House Republican Campaign Committee and the Senate Majority Campaign Committee, help elect Republican candidates for their respective legislative chambers.
The committees are chaired by the top Republican leader in each caucus. House Speaker Todd Huston chairs the HRCC and Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray chairs the SMCC. The committees also have full-time staff dedicated to running the campaign operations necessary to flip blue seats and protect red seats.
What, then, do these committees do when they control a supermajority of seats in either chamber and the number of competitive districts drops to single digits because of changing voter habits?
The answer so far has been to curate the caucus itself, either by protecting incumbent Republicans against same-party challengers or in some cases working to oust Republicans who don’t mesh with the caucus.
They have been successful in some cases, but less so in others. As primary results indicated, anti-establishment candidates can perform well against incumbents when they are armed with funding and grassroots organization, as opposed to mere gumption and a prayer.
What, then, happens when these campaign committees spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in negative campaigning, only for the outsider candidate to win anyway?
When six or more new faces arrive in the Indiana Senate Republican Caucus, will everyone come together to pass legislation, or will ideological disagreements and bruised egos cause inner-party turmoil and affect the legislative process?
In the Indiana House of Representatives, a combination of retirements and ousted incumbents has led to the Republican caucus becoming younger and further to the right than when they first took the supermajority.
It appears the same dynamic will happen in the Senate soon enough. Voters in the primaries have spoken with a resounding “out with the old, and in with the new.”
Joe Bursley lives in Indianapolis and is a member of the Marion County Young Republicans.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana Republicans are tired of their own incumbents | Opinion
Reporting by Joe Bursley, Opinion Contributor / Indianapolis Star
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