Three days before Indiana Republicans choose their nominee for secretary of state, the four-way race took its ugliest turn yet — and turned the candidate under attack into the man everyone suddenly wanted to defend.
A mass text message reached convention delegates this week pairing an apparently AI-generated image of candidate David Shelton outside a middle school with unsubstantiated claims that he and his wife had promoted a “sex toy” business at their children’s school. The message carried no paid-for-by disclaimer and closed with an appeal to vote for incumbent Secretary of State Diego Morales.
Morales disavowed it within minutes.
“A few minutes ago, in yet another shameful display of dirty politics, a text message was sent out attacking fellow Republican and candidate David Shelton,” Morales wrote on his verified Facebook page. “This text message was NOT from my campaign and was made to deceive delegates.”
Morales noted the message lacked a required paid-for-by disclaimer and urged Republicans to “rebuke these despicable actions and not allow these dirty tactics to destroy our party.”
Max Engling, the third major candidate in the race, quickly followed. “My campaign did not send the recent message about David Shelton, and it wants nothing to do with these smear tactics,” Engling said in a statement to delegates. He called for a “serious discussion about the future of this important office, not fake tabloid stories or manufactured controversies.”
The result was a rare convention tableau: two rivals racing to distance themselves from an attack neither claimed to have sent, on behalf of a third they are trying to beat. Shelton, the target, became — for a news cycle, at least — the candidate everyone loves.
Who actually sent the message remains unknown. The text went out as a mass blast, complete with an opt-out string, but carried no committee attribution. Its express call to vote for Morales, combined with Morales’s own insistence that it did not come from his campaign, leaves an unanswered question heading into Saturday: who paid for it, and will anyone answer for the missing disclaimer.
The fourth candidate, Reitenour, had not publicly responded as of Wednesday.
The episode is the latest flashpoint in a secretary of state race that has been bruising well before delegates gather Saturday in Fort Wayne. The contest has already featured competing endorsements, dueling claims about the office’s record, and questions about Morales’s standing in a field where no candidate has consolidated clear front-runner support.
It also fits a pattern. Anonymous mailers and untraceable attacks have shadowed this race for weeks, and the Shelton text — now amplified by AI-generated imagery — marks an escalation in both method and tone.
Delegates will sort it out Saturday. Whether the attack on Shelton helps him, hurts the candidate it was made to benefit, or simply deepens the bad blood in a divided field, the race to defend Dave may be the only thing Indiana Republicans agree on this week.
At least one delegate is arriving with appropriate expectations. Surveying the field three days out, a first-time delegate reached for “Star Wars”: “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy,” he said. “We must be cautious.”
