by Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Esq.
After getting home on election night and filing my stories, I decided to lie down and save the column for later. So I made my tea (Earl Grey, hot, for my fellow Trekkies) and put on some Gilbert & Sullivan to unwind, H.M.S. Pinafore. And as I was listening, it came to me.
In the Act I finale, the captain’s daughter turns down the humble sailor Ralph Rackstraw, and the ship’s resident grouch, Dick Deadeye, wastes no time reminding everyone: I told you so. Twice, actually.
Dick is the least popular man aboard. Mostly because he’s usually right.
I know how he feels.
Tuesday night, Democrat Beau Bayh beat Republican Max Engling for Secretary of State by more than eight points in unofficial returns. He’s the first Democrat to win that office since Joe Hogsett, back when Murphy Brown was still on the air and Dan Quayle was picking fights with her. Over in the 5th Congressional District, J.D. Ford sent Victoria Spartz back to private life, roughly 52-48.
Neither should have surprised anyone reading this space.
In early October, a Tarrance Group poll for Hoosier Leadership for America had the race tied, Engling 38, Bayh 37. A Republican in a Republican state who can’t crack 40 percent a month out has a problem, and I said at the time that Greg Ballard’s voters would stay home or vote for Bayh before they’d vote for Engling. A week later I said IN-05 was the seat most likely to flip, because Hamilton County isn’t your grandfather’s Hamilton County and Ballard gave unhappy suburban Republicans somewhere else to go.
The first early and absentee numbers out of Hamilton County Tuesday night had Bayh nearly doubling Engling. Game over before most people finished dinner.
And that was just the appetizer. Down the ballot, Hamilton County was a bloodbath. Start with the big one: House Speaker Todd Huston lost his Fishers seat to Democrat Lauren Cole by fewer than 800 votes. The Speaker. The guy who decides which bills live and which ones die. Rep. Danny Lopez lost his Carmel-Westfield seat to Democrat Lindsay Gramlich. Former Marion County Sheriff Kerry Forestal took the Fishers-area Senate seat Republican Kyle Walker left open. At the courthouse, local Democrats say they flipped 22 of 41 seats, including the sheriff, a Superior Court bench, three of four county council districts and the circuit court clerk, which hands them control of the county election board. The county chair says the goal going in was 10 seats. They more than doubled it. Somewhere a Republican precinct committeeman is still staring at a spreadsheet.
Why? First, Engling had an impossible assignment. He had to knock off the sitting Republican Secretary of State at the convention, then turn around and run as the clean-up candidate for an office his own party had been running. That’s like campaigning to fix the roof on the house you just finished setting on fire. Bayh’s pitch was simpler: the place needs an audit, and I’m not part of the crowd that made the mess.
Second, the national environment was ugly for Republicans, and Indiana is red, not bulletproof. Even Treasurer Daniel Elliott, who held his seat, conceded that “some of our friends are having a rough night.”
One of those friends was Comptroller Elise Nieshalla, who lost to Democrat Jessica Bailey in a race that had nothing to do with how she ran her office. That’s the thing about waves. They don’t check résumés.
Now, about Ballard. He cleared 2 percent, so the Lincoln Party has ballot access, which was always the real prize. Anybody who wants to blame him for Engling’s loss needs to do the math. You don’t lose by eight points because a guy got three and a half. That’s not a spoiler. That’s an alibi.
Indiana didn’t turn blue overnight. Democrats broke the House supermajority Republicans have held since 2012, but Congressmen Rudy Yakym, Marlin Stutzman and Jefferson Shreve all held their seats. The majority party just learned that when you hand voters a reason to look elsewhere, they will.
Which brings us to the Indiana GOP’s front office. I wrote a while back that if Engling lost, it could be the straw that broke the Bactrian camel’s back for the current leadership. Watch the state committee over the next few weeks.
As for Bayh, the hard part starts now. His father won this same office at 30 and was governor two years later. You don’t need a Ouija board to see where the 2028 chatter is headed. He’d better deliver that audit first.
In Pinafore, Dick Deadeye never gets the girl. Nobody throws him a party. But by the end of the show, it turns out he knew exactly what was going on the whole time.
Like I said, I hate to say I told you so.
I take that back. I don’t hate it at all.
Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the editor and publisher of IndyPolitics.org and an attorney licensed in Indiana and Illinois. He is also a big Gilbert & Sullivan musical theatre dork. And who knows, maybe one day he’ll be the very model of a modern attorney general.
