by Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Esq.

Before we get started, a quick reminder for the new readers and the people who keep emailing me like I work at Indiana Capital Chronicle.  I am not a pure journalist. I am a media commentator. The distinction matters. A journalist has to be fair. A commentator has to be right. I do not have to give every side of every story equal weight. I have to read the public record, do the math, and tell you what I see. Then I have to be right about it.

Here is what I have been right about, just on this primary cycle. I told you in March that the redistricting purge was going to recruit faster than it could vet. I told you when Trump endorsed Blake Fiechter in SD 19 — before Fiechter had filed to run — that the campaign was not going to hold together, and it didn’t. I told you the AG’s office getting tangled up in the Alexandra Wilson ballot fight was going to look like exactly what it was, and it does. I told you the same Brenda Wilson the White House was branding as the face of Hoosier agriculture had a paper trail nobody on Trump’s vetting team appears to have read, and as of two weeks ago, the Indiana State Police are reading it now.

So when I sit down on a Saturday morning to write about who is on the ballot Tuesday, the framing is this: I have looked at the records. I am going to read a few of them out loud. You can decide what to do with what I tell you. I will be right.

Start with Brenda Wilson, the Trump-endorsed challenger to Greg Goode in SD 38. Trump’s endorsement post called her a “Successful Family Farmer, and Highly Respected Vigo County Commissioner.” She is a county councilor, not a commissioner. I will spot you the typo, because that is the least of it.

The “successful family farmer” framing has come apart in public, courtesy of Jacob Stewart’s April 18 IndyStar column, which is required reading and which I am not going to rewrite here because Jacob did the work. The CliffsNotes: Wilson’s late husband, a Terre Haute farmer, died in December 2024. Four stepchildren. A contested non-notarized 2024 will that disinherited them. Allegations of undue influence. They settled. Wilson then sued the family farm separately for over a million dollars, settled February 12 — and six days later, Trump declared her the standard-bearer for Hoosier agriculture. The timing is, let us say, instructive.

Then it gets worse. A police report alleging Wilson was barred from the property and was caught on trail camera taking items anyway. Indiana State Police executed a search warrant. They took her phone. She got a new phone. She got a new number. As one does. The four stepchildren have endorsed Goode. Meanwhile, Wilson’s campaign website still tells voters that farm life taught her “respect for property rights.” I am going to leave that sentence right there and let it think about what it has done.

Richard Bagsby is Beckwith’s pick against Ron Alting in SD 22, and Bagsby is the easiest one to be fair to. He owns his old story. Prison time for cocaine dealing, written about in his own memoir, no apologies, full transparency. That is genuinely not nothing, and I will give it to him.

The current file is the problem, and the current file is not in the memoir. Indiana’s public court records turn up a steady drumbeat of civil collection actions against Bagsby and his company, B Squared Construction Service. Interior Supply sued in January. ABC Supply got a foreign judgment last August. American Builders & Contractors Supply sued in May 2025 and won. Two earlier consumer-debt suits hit him personally in 2023. The pattern is suppliers and creditors going to court to get paid, and none of it is from the cocaine case. All of it is from the years since. The redemption arc is the candidacy. The receivables are not. You can write a memoir. You should also pay your vendors.

Paula Copenhaver, against Spencer Deery in SD 23, became “Indiana Karen” in 2020 for refusing to mask while running early voting in what was then Indiana’s worst COVID hot spot. Fine. That is a lifestyle choice. The 2006 Indiana Court of Appeals ruling Deery’s TV ads have been hammering — accusing her of taking $120,000 in a business dispute — is a different kind of document. She calls the ads character assassination. The ruling, however, is real, and the ads cite the factual record. So character assassination, not really. More like a mercy killing.

And speaking of mercy. A Turning Point PAC mailer hit District 23 mailboxes this week making the full Copenhaver case — Conservative Republican Leader, Pro-Family Values, Second Amendment Defender, the works — across an entire glossy panel of her, before instructing voters at the bottom, in giant capital letters, to “VOTE BLAKE FIECHTER ON MAY 5.” Blake Fiechter is running in SD 19. Different district. Different senator. Different ballot. The flagship outside-money operation supporting Copenhaver cannot keep its candidates straight on its own mail piece. The fact-checking on her résumé I am happy to leave to the Court of Appeals. The proofreading I would have thought Turning Point could handle in-house.

The Senate slate is not the only address for this. Over in House District 40, Sid Mahant — the self-funded challenger to 19-year incumbent and #3-ranking House Republican Greg Steuerwald — is having a week. The Hendricks County Elections Board, on a bipartisan 3-0 vote, referred two complaints against Mahant to the prosecutor. One for being inside a polling place where he had no business being. One for a Nautical Bowls video. The complainants were one Democrat and one Republican, which makes the establishment-witch-hunt framing a hard sell. Mahant says he didn’t know he wasn’t allowed inside the polling place. He has half a million of his own money in this race. Half a million should buy at least one lap around the rules.

Four candidates. Four sets of public records. One election. The pitch was outsider authenticity. The records suggest something more familiar: when a party recruits fast against an enemies list, it gets the candidates who said yes.

One housekeeping note. Destiny Wells, currently splitting the anti-Carson field in CD-7 with George Hornedo  and Denise Paul Hatch, took a swing at our polling this week and called it “slop.” Our “poll”  was an unscientific reader survey, labeled as such, and it tracked right in line with the paid-for public polling on the same races. The numbers are the numbers. I would also note, gently, that Wells has run for attorney general (lost), secretary of state (lost), and state party chair (lost), and her convention delegates were once tossed off the ballot for failing to follow basic filing rules. People with that résumé should be careful grading other people’s work.

The polling stands. The record stands. And as I said at the top — I do not have to be fair. I have to be right. I will be at this desk Tuesday night, like always.

See you then.

Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the editor and publisher of Indy Politics.  He is also an attorney licensed in Indiana and Illinois.