by Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Esq.

Lately, you can’t open an Indiana news site without tripping over my home state.

The Chicago Bears are eyeing Hammond for a new stadium. As a Chicago kid, I have feelings about that, but we’ll save the therapy session for later. Downstate Illinois counties keep voting to explore becoming Hoosiers, and our General Assembly set up a commission to talk about moving the state line. Apparently everybody in Illinois wants to come to Indiana except the people who run it.

And this week, Illinois handed me a flashback from the ghost of elections past.

In 2002, I was working for Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan, who topped the Republican ticket as the nominee for governor.  Also on the ballot was a suburban state representative named Jim Durkin, the party’s nominee for U.S. Senate against Dick Durbin. Back then, a moderate like Durkin was what a statewide Illinois Republican looked like. Today, he’d need a hall pass to get into the state convention.

On Monday, Durkin endorsed Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker over GOP nominee Darren Bailey. Same day, here in the Hoosier State, former Lt. Gov. Sue Ellspermann endorsed Lincoln Party secretary of state candidate Greg Ballard.

Two longtime Republicans, two states, one message: I’m still in the party. I’m just not voting for its nominee. It’s “it’s not you, it’s me.” Except it’s definitely you.

Neither one is leaving, either. Ellspermann still considers herself a Republican. Durkin says he’ll keep voting Republican this fall and after. They aren’t changing teams. They’re just declining to get on the bus.

Durkin served two stints in the Illinois House across a quarter-century and led the GOP caucus for a decade. He never warmed to Donald Trump and never got along with Bailey. Bailey, you may recall, was asked at this summer’s state fair whether humans and dinosaurs walked the earth together. His answer: “Were you there?” No, Darren, but I’ve seen “Jurassic Park.” That’s another column for another time.

Durkin’s diagnosis is that the state party has spent ten years playing “the game of subtraction” on abortion, guns and LGBTQ rights. Translation: it chased primary voters while the suburbs packed up and moved out.

I taught at Ivy Tech while Ellspermann was its president, so I’ve seen her work up close. She’s an industrial engineer and was Mike Pence’s running mate. That is not the resume of a bomb-thrower. Yet she opposed the Trump-backed redistricting plan last year, and this time she said she could have quietly voted for Ballard but wanted her support public. By Statehouse standards, that’s practically a primal scream.

So what does it tell us about this cycle?

First, never buy your own press. Endorsements from former officeholders rarely move many votes. Pritzker was already up 20 in one recent poll. Durkin isn’t changing that race, he’s changing the argument over what Illinois Republicans do after it. Ballard sat at 5 percent in the latest public poll, and one former lieutenant governor won’t close that gap. Her real audience is the Republican-leaning voter in the doughnut counties who’s uneasy with Max Engling but would rather chew glass than vote for a Bayh.

Second, watch how the parties respond. Bailey said Durkin had “failed us miserably.” His running mate called the endorsement “surrender dressed up as leadership.” Here, the GOP’s first TV ad of the race carpet-bombed Ballard’s record as the Republican mayor of Indianapolis. When a party answers its former leaders with excommunication, it tends to prove their point.

And there’s an irony worth savoring. Durkin said he doesn’t want to waste his vote on Bailey. That’s the exact frame Indiana Republicans are using against Ballard. In Illinois, a prominent Republican calls the GOP vote the wasted one. In Indiana, the party is betting voters still think it’s the third-party vote.

So maybe Illinois and Indiana have more in common than the border commission thinks. The 2026 fight in both states isn’t just Republican versus Democrat. It’s Republican versus what Republicans used to be. Sue and Jim said so on the record. As for me, I keep thinking about that 2002 ballot and the party that was on it. Those are the ghosts that haunt me.

Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the editor and publisher of IndyPolitics.org and an attorney licensed in Indiana and Illinois. He worked for Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan before coming to Indiana.

Photo:  WCIA-TV