The Monster They Built

Watching Indiana Republicans run from Diego Morales this week reminded me of nothing so much as the last act of an old Frankenstein movie. The villagers grab their torches, form a mob, and march on the castle, while somewhere in the back, quietly hoping no one looks at him, stands the doctor who built the thing in the first place.

Because Diego Morales did not assemble himself.

The Indiana Republican Party nominated him in 2022. Jim Banks endorsed him. Todd Rokita endorsed him — which is a particularly interesting detail, given that Rokita himself was Secretary of State when Morales was fired from that very office. The convention delegates put him on the ticket. The voters — armed with considerably less information than they were entitled to — sent him in. And the people who had the information that might have changed the outcome made a decision, quietly and at the top, not to share it.

By the time he was sworn in, the assembly diagram was already on the table. Fired from the Secretary of State’s office before he ran to lead it. A military record inflated from three months and eighteen days of training into something it wasn’t. Voting in one county while claiming a homestead credit in another. Calling the 2020 election a scam in one room and walking it back in the next. Two Republican women — one of whom had worked in the Secretary of State’s office — alleging sexual assault, brought to State Chair Kyle Hupfer two months after the nomination had already been locked in. The delegates did not get the information. The voters did not get the information. Morales got the nomination.

And let’s tell that story honestly. The 2022 convention was not a failure of party leadership to warn the delegates. It was a delegate rebellion against party leadership. Gov. Eric Holcomb had appointed Holli Sullivan to fill the Secretary of State vacancy and the establishment expected her to win the nomination on a coronation basis. The delegates — particularly from the smaller and rural counties, and still furious with Holcomb over his COVID-era restrictions — had other ideas. They picked Morales precisely because the Indianapolis crowd was telling them not to. They let short-term anger curdle into long-term shortsightedness. They voted with the part of themselves that wanted to punish Holcomb, not the part that was supposed to be picking a Secretary of State. And Banks and Rokita, reading that room, got on the train and endorsed the result. They were not warning anybody. They were reading the prevailing wind. Which is also, not for nothing, exactly what they are doing this week.

Then he got sworn in, and the stitches showed.

A brother-in-law in a new six-figure job. Roughly $308,000 in spot bonuses in year one — the largest haul on record by an Indiana statewide elected official. No-bid contracts so brazen the General Assembly passed new transparency rules to rein him in. A $90,000 GMC Yukon Denali bought with taxpayer dollars from a dealer who had given his campaign $65,000. A ten-day trip to India during which he skipped a budget hearing and a prayer breakfast his own office was sponsoring. Multiple trips to Hungary for CPAC, framed as “personal time” while somehow involving meetings with government officials. And the Marion County Election Board barring him from non-public areas of the election services center on Primary Election Day — the state’s chief election officer kept out of an election facility. Read that twice.

And then there is Elina Kupce — best friend of Sidonna Morales, which is to say, best friend of the bride of Frankenstein — the $160,000-a-year deputy chief of staff whose nine consecutive BMV renewals, not one reaching the standard two-year extension, raise questions about her citizenship status during her time on the public payroll. She is the piece of the creature the doctors are still trying not to look at, because looking at her means looking at who hired her, who supervised her, and who signed off on the whole arrangement. Because how else does someone with her “credentials” land that job?

So now the doctors are at the castle door with torches, demanding the monster stand down for the good of the village. And the monster, predictably, is asking why he should be the one to leave when everybody else is still living in the castles he helped them build. He has, by his campaign’s own count, at least 600 delegates already in his camp. He can win this thing. He may well win this thing.

And the torches keep arriving. By Friday morning, State Treasurer Daniel Elliott had jumped the line on Banks and Rokita and called on Morales to resign from office — not just suspend his campaign, but step down from the office immediately — citing, in Elliott’s words, “allegations of corruption and mismanagement” and the news that Morales’s “own Chief of Staff was a non-citizen and illegally registered to vote.” Elliott’s framing of the Kupce situation goes meaningfully further than the public reporting has, which has documented the BMV renewal pattern and the questions it raises but has not established the underlying facts Elliott asserts. Make of that what you will. He endorsed Engling too.

And let’s be clear-eyed about what this week’s sudden outbreak of conscience is actually about. This is not about good government. This is not about the integrity of the Secretary of State’s office. This is not about the women in 2022, the no-bid contracts in 2023, the SUV in 2024, or anything else in a record that has been sitting in plain view for four years. This is about saving their asses — pardon my French — because the internal polling came back ugly and somebody figured out that the down-ballot collateral damage was going to land on them. The principle did not change this week. The math did.

Frankly, it is a little late to be reaching for the torches and pitchforks. We told you about Diego. Even Destiny Wells got this one right.

You built him.

And as Pottery Barn would tell you: you break it, you bought it.

See you in Fort Wayne.