by Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Esq.

We published our informal survey of roughly 700 likely Indiana primary voters this weekend, and the response was about what you’d expect: campaigns whose numbers looked good loved it, campaigns whose numbers looked bad were suddenly very interested in methodology, and somewhere a consultant is billing six hours to explain why a sample of 700 doesn’t count.

Fair enough. It’s a self-selected online sample. We said so. We’re not apologizing for it.

But here’s what got lost in the back-and-forth: our numbers aren’t sitting out there alone. They’re the fourth read in five months, and the first three were done by people with proper voter files and margins of error. All four point the same direction.

Poll One: Dubois County, December 2025. Public Policy Polling went into Gov. Mike Braun’s home county — Jasper, the place that’s supposed to love him — and surveyed 636 voters. Braun came back at 16% approve / 62% disapprove. Trump, in the same sample, hit 54/32. A 38-point gap between the Republican president and the Republican governor, in the governor’s own backyard. Among women, Braun cleared 10%. The Mid-States Corridor was the proximate cause; the broader story was voters declining to grade Braun on Trump’s curve. When your hometown is treating you like a stranger, the rest of the state is usually not far behind.

Poll Two: Statewide PPP, February 2026. Same pollster, this time 554 voters across Indiana. Braun’s approval languishing in the 20s. Even Republicans described as lukewarm. Morning Consult separately ranked him among the least popular governors in the country. The pattern from Dubois turned out not to be a Dubois problem.

Poll Three: Secretary of State Ballot Test, March 2026. A 400-voter survey, ±4.9% margin, testing a three-way SoS race: Democrat Beau Bayh 31.5%, Republican incumbent Diego Morales 28.5%, independent Greg Ballard 23.8%. A sitting Republican Secretary of State running second in a state Trump carried by 19 points, within the margin of error of an independent who hasn’t filed his petition signatures yet.

Now Our Survey, April 2026. Braun: 18/73. Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith — the biggest loser in our survey by a country mile — comes in at 14/75, with 57% strongly disapproving and two-thirds of respondents saying they think he knows more than he’s letting on about the Life Church scandal. That’s not a polling problem. That’s a political obituary in slow motion. Morales running fourth in his own primary at 14%, behind Ballard, Bayh, and a Republican challenger most casual voters couldn’t have named six months ago. Of voters who’d seen the multi-million-dollar attack ads against the senators who voted no on redistricting, 83% said they had no effect or — and this was the actual word — “meh.” Trump endorsement: net negative, 44% less likely to 24% more.

Stack them up. December: a Republican governor underwater in his hometown while Trump cruises. February: that same governor underwater statewide. March: a sitting Republican SoS in a competitive three-way against an independent and a Democrat. April: our readers — older, engaged, 67% Republican-primary — putting that same SoS in fourth place, putting Beckwith somewhere south of toxic, and rating the rest of the statewide GOP ticket somewhere between disappointment and disgust.

Four data points. Four different methodologies. Four different geographies. Four different offices. One direction.

The honest reading isn’t that any single poll proves anything. It’s that when an online reader survey of 700 people lines up with a 636-respondent county poll, lines up with a 554-respondent statewide poll, lines up with a 400-respondent ballot test — and they all agree the Republican brand below Donald Trump is in trouble in a state Trump carried by 19 — that’s not a methodology artifact. That’s signal.

The other thing worth saying out loud: we’ve been measuring this since December. No one shifted the wind. The wind shifted, and the polling caught up.

May 5 will be the next read. The first three were polls. The fourth was our readers. The fifth will be the only one that actually counts — and based on the first four, somebody on the ballot is going to wish they’d been paying closer attention.

The campaigns still have nine days to figure out which one of them it’s going to be.

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