By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com
September 11, 2026
At last, some signs of both sanity and integrity have returned to Indiana politics.
The Indiana Supreme Court finally put an end to Indiana’s closest and most divisive primary battle. The court ruled that state Sen. Spencer Deery, R-West Lafayette, won the May primary and will be on the November general election ballot, thus putting an end to a prolonged and unsavory political and legal battle.
The May primary that Deery won by three—yes, three—votes was less an election campaign than it was a nasty, nasty Republican family feud.
That feud began when President Donald Trump, fearing a massive Republican loss in the 2026 midterm elections that would cost the GOP the U.S. House of Representatives and allow Democrats to investigate his many questionable personal and political initiatives, decided to rewrite the rule book.
Since the beginning of the American republic, congressional districts in the United States have been drawn following the census done at the end of each decade.
Trump, though, decided to push for redistricting in the middle of the decade in states where he thought Republicans might be able to scoop up congressional seats by rejiggering the maps.
Indiana was one of the states on the president’s list.
He ran into more opposition in Republican ranks than he expected, even though he had Indiana Gov. Mike Braun, Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith and Attorney General Todd Rokita all pounding the drum for him.
Polls showed that everyday Republicans in the state didn’t like Trump’s power play.
It ran into a wall in the Indiana Senate. Deery and 20 other Indiana Republican senators—more than half the Senate’s GOP caucus—joined 10 Democrats to vote down Trump’s election steal plan by a decisive 31-19 margin.
Trump and his Indiana allies—none of whom will earn chapters in future editions of “Profiles in Courage”—vowed retribution. They decided to target a handful of Hoosier Republican state senators for primary challenges.
Deery was one of them.
His challenger was Paula Copenhaver, a staff member in Beckwith’s office.
Trump and company plunged millions of dollars—the true number may never be known, but it was large—into these Republican-versus-Republican battles.
When the votes were counted and then recounted, Deery prevailed over Copenhaver by one of the narrowest margins in Indiana history.
Egged on by the president and his brain trust, Copenhaver challenged the results.
At first, she and her lawyers planned to argue that Deery’s victory should be set aside because some Democrats may have voted for Deery. She dropped that argument, though, and then set her sights on disenfranchising voters.
She contended that six ballots cast for Deery should be disqualified because they don’t bear the proper signatures from election officials.
The intentions and the interests of those voters figured nowhere in Copenhaver’s pleadings—as it rarely does with Trump and his acolytes.
Only the people who agree with them matter or have rights, regardless of what the U.S. and Indiana constitutions say on such questions.
Fortunately, the state’s Supreme Court justices—or at least a majority of them—disagreed.
In the ruling, Chief Justice Loretta Rush reaffirmed that, absent clear evidence of corruption or abuse of the process, protecting the voter’s right to cast a ballot should be of primary importance.
In a self-governing society such as ours in which government at all levels draws its authority through the consent of the governed, that sounds as if it should be considered self-evident.
But—too often—it isn’t.
In her remarks acknowledging the court’s decision, Copenhaver talked with passion about the pressure on election officials and the need for election integrity—particularly closed primaries, which have become an obsession among “shrink-the-tent” conservatives.
She couldn’t seem to summon up much enthusiasm, though, for the principle that people should have a right to vote and that their votes should not be disregarded because they irritate one faction or another.
Fortunately, the Indiana Supreme Court thought otherwise.
A majority of the justices decided that the core beliefs that have animated both this country and this state since they were founded are still valid.
And must be respected.
In an era in which so many fundamental American principles are under assault by people who should know and behave better, that’s a victory.
A victory that matters.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College. Also, the views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.
