By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com
September 18, 2026
The race to be Indiana’s next secretary of state is about to get ugly.
Sabato’s Crystal Ball, which is named after famed political analyst Larry Sabato and run by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, which Sabato directs, has changed its projection. Originally, Crystal Ball said Republicans likely would win the contest. Now, the prognostication is that the race is a toss-up.
That’s one of the reasons the battle among Democrat Beau Bayh, Republican Max Engling and Greg Ballard, the standard bearer for the freshly created Lincoln Party, is about to turn nasty.
Tight political races rarely bring out the best in people.
The math of political campaigns is harsh, even brutal.
It asks candidates and their staffs to commit almost all of their existences for a year or more to winning an office. Because only one campaign can achieve victory and the others go home on Election Night feeling as if they’ve lost not a race but a piece of their lives, the determination to win at all costs takes on an inevitable inertia.
But there’s even more going on now.
First, there’s the entry of Ballard into the contest.
The last Republican mayor of Indianapolis, Ballard’s base is that of erstwhile members of the GOP who once controlled what was the party of Abraham Lincoln and now have been chased out of it—hence, the new party name.
This has all the makings of a political family squabble.
Those who have been part of family feuds know that they can be vicious, because there generally are feelings of resentment and betrayal on both sides of the dispute.
That’s the way it is with this one. I’ve lost track of the number of old-line Republicans, people whose lineage within the GOP goes back decades or even generations, who have told me they’re furious with the MAGA types who just seemed to discover the party now labeling traditional conservatives RINOs—Republicans in Name Only—because the old-liners don’t twist and turn with every about-face President Donald Trump performs.
And the MAGA types feel that those traditional Republicans have, at best, taken them and their issues for granted for years and, at worst, looked down on them.
So, both sides of that dispute have reasons to seethe.
Then there’s the structural weakness for the Republicans and their candidate.
Normally, a candidate for a party that has been in power for as long as the GOP has would want to run on its record of accomplishment.
In this case, though, the reason Engling became the party’s candidate is because the incumbent, fellow Republican Diego Morales, made himself into the poster boy for corruption and using public office to personally enrich himself and his family. The party ditched him not because of his transgressions but because he was polling poorly.
Taking the message “we’re willing to tolerate incredibly bad behavior as long as it doesn’t cost us votes” into the general election is not exactly a stirring campaign theme.
If Engling and his fellow MAGA Republicans cannot make a plausible case for themselves, they have only one other viable path to victory.
That involves trying to discredit their opponents—particularly Bayh.
Engling and his allies will try to define Bayh as someone with values alien to Hoosiers. They will try to scare voters into thinking that the Democrat, whose father was a governor and U.S. senator from Indiana and whose late grandfather was one of the greatest senators in U.S. history, is someone of whom they should be scared.
Bayh’s ads so far—which feature a lot of footage of him handling firearms and touting his service in the Marine Corps—are designed to inoculate him against such attacks. They aim to tell Hoosiers that he is a lot like them and not the caricature Engling and friends will try to sketch of him.
Whether the ads will protect him is an open question.
The wave of negative advertising coming Bayh’s way will be immense.
Because Engling and the Indiana GOP have no other card to play in this high-stakes game.
That sense of desperation, along with the inherent bitterness of the Republican family quarrel, will drive much of the vituperation that is to come.
I don’t know who will win the secretary of state’s race.
But I do know that what we’ll see between now and Election Day won’t be pretty.
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.
