By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com
October 16, 2026
Not long before he died, former four-term Indianapolis Mayor Bill Hudnut talked with me about the Republican Party to which he had devoted most of his career.
This was in the days after Donald Trump had taken the ride down the golden escalator to commence his long campaign to remake the party of Lincoln into something the Great Emancipator wouldn’t recognize.
Bill—we were friends, so I’m going to use his first name—was troubled by the direction the GOP was taking as the Trump era began.
It wasn’t the Trump crowd’s many gaucheries that bothered him or even their departures from what had been considered Republican orthodoxies such as free markets.
No, it was the way they reveled in meanness—in marginalizing and bullying already beleaguered people just because they could. An ordained Presbyterian minister, Bill was disturbed by their celebrations of cruelty just for the sake of being cruel.
I asked Bill if that meant he was leaving the GOP.
“No,” he said. “I’m not leaving my party. My party left me.”
I’ve been thinking about that conversation with Bill an awful lot these days.
Indiana Republicans are in an uproar because two former GOP lieutenant governors—Sue Ellspermann and John Mutz—have endorsed former Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard in this year’s hotly contested secretary of state’s race.
Ballard, the last Republican mayor of Indiana’s largest city, formed a new political party, the Lincoln Party, with the help of many other traditional GOP stalwarts. At least part of the Lincoln Party’s avowed mission is to create a new home for disaffected longtime Republicans like Bill who believed, rightly or wrongly, that free markets could be a liberating and uplifting force and that blind bigotry wasn’t morally or intellectually defensible.
Ballard’s poll numbers haven’t been great, but he seems to be attracting enough votes to tip the balance in a tight election.
Which may have been at least part of the point all along.
MAGA Republicans also are angry that Indiana Sen. Greg Walker, R-Columbus, endorsed Democrat Beau Bayh in the secretary of state’s race.
Walker was one of the Republican Indiana senators Trump and MAGA targeted for retribution because those lawmakers refused to vote for the president’s ill-conceived and quite possibly illegal plan to further gerrymander the state’s congressional districts in the middle of a decade.
Walker and his fellow Republicans who defied Trump did so on principled grounds. They had concerns that the president’s plan was unconstitutional and they had taken oaths to uphold both the Indiana and U.S. constitutions.
That didn’t matter.
Trump’s team spent millions of dollars trying to defeat people who belonged to their own political party. They only had moderate success, but one place they did come out on top was in Walker’s race.
At a cost of who knows how much money, they managed to drive Walker—a loyal Republican senator for 20 years—from office.
To do that, they called him a RINO. That’s an acronym for “Republican in Name Only.”
They said that about a guy who had spent two decades of his life serving the GOP.
The stories of John Mutz and Sue Ellspermann aren’t as dramatic as Greg Walker’s is, but the overall theme is the same.
They’re both part of a wing of the Indiana Republican Party that believed that if people worked hard enough to build both businesses and communities, they wouldn’t have time for or even feel the need to hate. They believed and continue to believe in the gospel of prosperity, the secular faith animated by the fundamental principle, to rely on a cliché, that a rising tide would and should lift all boats.
That sort of thinking does not dominate today’s Indiana GOP.
Often, that sort of thinking doesn’t even merit a hearing in today’s Indiana GOP.
So, if MAGA Republicans here in the Hoosier state are upset that longtime Indiana Republicans such as Sue Ellspermann, John Mutz and Greg Walker have decided not to endorse the GOP candidate for secretary of state, those Republicans have no one to blame but themselves.
They’ve spent years and a lot of money telling many Hoosier Republicans that they aren’t wanted in the GOP these days.
As Bill Hudnut said, it wasn’t that Ellspermann, Mutz and Walker left the Republican Party.
It’s that their party left them.
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.
