IN-SOS: Can a Democratic Dynasty Survive in This Red State?

Nashville, Ind.—Beau Bayh knows the way out of the wilderness.

“You got to go north on Main Road,” he tells me over the phone, trying to guide me through the fall foliage of the Little Smokies, as the locals call them. The candidate for Indiana Secretary of State is set to meet me for a run at a trailhead here in Brown County State Park this morning. It’s his 30th birthday. How else would a chiseled, 6’3 ex-Marine and ambitious Hoosier political scion celebrate but with some PT in the deep woods of southern Indiana? There is, of course, an Indiana University game later in the day, and he’ll watch that with friends.

When I finally catch up to him, his campaign manager has dropped him off, and he’s already limbered up for a run across a four-mile stretch of some 16,000 acres of rugged hills and ravines etched into the southern half of the state. His family would vacation here when he was a kid, one of the reasons he chose it as the location of one of our many ranging talks over the last year.

I’m not the only one looking to Bayh to lead me out of the wilderness. Democrats haven’t won a statewide office in barn-red Indiana since 2012. And their performance across the rest of middle America hasn’t been much better. President Donald Trump won both Michigan and Wisconsin in 2024. Once-purple Iowa is down to one last statewide Democrat in elected office, Auditor Rob Sand. The old neighboring battleground of Ohio has trended red, too.

But Bayh is bringing hope to the ruins — literally. He announced his campaign six months ago amid sculptures from the 1970s called “The Ruins” that look like the vestiges of ancient Greece.



https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/04/24/beau-bayh-democrats-indiana-secretary-of-state-race-00886849