Shoving the Door Open

Energy is rising in Indiana. The question is who controls it.

In my last piece, Bake the Cake, I focused on turnout and infrastructure. On the unglamorous work that actually determines whether a party can win.

What I didn’t spell out then is that baking the cake is also about control — who decides what gets built, who gets to compete, who gets heard once the energy shows up.

Judging from the candidate filings at yesterday’s deadline, the energy is there in historic numbers.

For the first time since 1974 — since Watergate — Democrats in Indiana have a candidate running in every State Senate race. Ninety-two of one hundred House seats are filled. I shared it on social media, and quickly it had almost a half million sets of eyes on it. Even AOC elevated Indiana’s story with a simple directive: run every seat.

Running every seat in Indiana hasn’t been the norm. I’ve traveled this state forward and back. In 2022 and 2024, I drove through counties where there wasn’t even a Democratic name on the ballot. You’d ask the county chair, assuming they attempted, and they would say there was just no one that year.

But politics is amplifying chaos right now, too deafening to ignore.

People are horrified by what they’re seeing from the Trump Administration. They’re frustrated with the everyday challenges of simply living. And they’re choosing to do something about it instead of waiting for the political class to work it out.

In many places this time, the party didn’t have to go looking. The candidates came to them.

It’s that kind of energy that raises a fundamental question: what happens when people are on the party’s doorstep, knocking, waiting to be let in?

Last spring, many of us saw that answer play out during the Indiana Democratic Party reorganization.

Coming off another statewide run as the party’s candidate for Indiana Attorney General (where we got a glimpse of what the party could look like), I ran for Indiana Democratic State Party Chair because the fundamentals weren’t fixing themselves — the cake was half-baked, as I’ve previously discussed. There was no clear vision of where we were headed. Participation was waning. Marion County — our Democratic stronghold — was turning out so poorly that statewide contests were effectively dead on arrival. Infrastructure lagged behind the rhetoric. If more people were going to step forward, they needed an on-ramp into the party.

The election for Chair — decided by party insiders — was coming down to the final days. Five candidates had been winnowed down to two, vote counts were circulating, but I had been in the map for months and knew we were tied. I had just picked up support from the Labor Caucus — a move that sent gasps through the old-guard network. They were losing a key piece of their coalition.

Two votes were left to secure while the two factions of the party — the new guard, which I represented, and the establishment — were locked in a dead heat. They would decide the next four years of party leadership, and they sat in my hometown congressional district — Indiana’s 7th — in the heart of Marion County and Indianapolis.

Those two votes sat in Congressman Andre Carson’s district. As the senior elected official, after a series of backroom calls, Carson directed that my opponent, Karen Tallian, a 75-year-old retired politician, be installed as the next chair. The establishment remained in control.

That vote wasn’t just about a chair race. For me, it was four years of work that felt like heartbreak. And for all of us, it served as a reminder that control inside a party doesn’t change just because energy builds outside it. It changes when enough people are willing to challenge it directly.

I’ve sat with these events for the last year. I’ve tooled and retooled ways to keep doing the work — a statewide PAC called The Good Fight, supporting other candidates, and even considering monetizing what I’ve learned as a consultant (because, let’s face it, this work has been financially draining). But none of that gets the work done at scale.

Losing didn’t push me out of the party. It pushed me further in. If control is the issue, you don’t fix it from the sidelines. You challenge it where it sits.

Indiana’s 7th deserves better than managed predictability.

It is one of the most reliably Democratic districts in the state. It should be a proving ground for progressive leadership. Instead, too many families here feel like decisions are made without their input. Rising housing costs, grocery bills that stretch further each month, community safety concerns, infrastructure that hasn’t kept pace, and schools that need a complete overhaul.

If the Democratic stronghold can’t deliver for the people who already choose progress, how does the rest of the state ever believe it has a fighting chance?

But that’s where the people have their opening.

In 2022 and 2024, an average of 1 out of 10 registered voters turned out for the Congressional District 7 primary.

One out of ten.

There isn’t a guaranteed congressman in the 7th. There is a community that hasn’t been given a real choice.

But in 87 days, we will.

Yesterday’s filing deadline showed numbers we haven’t seen in 50 years. The energy is real. What happens next will be decided by the people who stop knocking on the door and start pressing.

Now let’s shove it open.