Indiana Republican Congressman Rudy Yakym announced Tuesday that he’ll seek re-election in November. That didn’t surprise anyone, but his lack of a Democratic opponent so far could be historic.
Republican Party leaders tapped Yakym to succeed Jackie Walorski after her death in 2022, and he cruised to an overwhelming victory over Democrat Paul Steury.
So far, the Democrats have no opponent for Yakym this year. The party has never not had a congressional candidate by this time in the election cycle, late January of an election year, and it’s possible there won’t be one on the ballot in November for the first time.
Laura O’Sullivan hopes to avoid that. As the Democratic Party Chair for the 2nd District, O’Sullivan says she’s met with some two dozen Democrats over the past two years, either people who party leaders have approached or vice versa, but no one has stepped up to run.
"I do know that there's someone that is contemplating it but they've asked not to share their name yet because they're still thinking about it," O'Sullivan says.
If no one files for the May 7 primary election, the party has from May through July to conduct a caucus to appoint a candidate for November. In the caucus, interested candidates would compete for votes from precinct chairs throughout the district in a closed party event. This would also be historic. The party has never needed to do this to simply field a congressional candidate for the ballot.
O’Sullivan says Republicans, with their supermajority in the General Assembly, redrew the district lines in 2010 to make it very hard for a Democrat to win the district. The last Democrat to hold the seat was Joe Donnelly in 2012.
But Michiana is a very purple area, with a relatively even mix of Democratic- and Republican-leaning voters. Like much of the country, its cities are reliably Democratic, its rural areas conservative, and its suburbs somewhere in between.
So Republicans’ stronghold on the seat is a prime example, O’Sullivan says, of the need for bipartisan redistricting reform in Indiana to end gerrymandering.
But Jack Colwell, longtime political columnist for The South Bend Tribune, says Democrats can’t blame it all on gerrymandering.
"They made it a little more Republican but it was pretty Republican to begin with," Colwell says. "In the old district, if Rudy Yakym was running in that time, he certainly would have won big.
"So, yeah, gerrymandering made it tougher, but not any tougher than it is just with the complexion of voters now in Indiana."
Colwell says it’s understandable that Democrats are leery about investing the resources to run in the district when they’ve seen Republicans win it so easily over the past decade. But he says they shouldn’t fear losing a first attempt, or even a second.
"Sometimes you can win by losing," Colwell says. "(Democrat) John Brademas, who represented the South Bend-based district for 22 years, lost the first two times he ran. Joe Donnelly lost his first race. Jackie Walorski lost her first race. You want to talk about winning by losing, Pete Buttigieg. Ran for state treasurer. That was his first race. It was a very Republican year. He had no chance. He lost. But he impressed a lot of people, including some people looking for a candidate for mayor of South Bend."
Colwell says the Democrats can, like O’Sullivan says, appoint a candidate to the ballot through a party caucus this summer. But that could be a dangerous strategy to rely upon.
If a legitimate Democratic candidate doesn’t file for the primary election by Feb. 9, anyone could file.
"Somebody that they would not want at all could file down at the Secretary of State's office. Could be a Nazi. It could be a mental case. If that person is on there and the party doesn't have a candidate, that person is certain, then, to win the Democratic nomination and could cause real damage to all of the county tickets."
