As Trump lines up redistricting payback, Mitch Daniels comes to Sen. Deery’s side
Former governor/Purdue president publicly introduces Deery in Indiana Senate re-election bid amid promised retribution in redistricting fallout. Plus, Democrats try to find traction in 4th District
Support for this edition comes from the West Lafayette Public Library Foundation, which will host a Trivia Night Fundraiser Feb. 21 to support the library. Local trivia master Nick Rogers will preside at the all-ages event from 6:30-9 p.m. For tickets, $15 for individuals and $120 for a table of up to eight people, go to: www.wlplf.org/trivia
Before we start … how’s your shoveling going today? I’ll leave it to Chad Evans and Chad’s Weather Blog (sign up today!) for the snow totals and that brutal forecast. But it’s enough that Lafayette, West Lafayette and Tippecanoe school corporations have canceled school Monday; Lafayette Catholic Schools will go to an e-learning day; Purdue will be on a morning delay Monday with non-essential staff not due to report until 10:30 a.m.; Ivy Tech Community College will operate virtually Monday; and the cities were still operating under snow emergencies with parking restrictions on snow routes to give plows a chance to do their thing.
In other words, continue hunkering down.
AS TRUMP LINES UP REDISTRICTING PAYBACK, MITCH DANIELS COMES TO SEN. DEERY’S SIDE
The Trump administration’s promise to stay in touch with Indiana’s primaries, particularly when it comes to targeting Indiana senators who declined to join a push to redraw congressional boundaries in hopes of picking up a couple of U.S. House seats in the 2026 midterms, continued to play out in recent days.
This week, President Donald Trump posted a lengthy (for social media, at least) endorsement for a Bluffton City Council member to take on state Sen. Travis Holdman, a Republican from Markle in northern Indiana, who was among the 21 GOP votes in the Senate against a redistricting bill. In Trump’s eyes, and in his Truth Social post Thursday, Holdman was a RINO and “an America Last politician.” Which all was a surprise to the guy who got the president’s endorsement.
As Indianapolis Star’s Kayla Dwyer reported: “It’s not every day the president of the United States plucks a young city councilor out of rural Indiana obscurity and endorses him for a state Senate seat. Even rarer: Blake Fiechter hasn’t even made up his mind about running. And he has no idea how the president found out.” Read more here: “Trump endorses Indiana Statehouse primary challenger who isn’t even running yet.”
Trump’s post also touted polling that suggested Fiechter would jump to the lead with the president’s backing.
That piled onto ongoing hectoring from Vice President JD Vance, who took jabs a week ago at Senate President Pro Tem Rodric Bray – who helped toss cold water on the redistricting concept – after Democrats in Virginia orchestrated a map redo in that state: “I’d like to thank (Rodric Bray) for not even trying to fight back against this extraordinary Democrat abuse of power. Now the votes of Indiana Republicans will matter far less than the votes of Virginia Democrats. We told you it would happen, and you did nothing.”
Away from the redistricting issue, Trump also threw his weight behind an incumbent in U.S. Rep. Jim Baird, as the Greencastle Republican faces a primary challenge in Indiana’s 4th District – the one that covers Tippecanoe and surrounding counties – from state Sen. Craig Haggard, a Republican from Mooresville. In a social media post Friday, Trump called Baird a “Tremendous Champion” for the 4th District, who has the president’s “complete and total endorsement for re-election.”
In that context, here are a couple of scenes from local campaigns from the past week or so.
MITCH DANIELS INTRODUCES STATE SEN. SPENCER DEERY’S RE-ELECTION BID
In the first of a pair of formal campaign announcements over the past two weeks – one in West Lafayette, another clear on the other end of the sprawling Indiana Senate District 23, 90 minutes away in Rockville – Sen. Spencer Deery was introduced by former Gov. Mitch Daniels.
Daniels – who has largely refrained from campaign endorsements, outside a bump for Jefferson Shreve’s run in the 2023 Indianapolis mayoral race, since a decade-long run as Purdue president started in 2013 – said he wanted to publicly back Deery “for very special, personal reasons.”
Deery worked as a deputy chief of staff for Daniels at Purdue – a role the former governor said was one as “a sidekick, sounding board (and) really the one person who worked with me trying to conceive and sometimes execute communications that I thought were important to moving Purdue forward.”
“We live in a time when, sadly, public officials acting out of principle and acting with great courage are sometimes hard to find,” Daniels said via a message delivered by video at a campaign launch at 9 Irish Brothers in West Lafayette when scheduling issues prevented something live. “And in some recent controversies in our state, Spencer Deery has revealed himself to be a person of immense principle and of equivalent courage.”
Daniels’ public support for Deery comes with a backdrop of one of those recent “controversies in our state.”
Deery was an early and outspoken opponent of the White House push for redistricting, labeling it as a dangerous precedent that allowed current leaders to pick their voters in attempts to ace out challengers and hold power. His views paralleled those offered by Daniels during and after the debate. (The headline in a Washington Post op-ed after the Indiana Senate vote killed the plan had Daniels saying: “Hooray for Hoosiers, cynical GOP redistricting fails. Despite a White House intimidation, Indiana legislators defeated an unfair gerrymandering ploy.”)
Deery’s stance put him on the radar for promises for payback in the form of a well-funded primary.
Paula Copenhaver, a former Fountain County clerk and a member of Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith’s staff, made Deery’s opposition to redistricting a central part of her motivation to run: “District 23 deserves a senator who is unapologetically willing to take on the radical Democrats’ socialist agenda. I’ll be a fighter for Hoosiers and a defender of the Indiana and America First Agenda.”
Whether Copenhaver, who finished third in a four-candidate primary Deery won in 2022, lines up the sort of public support Blake Fiechter unexpectedly received from Trump is yet to be seen ahead of the May 5 primary. Gov. Mike Braun has promised to help in primaries against senators who didn’t get on board. And Beckwith, who put redistricting objections on blast early and often, told BiL in December that he was “on a mission now,” rallying national help and saying, “I’m going after senators.” Was he on board with Copenhaver: “Absolutely, I am,” Beckwith told BiL when she announced her candidacy.
Deery warned a crowd of supporters at his campaign launch in West Lafayette to be ready if that sort of campaign push comes.
“I’ve got bad news, and that’s that Washington, D.C., is coming for Indiana,” Deery said. “In this race, you’re going to see a lot of D.C. tactics, a lot of D.C. lack of focus on truth, stretches, distortions. And it’s already started. It’s going to get worse. And so I wanted to gather you all here and just ask to prepare for that, because we can expect that. When you’re getting text messages and mailers or internet ads with grainy, distorted, awkward pictures of me, I want you to know and remember who I am and what I stand for, and that I have always said from the day I stood four years ago that I would always tell you the truth. I’d study issues best I could and then I’ve voted accordingly. I make that same commitment to you today for this next four years.”
As things stand now, with two weeks left before the noon Feb. 6 candidate filing deadline, the winner of a Republican primary between Deery and Copenhaver would face David Sanders, a West Lafayette City Council member, who filed as a Democrat for a second consecutive run for the seat.
4TH DISTRICT DEMOCRATS GET LINED UP
With Trump choosing sides in the Republican ticket – giving the nod to Baird, who has rarely weaved in his pro-Trump support – five Democrats have filed or say they intend to run for the party’s nomination in Indiana’s 4th District seat in the U.S. House.
Four of those five Democratic candidates met Jan. 17 at the Crawfordsville Public Library for a forum put on by the Heartland Democracy Project, a new Lafayette-based group pushing blue candidates that primarily come from districts that include Tippecanoe County.
The candidates – Joe Mackey, retired from a manufacturer in Lafayette; Drew Cox, a member of the Lafayette Symphony Orchestra who teaches at Purdue; Thomas Hall, a Teamster from Martinsville; and John Whetstone, who owns a gaming store in Crawfordsville – had 15 minutes to make their case in front more than 100 people who’d driven in light snow from across the 16-county district.
(Darin Griesey, a nonprofit consultant and community development leader from Monticello, is running as a Democrat in the 4th District primary but did not participate in the forum because he’d just filed his candidacy.)
Peppered with audience questions, the four candidates tended to come from similar places: They tended to agree that the federal government needed to offer some sort of universal health care; recent and deadly ICE operations in U.S. cities should be stopped; a priority on issues of affordability, including in housing; and standing up to decisions made by the current White House administration, including voting to impeach Trump another time, given the opportunity.
They also acknowledged the uphill climb facing the one who earned the right to be on the November general election ballot.
Baird won his fourth term in 2024 with 64.8% of the vote. Derrick Holder, the Democratic candidate, received 30.9% in a three-candidate race. Democrats have not come considerably closer to winning over the past three decades.
At one point, someone in the audience pressed Mackey about what it was going to take to do better and to win – in particular, whether Democrats should shake things up with new faces, instead of trying with someone like Mackey, who’d lost to Baird in 2020.
“We can no longer sit still and wait for the magic Moses Democrat to come along and part the redneck sea and put a candidate in office,” Mackey said. “Don’t clap for a candidate. Donate. Don’t clap for a candidate. Volunteer. Get on the list, go to work – all of us. It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment and Democrats must respond. … We have to help our county parties by filling ballots.”
Bob Gump, a leader of the Heartland Democracy Project, said the group supported that idea and would work in 2026 to support what he called “challengers to the Republican majorities,” particularly those representing Greater Lafayette.
“If there’s a viable challenger and we can bring visibility to those candidates so voters know about them, that’s what we’re going to be about,” Gump said. “What I heard today is that there are people that, yes, what to support a good candidate, but they want a candidate who’s going to run to win the race. … We believe we can close that gap a fair amount, but at the end of the day you’ve got to have a candidate that believes that, and you need voters who believe that. There’s so much at stake right now, we feel.”
Thanks, again, to the West Lafayette Public Library Foundation for support of this edition. The foundation will host a Trivia Night Fundraiser Feb. 21 to support the library. For tickets go to: https://www.wlplf.org/trivia
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Tips, story ideas? I’m at davebangert1@gmail.com.
Deery was right in this single instance. Bravo. Now get him to fight for environmental regs to stay intact. SB 277 But then, Mitch aint for that, I suppose.
Deery was on the right side of things when we fought the statehouse and the IEDC to protect our water. He's far more reasonable than Copenhaver.