Before we get to some of the takeaways from Tuesday’s Election Night …
Tippecanoe County still has roughly 1,600 absentee ballots that beat the 6 p.m. Tuesday deadline to be counted but hadn’t been processed by the time election officials called it a night.
The Tippecanoe County Election Board is scheduled to meet at 9 a.m. Wednesday at the County Office Building, 20 N. Third St. in downtown Lafayette, to resume counting, County Clerk Julie Roush said.
As of Tuesday night, election officials had counted 43,821 ballots – a figure that was already 9% ahead of the 39,932 voters who turned out in November 2022, the most recent midterm election, per county records.
The ballots still uncounted won’t be enough to sway the races included in this round of Election Night takeaways:
Baker ends Alting’s career in Senate District 22
Natasha Baker, a high school teacher from Battle Ground, left no doubt Tuesday, flipping Indiana Senate District 22 and ending the political career of state Sen. Ron Alting, who first won the seat in 1998 and who had been prepared to resign the seat if he’d won under a cloud of shoplifting allegations that brewed in the final month of the campaign.
Baker, who had never run for public office, beat Alting with 58.8% of the vote across a district that includes Lafayette, the eastern portion of Tippecanoe County and all of Carroll County.
“I truly believe that this is the trajectory that we were already on,” Baker said. “It was about mid-September when it started to hit me that this could really happen, when the first round of polling data came back and I saw how much I was overperforming then. … When Sen. Alting dropped, I just was leaving it up to the voters at that point. I think that this is more of people are tired of the status quo. They’re ready for someone new, and we’re ready to see a change.”
Alting announced shortly after early, in-person voting started Oct. 6 that he was stepping back from his campaign as he was “experiencing concerning changes in my judgment and cognitive functioning,” that “I did things that were wrong and completely out of character for me,” and that he had sought medical help “and am now undergoing further evaluation.”
As of Election Day, a special prosecutor from Elkhart County assigned to look into a series of police cases of alleged shoplifting from a Lafayette Walmart and linked to Alting had not made a report to the court, according to Tippecanoe Circuit Court records. And no charges had been filed, according to online court records.
Despite announcing his withdrawal from the campaign trail, Alting wasn’t allowed by law to get off the ballot, unless he moved from the district or died, among a limited number of reasons laid out in Indiana election code.
Still, Alting’s campaign marched on, even if his appearances stopped. His face showed up daily in a series of commercials that played in heavy rotation on local TV, and large, red campaign signs dotted Lafayette and the rest of the district. Alting campaign signs were part of the arrays outside vote centers Tuesday.
Dale Seward, Carroll County Republican Party chairman, had said Alting getting out of the race clarified the stakes for some who found it tough to vote for him with the allegations hanging over the seven-term senator. With a promise to resign put out there, Seward had said, it allowed a new framing for the race: A vote for Alting was now a vote to keep a Republican in the Senate District 22 seat. An Alting win, followed by a resignation, would have triggered a Republican caucus of more than 80 precinct committee men and women. At least four Republicans announced in recent weeks that they’d put their names in to replace Alting, if he won, including Richard Bagsby, who ran against and lost to Alting in the May 2026 Republican primary.
But Baker, who won a primary in May to win the Democratic nomination, leaned into the situation, pulling in increased campaign donations and getting a boost of TV ads in the final weeks. One made a point of saying that Alting “literally told us he’s not up to the job. Let’s elect someone who is.” (In a Based in Lafayette Q&A, Baker listed this for a question about what separated her from her opponent: “The second profound difference between the two of us is that when I leave Walmart, everything in my cart has been paid for.”)
During the campaign, Baker also positioned herself as an alternative to a longtime senator who had garnered an endorsement from President Donald Trump ahead of the May primary for his vote for a failed mid-decade redistricting plan during the 2026 General Assembly.
Tuesday night, when the race was settled, Alting came to the Tippecanoe County Office Building in downtown Lafayette, making his first public appearance since he’d withdrawn from campaigning to concede to Baker. He also essentially said farewell to political life in a short speech in the County Office Building’s foyer, as Baker, state Rep. Sheila Klinker and others looked on.