Indiana’s Secretary Of State Race Is A Four-Way Mess
- Shillings has been on the ballot since March 2025, longer than any other candidate.
- She pitches herself as a non-partisan alternative to party-backed candidates.
- Shillings aims to appeal to Indiana's large non-voter population seeking an outsider candidate.
Indiana’s Secretary Of State Race Is A Four-Way Mess
The Republican and Democratic parties both stumbled into their picks for Indiana Secretary of State this cycle, and Tony Katz isn’t letting either side pretend otherwise. Translation: neither party built its ticket from the ground up, and the one candidate who’s actually been in the race from day one is running against a partisan pileup.
That candidate is Lauri Shillings the Libertarian Party’s nominee for Secretary of State, and she’s been on the ballot path since March 2025 — longer than anyone else currently running. Katz brought her on air to make the case for why that matters, and she didn’t waste the opportunity.
The field got crowded fast. Republicans swapped out a struggling Diego Morales for Max Engling after it became clear, as Katz put it on-air, that Diego “wasn’t going to cut the mustard.” Democrats parachuted in Beau Bayh, leaning on a family name that cuts both ways with Hoosier voters. Then former Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard jumped in as an independent, inventing a brand-new outfit called the Lincoln Party — a candidate Shillings bluntly called “really undefined.”
Shillings, by contrast, is running on a simple pitch: no party machine, no big donors calling in favors. “I can name pretty much every one of my donors in person,” she said. Her argument is that the other three are “all on board to carry water for their party or for leadership in Washington, DC” — not exactly a subtle line, and not one she walked back when pressed on it.
She’s also making a play for Indiana’s non-voters — roughly 36% of the electorate who sit out elections entirely, according to Shillings. Her framing is aimed squarely at people who feel abandoned by the two-party system, and she’s leaning hard into her Hoosier roots: ten generations in Indiana, a nonprofit-leadership degree from the University of Indianapolis, and a pitch built on service over partisanship.
As for what the job actually is, Shillings ran through it plainly: chief elections officer, business licensing, securities fraud oversight, and vehicle licensing — the unglamorous administrative backbone of state government that rarely makes headlines until something breaks.
Whether Hoosier voters reward the candidate who’s been grinding away for eighteen months over three bigger-name, better-funded rivals is still an open question. But Shillings isn’t hedging about her odds — and neither is her pitch.
Hear Tony Katz break it down live weekdays on WIBC 93.1 FM, or catch the full segment on-demand.
Listen to the “Indiana’s Secretary Of State Race Is A Four-Way Mess” discussion in full here:
