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The months-long political drama over possible Indiana congressional redistricting has snarled up campaign plans for some Hoosiers with U.S. House ambitions.
Indiana House members are returning to the Statehouse this week for debate over President Donald Trump’s demand for Republican-led states to draw more GOP-leaning congressional districts.
Uncertainty clouds whether such a plan will clear the Republican-dominated state Senate. Such has been the campaign ambiguity since August when Indiana became ensnared in the national redistricting debate.
“It’s definitely muddied the waters,” said Randy Niemeyer, who was the 2024 Republican challenger to Democratic U.S. Rep. Frank Mrvan and is considering a 2026 run.
Northwestern Indiana’s 1st Congressional District now held by Mrvan has been in Democratic hands since the 1930s. But it has trended more Republican in the Trump era and is seen as the easiest potential GOP pickup in the state.
The current 1st District takes in all of Indiana’s Lake Michigan shoreline areas, including all of Lake and Porter counties and part of LaPorte County. Many unofficial map proposals create a more Republican district by pairing Lake County — the state’s second-most populous — with numerous rural counties to the south and southeast.
The uncertainty of what map will be used for the 2026 election hangs over many campaign decisions, said Niemeyer, who is the Lake County Republican chair and a County Council member.
“It becomes a factor in fundraising,” Niemeyer said in an interview. “It becomes a factor in a ground game. You’re talking about a difference between covering two and a half counties and possibly 12 or 13 counties. What I’ve kind of been doing in my own consideration is, ‘All right, let’s build two business models and see what this looks like.’”
Republican hopeful faces unknowns
Similar troubles exist for candidates in what are now among solidly Republican districts.
Redrawing maps so that all nine of Indiana’s congressional districts favor Republicans would mean also carving up the heavily Democratic 7th District in Indianapolis now held by Rep. Andre Carson.
That could mean a chunk of Indianapolis going into the 4th District, where state Rep. Craig Haggard is challenging four-term U.S. Rep. Jim Baird for the Republican nomination.
Haggard said he’s spent most of the past two years traveling the district that spans from the western suburbs of Indianapolis more than a hundred miles north to the Kankakee River separating Lake and Newton counties.
“I’ve spent a lot of resources. I have volunteer coordinators in each of those counties,” Haggard said. “They could go away. It really could upend everything and then I have a very, very short time to start over again.”
Indiana’s candidate filing period for the 2026 primaries opens Jan. 7 and closes Feb. 6. Early voting is scheduled to start April 7 for the Republican and Democratic primaries on May 5.
So even though U.S. House candidates aren’t required to live in their districts, most serious campaigns for a congressional seat start months or years ahead of the filing period — especially with fundraising.
Haggard acknowledged some potential financial supporters were holding back until the district lines were finalized, but said he believed that was a small percentage.
The most recent Federal Election Commission reports show Haggard raised $49,500 during the three months ending Sept. 30, compared to Baird’s $70,610. Haggard’s campaign had about $117,000 in the bank, while Baird had $182,000.
Complications for Carson challenger
George Hornedo has faced an even more complicated political landscape since May when he announced his Democratic primary challenge to Carson in the 7th District.
Hornedo says he is pressing on despite the prospect of the district being split up among perhaps two or three others to favor Republicans.
Hornedo, an attorney who was a staffer with Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign, decided to narrow his campaign team’s focus to northern Indianapolis, knocking on doors and making phone calls to both oppose redistricting and support his candidacy.
“Every ounce of volunteer energy, every phone banking shift, every hour canvassing, it was going to identify and support us for the campaign, but also educating neighbors with what’s at stake with redistricting and helping to enable them to take action,” he said.
Hornedo had an initial burst of fundraising success, collecting nearly $160,000 in the first three-month period when he announced his bid. That dropped to about $18,000 for the three months ending Sept. 30, leaving his campaign with about $43,000.
Carson, who has held the House seat since 2008, ended September with more than $600,000, having raised about $155,000 in the previous three months.
Hornedo said he is committed to a 2026 campaign regardless of how the redistricting debate plays out.
“I would organize in whatever the new district is, but I would continue to organize in the district as it is now — Indianapolis at large — because part of the reason I got into this race was talking about rebuilding the Democratic Party from the bottom up,” he said.
Carson’s campaign said it is running a coordinating effort “to support Democrats up and down the ballot.
“This year, that work has continued — and the congressman has also collaborated with local leaders to raise the alarm on redistricting,” Carson spokesperson Caroline Ellert said in a statement.
Democratic enthusiasm boost?
The biggest political change from the 2021 congressional maps drawn by Republicans after the 2020 census was strengthening the GOP’s hold on central Indiana’s 5th District following U.S. Rep. Victoria Spartz’s narrow 2020 general election win for her first term.
Spartz easily defeated Democratic candidates in the 2022 and 2024 elections, even after surviving a tight Republican primary last year.
No 2026 Republican challengers have emerged against Spartz as the redistricting debate has lingered.
But Democrats say they have stirred up animosity among voters with a redistricting push that they see as unfair.
“They want to know where the district lines are, but people are just paying attention to what’s going on and they’re stepping up,” said 5th District Democratic chair Terri Austin, a former state legislator from Anderson. “They’re stepping up in their activism. They’re stepping up to run for local office and they’re fired up. They really are.”
Mrvan challengers jumping in
Mrvan, the Democratic congressman from northwestern Indiana, told an anti-redistricting rally at the Statehouse in August that he planned to seek reelection next year “no matter what district they put me in.”
Mrvan argued Trump was pushing redistricting to help Republicans overcome unpopular policies and retain a narrow U.S. House majority.
“They are afraid, they are afraid to face voters,” Mrvan said during the rally.
A Mrvan spokeswoman did not return recent messages seeking additional comment.
The unknown makeup of the 1st District hasn’t stopped Republicans from entering the race to possibly challenge Mrvan.
Those who’ve already declared candidacies include Porter County Commissioner Barb Regnitz and Jennifer-Ruth Green, who got 47% of the vote in a 2022 loss to Mrvan.
Green announced her new campaign in October, the month after she resigned as public safety secretary for Gov. Mike Braun’s administration. She has denied allegations of ghost employment and misuse of state property made by the state inspector general in a formal ethics complaint.
Green campaign spokesman Tim Edson said in a statement that Green “is receiving a lot of support from Republican activists, donors and Hoosiers across the Region excited to have an outsider, a conservative and a fighter who will stand with President Trump in this race. We remain confident Indiana will redraw the congressional map to combat Democrats efforts to rig the game through gerrymandering and counting illegal immigrants in the census.”
The Regnitz campaign did not reply to messages seeking comment.
Some Republican legislators who oppose the redistricting push argue that it has taken focus away from supporting a GOP candidate against Mrvan.
Niemeyer said he would be making a decision soon about seeking a rematch against Mrvan and scoffed at the argument the redistricting debate hurts Republican candidates.
“We built a really legitimate campaign and not a single one of those people saying that lent a hand,” Niemeyer said. “I find it to be a very hollow statement and actually a statement that is trying to deflect what’s at play, because I doubt that they will help.”
GOP U.S. House members in support
All seven of Indiana’s current Republican U.S. House members have endorsed Trump’s redistricting call — despite not seeing what those new maps might look like.
Baird, the 4th District incumbent, said he would be running for reelection “no matter what the final map looks like.”
“I would hate to lose any of my constituents, but I also recognize how important it is for Indiana to get this process right so every Hoosier has a fair voice in Washington,” Baird wrote in an email.
Baird said he trusted the Legislature “to do what is right for Indiana and all Hoosiers.”
“Neither my staff nor I have been involved in drafting any maps,” Baird wrote. “That responsibility lies solely with the Indiana General Assembly.”
Haggard, the legislator from Mooresville challenging Baird, said he supported the redistricting push despite the impact on his candidacy.
“If I can’t handle this, I shouldn’t go to Congress anyway,” Haggard said. “… It hurts a campaign like mine but at the end of the day, I think that this is bigger than me.”
The Indiana Capital Chronicle is an independent, nonprofit news organization that covers state government, policy and elections.
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