I’m not the only one who’s looking to Beh to lead me out of the woods. Democrats have not won any statewide office in barn-red Indiana since 2012. And they haven’t fared much better in the rest of Central America. President Donald Trump won both Michigan and Wisconsin in 2024. Once purple Iowa has one last statewide Democrat in elected office, Auditor Rob Sand. The old neighboring battleground state of Ohio is also trending in the red.
But Beh is literally bringing hope to the ruins. He announced his campaign six months ago amid 1970s-era sculptures called “The Ruins,” which look like the remains of ancient Greece.
Bayh checks all the right boxes. His grandfather, Birch, was a three-term Democratic senator and sought the presidency in 1972 and 1976. His father, Ivan, was a two-term senator and governor who briefly flirted with his own campaign before 2008. He went to Harvard and Harvard Law. He served his country in the Marines. He clerked for the 7th Circuit. And, as Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear — a fellow red-state Democrat with a family history in politics — said recently on his podcast, he cuts a figure Like “Captain America.”
“I even sometimes hear people say that he looks so good, he almost looks like he’s an AI. But there’s no doubt that Beau looks the part,” says Mike Schmuhl, who managed the presidential campaign for a former Indiana mayor named Pete Buttigieg, and who recently signed on as a senior adviser to Beau. “Ex-Marine, lawyer, well educated, very smart, but also very dedicated to his work.” His campaign manager, Jack Tormohlen, served as executive director of the New Hampshire Democratic Party under Chairman Ray Buckley.
Bayh served as an infantry officer in the Marines and rose to the rank of Captain. | Courtesy Beau Beh
Her campaign against scandal-plagued GOP incumbent Diego Morales has drawn a huge amount of attention to the state-level race, building a fundraising campaign that would be the envy of Senate Democratic primary candidates in some other states. He says that so far he has raised a whopping amount of $2.4 million.
Why so much attention on state level races? If national Democrats hope to become the majority ruling party again, they will have to solve their problems in places like Indiana, a state that long ago mattered to them. And Bayh is looking like an increasingly strong candidate who can show Democrats how to win elections in Trump country — in part, by building trust with voters through her management of typically non-partisan elected offices. (The Indiana secretary of state is not typically a person engaged in breathless social media rants or furious cable punditry.) Like other Democrats vying for power in red states on the map in 2026, Bayh is running a back-to-basics campaign focused on kitchen table and good government issues, free of culture wars.
“Too often, both in Indiana and nationally, Democrats are running with a sense of cultural superiority — they look down on people in Indiana,” Bayh told me as we navigated the switchbacks.
One reason Bayh’s approach could work is that Indiana Republicans — even though they are at the pinnacle of power, controlling the governor’s mansion and a supermajority in the legislature — are historically divided after a redistricting fight last year. Governor Mike Braun also endorsed primary challengers against incumbent Republican senators who opposed Trump’s plan to limit the maps before the midterms.
