By Producer Karl
Greg Ballard isn’t running for Secretary of State to win over Republicans. He’s running because he thinks both parties have rigged the game against everyone else — and he told Tony Katz exactly that.
“I don’t think the average person in America is represented anymore,” Ballard said, laying out the case for why he’s launching his campaign under a brand-new banner, the Lincoln Party, rather than as a Republican or a straight independent.
Ballard, the two-term former Republican mayor of Indianapolis and a 23-year Marine veteran of the Gulf War, isn’t shy about why he thinks the office needs a shake-up by highlighting the turmoil surrounding current Secretary of State Diego Morales — the travel expenses, and the controversial handling of the redistricting commission.
“We have the Secretary of State as the head of the RECAC Commission making choices based on people who we already know he has alliances with,” Ballard said. Translation: the office has become a political tool, not a neutral referee, and Ballard says he’s the only candidate willing to say the job should be walled off from politics entirely. “I will not endorse anybody. I will not donate to anybody. I will not fundraise for anybody in that office,” he said flatly.
That’s not exactly a shock line for a guy running outside the two-party structure — but the numbers he threw at Katz are the real story. Forty-one percent of Hoosiers identify as independents, Ballard said, compared to just 29 percent Republican and 21 percent Democrat. Nationally, that independent number climbs toward 46 percent. And yet, he argued, 95 percent of Indiana’s legislature is effectively decided in May primaries — by roughly 10 percent of voters — not in competitive November general elections.
Katz pushed him on the obvious irony: forming a party to fight partisanship sounds like exactly the kind of faction the founding fathers warned about. Ballard’s answer was blunt — state law forces the move. Getting on the ballot as an independent required 37,000 signatures and cost over $700,000, a hurdle he says was “purposefully” built by both parties to protect their own turf. Forming a party, he says, is simply the only legal vehicle to keep giving independents a path forward.
Ballard also dropped a number most political operatives don’t advertise: 244 independents have run for office across Indiana in the last two cycles — and more than half of them won.
Ballard joins Democrat Beau Bayh, Republican Max Engling and Libertarian Lauri Shillings in the race, with debates still to come before Hoosiers head to the polls.
This article originally appeared on WIBC