By: Kayla Dwyer
Greg Ballard's preferred campaign mode is meeting with a small group of voters for at least an hour, because then there's plenty of time to break down the game theory of his monkey-wrench of a candidacy for Indiana secretary of state, answer everyone's questions, and get a feel for who he is and isn't converting to the cause.
So the 71-year-old former Indianapolis mayor wasn't a fan of being asked to distill everything into a 3-minute stump speech before the Marion County Bar Association a recent Saturday afternoon.
When the 30-second-warning card went up, Ballard paused a beat and cleared his throat, calculating how much more he could squeeze in.
"There's no elevator speech for what I'm trying to do," he said, with a touch of exasperation evident in his voice.
To the extent there is an elevator pitch, it precedes Ballard. It wasn't originally his idea to jump back into Indiana politics as the poster candidate for a plan to create a new political party here that would house independent-minded candidates and inject more competition into the state's Republican-dominated elections. That's what the "Lincoln Party" would be if Ballard gets at least 2% of the vote in this secretary of state race, which also includes Democrat Beau Bayh, Republican Max Engling and Libertarian Lauri Shillings.
If he gets 10% of the vote, the Lincoln Party would hold primaries, like the Democrats and Republicans.
If he wins − and Ballard, perhaps the only soul in Indianapolis who believed he'd win his mayoral race in 2007, once again believes he will win − he would upset two decades of Republican dominance in Indiana.
In the eyes of national observers, this four-way race is a "pure tossup." The Republican candidate is putting out attack ads on Ballard, a telltale sign of nervousness. If Ballard doesn't outright win, he's most likely to take old-school Republican voters away from MAGA-associated Engling, which could spell good news for Bayh. Then again, Ballard also stands to benefit from Bayh's struggle to appeal to the Democrats' more progressive wing.
Today, Ballard says he has the same gut feeling he had in the two weeks before his major political upset against then-incumbent Democratic Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson.
"It feels exactly like '07," he said. "I'm fairly used to being underestimated."
Ballard's 2007 longshot
Not only was Ballard not projected to become Indianapolis mayor, but he wasn't supposed to be the Republican party's candidate.
This was during the era of slating, when party officials met behind closed doors to select which candidates the party would endorse before the primary. The night before the slating convention in 2007, the candidate the party planned to endorse was quoted by IndyStar columnist Matt Tully saying some compromising things. He was out.
Ballard, a total unknown, was standing by.
"No one could pick him out of a lineup," recalled Robert Vane, president of the public relations firm Veteran Strategies who ended up working in Ballard's mayoral administration. "The first time I shook his hand was at slating. Never heard of him. And I was communications director of the state party."
Ballard was a northeast-side kid, one of five siblings from a middle-class family. His father worked at Eli Lilly and sent him to Cathedral High School. The 1993 film "The Sandlot," about a rag-tag group of boys growing up in the 1960s, could have been written about Ballard and his neighborhood buddies, longtime friend Larry Spilbeler said.
There wasn't much that stood out about Ballard back then. He wasn't particularly athletically or academically gifted. It took him a little longer than it should have to graduate from Indiana University. Ballard is not shy about these things, elaborating on them in his recent memoir, "Urban Republican Mayor."
His time in the U.S. Marine Corps is when Ballard "blossomed," Spilbeler said.
"I think that was a perfect fit for him," he said. "And Lord knows we didn't see it coming."
His 23 years in the Marines were formative for Ballard. He led people as an officer; he traveled the world; he served during the first Gulf War. After retiring in 2001, he returned to Indianapolis to raise his family, and wrote a leadership book.
In 2006, he wrote in "Urban Republican Mayor," an unnamed "minor Republican office holder" and an "old newspaper man" asked him to consider running for mayor. Peterson was well-liked, and more well-known Republicans did not feel like being crushed. Ballard had nothing to lose. He was, he wrote in his recent book, "cannon fodder."
But Ballard benefited from a massive source of fomenting discontent: the Peterson administration raised the local income tax significantly, in a year when Hoosiers were already experiencing a property-tax spike. Ballard, outspent ten-to-one by Peterson, defied all expectations − except his own − when he beat Peterson by 3 percentage points. He was the first to beat an incumbent Indianapolis mayor in 40 years.
Less talked about is Ballard's reelection campaign in 2011, after Democrats had registered a hoard of new voters during President Barack Obama's campaign, stacking the deck further against a Republican mayor.
"Greg Ballard’s reelection in 2011 is the most remarkable political achievement in my lifetime," Vane said.
In hindsight, Ballard's mayoral tenure was a proving ground for his independent streak. Though a Republican, he made decisions that could be considered progressive, or "radical leftist" by modern GOP standards: He moved to electrify Indianapolis' municipal fleet before many cities did so; he championed the development of IndyGo's bus rapid transit and a vast expansion of bike lanes; he turned against his colleagues in the Indiana Statehouse and spoke out fervently against Indiana's Religious Freedom and Restoration Act, a controversial law he and many prominent sports and business figures believed would allow for discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community.
Beyond the headline-grabbers, some remember his tenure for the nuts-and-bolts things: Former Lilly executive David Lewis said what stood out to him was the significant improvement in response time to filling potholes.
"There was just a certain air of competence," said Lewis, one of a dozen prominent civic leaders and Republicans who co-hosted a lucrative fundraiser for Ballard on Sept. 22.
He weathered his requisite share of criticism. Though he appreciated Ballard's support for the marriage equality movement, Rick Sutton, former president of Indiana Stonewall Democrats, said he didn't think Ballard ran his administration well. There were a number of "failed experiments that didn't seem well thought out," he said.
Among them: Blue Indy was an attempt at an electric car-sharing system that didn't get enough consistent users to be viable; city-county councilors balked at a multi-million-dollar project to build cricket fields on the east side; and the deal Ballard brokered with venture capital firm Vision Fleet to lease hundreds of electric vehicles resulted in a lawsuit and an early contract termination by his mayoral successor.
Yet, he left office with an approval rating above 65%. And he thought he was done with politics for good.
Ballard's resurgence
A year ago, Ballard was "quite fine," as he puts it. He was retired living in Whitestown, doing nonprofit work, leading a writer's group, reading a lot.
Also a year ago, a group called Independent Indiana formed to find ways to support independent candidates, who had already won over half the races they participated in across Indiana in 2023 and 2024 despite the onerous signature requirements they face to even get on the ballot.
They wanted to disrupt the status quo of uncompetitive general elections in Indiana, where the candidates are chosen by a small subset of primary voters within increasingly polarized political parties.
The group's previous leader, former independent congressional candidate Nathan Gotsch, had a few lunches with Ballard. Ballard at first thought he was just giving Gotsch advice. Turns out Gotsch was courting him.
As the two recall, it took months for Ballard to get on board with being the face of the ballot-access mission. He ended up doing so, Ballard said, because he saw the cause as bigger than himself: it was about the future of voters' choices.
Though, Gotsch said Ballard being the candidate is also a crucial ingredient to the plan's design.
"He has a clear track record," Gotsch said. "And he was a Republican mayor in a Democratic city who left office incredibly popular. I don't know that I've ever met anybody who agreed with everything he did as mayor. But I have yet to meet somebody who said, 'I didn't respect him.'"
A spoiler or a winner?
Ballard says he is running because he believes he's going to win. But outside of Marion County and perhaps some of the suburbs, he faces an uphill battle with name recognition.
Most political insiders are instead toying with the classic third-party question: Which mainstream-party candidate stands to benefit most from Ballard's participation?
There's no straightforward answer, and various political insiders have different theories. Ballard is fielding support from both Republicans and Democrats, financially and on the payroll of his campaign. For old-school Republicans turned off by MAGA but unwilling to vote for a Democrat, he's a viable option. Even some progressive Democrats are toying with voting for Ballard as a protest vote against Bayh, who they see as the continuation of an establishment political dynasty.
Of the Republicans willing to buck their party and put their name behind Ballard, there are a number of heavy-hitters, such as Dan Evans, whose GOP bonafides are lengthy: a convention delegate, precinct committeeman, campaign managers for former Gov. Otis Bowen and vice-presidential candidate Dan Quayle, to name a few. He met his wife working as a summer intern in the late U.S. Sen. Dick Lugar's office in the 1970s, passing out flyers to voters teaching them how to split their tickets.
But Evans disagreed with his party's pursuit of redistricting outside the decennial census last year, and that discontent was cemented with the Indiana Recount Commission's attempt to throw out voter intent in the case of the contested primary battle between state Sen. Spencer Deery and Paula Copenhaver. The Indiana Supreme Court recently sided with Deery in that case.
As a convention delegate, Evans helped nominate Engling as the Republican candidate for secretary of state this summer. But this fall, he was one of the co-hosts of the Ballard fundraiser.
"Some of the policies of the two mainline parties, people like me just don't agree with," Evans said. "And we don't have much choice."
On the other side of the aisle, Ballard is also capturing discontented Democrats. Indianapolis resident Ed Adams fits that bill: He's been disappointed with party leaders' responses to various sexual harassment scandals at both the city and state level. He's skeptical Bayh will hold the party establishment accountable.
Ballard, meanwhile, impressed Adams with his stance against RFRA a decade ago. And Adams likes what he's seeing on the campaign trail: practical policy plans like making the recount commission nonpartisan, creating a training program for election clerks and mailing a voter guide to Hoosiers.
"Even if I wasn’t feeling anti-Democrat right now, he might still get my vote," Adams said.
Adams is also sympathetic to the grander mission: That Indiana would ultimately benefit from more competitive elections.
"They need to lose this," Adams said of the Republican and Democratic parties. "They need to quit putting up the candidates they have been and expecting the public to go with them blindly. ... I really think he’s the laxative both parties need."
The election is Nov. 3.
This profile originally appear on IndyStar.com