The losing Congressional candidate everyone in the GOP is talking about
Plus Ron Turpin on the biggest issue facing the Allen County Commissioners
“I’m glad this race is over.”
That’s what 3rd Congressional district primary winner Marlin Stutzman told a crowd at Allen County GOP headquarters that included his wife Christy — who fell short in her own bid for Congress in Indiana’s 2nd District less than two years ago — just before noon on Wednesday.
Hours earlier, Stutzman (24.2%) had squeaked out a victory over Tim Smith (22.6%) and Wendy Davis (19.4%) to become the Republican nominee to replace Congressman Jim Banks in the November general election.
But it was another candidate that Stutzman singled out in his remarks as having impressed him in Tuesday’s election: political newcomer Grant Bucher.
“He did extremely well in Wells County and Adams County,” Stutzman said.
That was an understatement.
Despite bringing in just $98,237.96 in campaign donations, Bucher (pronounced BOO-ker) won Adams County with nearly 28% percent of the vote.
In Wells County, he did even better, taking the top spot with a whopping 43 percent. Stutzman finished in second place there (15%) despite having raised eight times more cash than Bucher.
Overall, Bucher netted 10.3% of all votes cast across the district, good for fifth place in the crowded primary field.
Stutzman wasn’t the only one who took notice of Bucher’s surprising showing. I spoke with several GOP insiders who went out of their way to tell me how impressed they were with his final numbers.
“He has certainly proven himself as a great campaigner and able to get his message out,” said Allen County GOP chair Steve Shine, “and he has all the other necessary qualities of a great candidate.”
A long shot candidacy
In an interview with Fort Wayne Politics, Bucher said he was realistic about his chances from the start. “Getting into this race, I knew I needed a miracle to win,” he told me.
“Early on [we] decided that we weren’t going with a formal strategy or running on issues, but [instead] we’re just going to establish a few principles and stick to them,” he said. “Truth, accountability, and unity.”
Bucher said when he started campaigning, Davis seemed to have the “GOP in her pocket,” so he decided to focus less time on wooing the party stalwarts and more on connecting with everyday voters.
That meant spending lots of time south of Fort Wayne where he and his wife grew up.
Bucher is a Wells County native and said he spent a lot of time “at the grassroots level” campaigning there.
“We got a lot of family [in the area],” he told me. “They were advocates, and then [I met with] community leaders, and they became advocates.”
Adams County was a similar story. His wife is from there — her father is former state representative Mike Ripley, who was not involved in Bucher’s campaign — and her mother was an especially active volunteer for her son-in-law.
The same was true of Bucher’s grandmother, who also lives in Adams County. “If your car happened to be in a parking lot where Grandma was that day, you were getting a flyer in your windshield,” he said.
Bucher started to realize his campaign was catching on six weeks ago, when he was driving through Wells County and started seeing signs in “lots and lots of yards” of people he didn’t know.
“I tend to resonate with a lot of average Hoosiers. I’m quite average myself.” — Grant Bucher in a 2023 article on the IN-3 race in Roll Call
Bucher wasn’t the only one who noticed that momentum. He said a rival campaign approached him to ask if he would consider dropping out of the race.
He never gave it any serious thought.
“There was never a moment where I thought, boy, I could really leverage this for myself,” Bucher told me. “[Dropping out] wasn’t really a consideration.”
Which campaign asked him to step aside? Bucher refused to say, but he did reveal what he told them in response.
“I ended up asking this individual if I should be asking them to drop out and throw their weight behind me.”
Bucher’s Christian faith was a central tenet of his campaign messaging, and several insiders I spoke with thought he might have taken evangelical conservative votes from Tim Smith, whose closing ad emphasized the values he learned at church “every Sunday.”
A few even believe Bucher cost Smith — who lost to Stutzman by 1,307 votes — the election.
Bucher bristles at the suggestion that he played the role of spoiler. He doesn’t think, were he not in the race, that a majority of his votes would have automatically gone to Smith. He also doesn’t believe that, had he not run, Smith’s faith would have been “as prominent a part of his message.”
Bucher said Smith was not as “faith forward” at the beginning of the campaign as he was at the end.
“As we’d give our one minute stump speeches [at events], Tim started saying, ‘Everything Grant just said about Jesus, me too.’ Then it faded for several months, and then these past couple months, whenever polling started coming in, that’s when his speaking about his faith picked up again.”
If anything, Bucher told me, he wonders how much better his numbers could have been if the local media had given his campaign the same level of coverage they did to Stutzman, Smith, Davis, and Andy Zay. He also lamented that he was not included in the debate conducted by WANE and WOWO in conjunction with the Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics at PFW on April 17.
“I heard throughout the campaign, Oh, I was [for] this person, but now I'm [for] you, I was [for] this person, but now I’m [for] you. We struggled to get our message broadly out there.”
Still, Bucher was able to garner enough votes to turn heads among the political class. “He did well enough that he can run again if he wants to,” one longtime GOP stalwart told me.
In spite of the positive buzz around his performance, Bucher said the only race he sees in his future at the moment is an Ironman triathlon he’s competing in this fall.
He did, however, tell me he isn’t ruling out another campaign at some point in the future.
“The process did not turn me off enough to say I’m done with that.”
Ron Turpin: “The jail is a hot mess”
Ron Turpin knows he ruffled some feathers in his successful primary campaign against Tom Harris to replace outgoing Allen County Commissioner Nelson Peters.
Despite Turpin racking up a long list of endorsement from Republican elected officials in Allen County, there were three very notable names missing: current commissioners Therese Brown, Rich Beck, and Peters.
In an interview on election night, Turpin told me he wasn’t worried about any lingering bad blood were he to win the general election in November. (He’s currently unopposed, but the Allen County Democratic Party still has some time to put a candidate on the ballot.)
“I’ve known Therese and Rich for many years,” he said. “We’ve collaborated on many projects.” Turpin acknowledged that sometimes primaries can get heated, but that he “took great pains not to criticize the commissioners.”
At the same time, a large part of his campaign was centered around his critique of the way the planning of the new Allen County Jail has been handled, something that ultimately falls at the feet of the current county commissioners.
“The issue [I] really [had] was the lack of community conversation,” Turpin told me. “Why was this such a surprise to us? And why were we so reactive and not proactive?”
He noted that he wrote a letter to the editor in the Journal Gazette back in 2020 about looming problems with overcrowding at the jail. He urged the County to create a commission and conduct a study so that a plan could be devised in 2021.
That never happened.
“It’s no secret that the jail is a hot mess,” Turpin told me. “Why did it take a federal judge to force our hand when it [has now become] exponentially more expensive?”
He says he is committed to finding a solution that goes far beyond building a larger version of the current jail we have now.
“Rather than just build a big jail that’s a warehousing facility that will just lead to it getting bigger and bigger and bigger, how do we do a collaboration and partnership with the churches, nonprofits, and everyone working in the space of mental health issues, addiction issues, things that the sheriff is not trained on at all.”
Just having a wing in the jail isn’t sufficient, he told me. He wants to explore how to utilize a 100+ acre facility to do “what I would call restoration for those people that can be restored.”
Turpin acknowledged that some people are “bad actors,” but for those who are primarily struggling with mental health and addiction issues, he wants to focus on rehabilitation to “make them tax payers, not tax takers.”
A tearful Allen County Council goodbye
Three at-large spots on Allen County Council were up for grabs in Tuesday’s primary election. The GOP held all three of them, and incumbents Ken Fries, Bob Armstrong, and Kyle Kerley faced a challenge from Lindsay Hammond to hang on to their seats.
The top three vote-getters would advance to the general election, and when the dust settled, Hammond had managed to knock off Kerley by just 1,321 votes. Fries and Armstrong finished first and second, respectively.
At the Allen County GOP lunch on Wednesday, Armstrong used his time with the mic to thank Kerley, who was in the crowd, for his service to the community. The two worked together closely during their time on the council.
“Kyle, we’re gonna miss you,” Armstrong began before breaking down in tears. Unable to continue, he handed the mic to someone else and stood back in line with the other victorious candidates on the stage.
While there may not be crying in baseball, occasionally there is in Fort Wayne politics.
Fort Wayne Politics on WOWO
On Thursday I joined Kayla Blakeslee on Fort Wayne’s Morning News to talk about the primary election results. You can listen to the full interview here:
More photos from the GOP post-election lunch
Ron Turpin election was the high note of this Republican primary. Very disappointed in the quality of the candidates who stressed their religion more than how they would listen to all of us and represent us. A sad time in our local and national democracy.
Excellent article Nathan. Background is crucial to understanding an election and yours is superbly done.