The most interesting race in Northeast Indiana
A former four-term GOP prosecutor is running as an independent for DeKalb County commissioner against Republican nominee many party insiders view as extremist
Northeast Indiana is usually pretty boring on Election Day. At least in the fall.
Outside of the Fort Wayne mayor’s race — which hasn’t been won by a Republican since Paul Helmke beat Thomas Essex all the way back in 1995 — and two safe Democratic seats in the Indiana House of Representatives, the GOP consistently dominates general elections across the region.
This year looks to be more of the same.
Marlin Stutzman won a bloody GOP primary in May for his old seat in Congress, which Jim Banks is vacating to run for the U.S. Senate. Stutzman saw Democrat Kiley Adolph as such a weak opponent that he refused to debate her, a move straight out of Banks’ own playbook.
(Incidentally, despite playing nice in public, there’s no love lost between Stutzman and Banks. “They hate each other,” one Allen County Republican insider told me recently.)
Other Northeast Indiana contests — for state representative, state senator, and county offices — are similarly uncompetitive. There is one race in the region, however, where the Republican nominee faces a real challenge: DeKalb County commissioner.
That might surprise you, especially considering how ruby red the home of the annual Auburn Cord Duesenberg Festival is. But this spring, a renegade Republican candidate named Kellen Dooley challenged the incumbent county commissioner in the primary and won a narrow victory by just 53 votes.
In the aftermath of that election, several DeKalb County GOP officials privately expressed concerns that Dooley was not qualified or competent enough to be a successful commissioner.
His campaign slogan — “Keep DeKalb, DeKalb” — suggested Dooley was against the economic growth necessary for the county to thrive, and in October, he said in a video (below) posted to his campaign Facebook page that, if elected, he might “take some roads away” in an effort to save money.
“Do we need all the roads that we have in this county?” Dooley asks in the video. “Is it worth having every one of these roads? If we can get rid of a couple miles of road, that would reduce the spending.”
Because no one had run for county commissioner in the Democratic primary, Dooley was set to be unopposed in the general election.
Then ClaraMary Winebrenner jumped in.
A former four-term DeKalb County prosecutor — running as a Republican, of course — she’d retired at the end of 2022 and thought she was done campaigning for office.
After Dooley won the primary, however, Winebrenner decided to challenge him, running this time as an independent candidate.
She had the time, she told me, and was convinced he was wrong for the community she’d served for nearly two decades.
After collecting the 233 signatures required to get on the ballot, Winebrenner officially launched her campaign at the end of June, posting on Facebook that she was running because “a far-right fringe within the local GOP is trying to steer us backward, away from the values we hold dear.”
Since then, she’s marched in parades with her supporters, put 600 campaign signs around the county, and knocked on 5,171 doors all by herself.
Her message is simple. “I’m running as an independent because I think we’ve got to get the partisan bickering out of it,” she told a woman in Garrett after knocking on her door in mid-October. “You’re not kidding,” the woman replied.
“There’s not a Republican or Democratic way to pave a road or build a jail,” Winebrenner told another homeowner a few doors down. “And we’re going to have to build one,” she continued. “I was the prosecutor for seventeen years. Trust me. And we need growth to pay for it so our taxes don’t go up.”
Independent candidates have a difficult path to victory in Indiana. It’s one of six states that still have straight-ticket voting. If a voter in DeKalb County hits the straight-ticket button for either party, they won’t see Winebrenner’s name on their ballot.
Despite that, there’s a recent history of success in Northeast Indiana for independent candidates. In 2019, Richard Strick won the mayor’s race in Huntington — Dan Quayle’s hometown and the second largest city in the region — by 10 points. Four years later, he won re-election against a sole GOP challenger by an 8-point margin. In Adams County ,independent Sam Conrad successfully ran for superior court judge in 2020.
Can Winebrenner join them? There’s been no polling in her race, so it’s impossible to predict how she’ll do. The fact that she’s got high name ID from her previous campaigns for prosecutor and has deep roots in the community certainly will help.
Her campaign signs are spread throughout the county, including in the yards of several notable Republicans. Perhaps even more telling, one also sits in front of a house owned by a man she put behind bars — more than once — in her previous job.
Winebrenner encountered him on one of her days knocking doors over the summer.
“He was sitting on his front step with his dog,” she told me, “and we just had a nice little talk.”
At the end of the conversation, Winebrenner asked if he’d consider letting her put a campaign sign in his yard.
“He said, ‘Sure.’”
Questions or comments? Email feedback@fortwaynepolitics.com
Thank you for the excellent work you’ve done covering these local races. We have a massive dearth of local political reporting so you’re filling a vital need.
The funny thing is: Dooley’s stance on roads has a small kernel of truth, but not for the reason he thinks it does. The suburban-style single family home growth pattern is inherently unsustainable because the taxes generated from that type of housing aren’t enough to cover ongoing maintenance costs on things like roads and utilities. There is an illusion of financial stability in the short term (you don’t need to do maintenance on a road that was just built a year ago) but over time the math just doesn’t work. Cities work this problem out by continuously growing and using the temporary infusion of new tax dollars to pay for the maintenance of older subdivisions. Once an area stops growing, it quickly becomes financially insolvent and is unable to provide even most basic services (see: Detroit in the late 2000s). This is called the “Growth Ponzi Scheme.” Strong Towns by Charles Marohn goes into it in great detail. The solution very obviously isn’t to get rid of roads, as Dooley ludicrously suggests. It’s to build denser, mixed use housing. I have to imagine Dooley would have an aneurysm if someone suggested that to him though.