Indiana State Sen. J.D. Ford (D-Carmel) won the Democratic nomination for Indiana’s 5th Congressional District in the May 5 primary election.
Ford, the first openly gay man elected to the Indiana State House, will face Republican Representative Victoria Spartz in the general election. In 2019, he proposed a bill to protect minors from conversion therapy. A year later, he introduced legislation that would ban schools that discriminate against LGBTQ people and other protected groups from receiving taxpayer-funded school vouchers.
The 5th Congressional District is rated R+8, meaning it typically votes Republican about 8 points more than the national average. It is generally considered a “safe” Republican district.
However, this metric is often seen as advantageous for Democrats because suburban districts are also relatively highly educated, and college-educated voters were more likely to support Democratic candidates during the Trump era.
In the 2022 and 2024 Republican-leaning election cycles, Spartz’s performance largely mirrored both President Trump’s dominance and the partisan leanings of the district. But in 2020, a more favorable year for Democrats, she won by just 4 points.
As a PBS affiliate based in Indianapolis For reference Ford, reported in January, said his decision to run was inspired by the redistricting controversy in mid-2010. At the urging of President Donald Trump, many Indiana Republicans tried to redraw the state’s congressional map from a 7-2 Republican-favored map to a 9-0 Republican-favored map as part of a broader effort to maintain Republican control of Congress.
A small number of Republicans voted against the plan, blocking its passage and keeping the current map in place. He then lost the mostly pro-Trump primary on Tuesday night to a pro-Trump challenger.
“I can’t sit on the sidelines anymore. I wanted to throw my hat in the ring and give the Hoosiers a real option in this race,” Ford said of his decision to run.
Spartz announced that he would not seek another term in 2023, but instead would change course and run again in both 2024 and 2026. On Tuesday, he fell short of expectations, winning just under 60% of the vote against his primary challenger, Army veteran and electrician Scott King. Three other Republican incumbents in Indiana also received less than two-thirds of the primary vote.
Meanwhile, Ford easily won the Democratic primary, receiving nearly 43% of the vote and finishing with a 25-point lead over his closest rival among the seven candidates.
In his victory speech, Mr. Ford called on his supporters to continue working together to “take back Congress” and criticized Mr. Spartz’s loyalty to President Donald Trump, whose approval ratings have declined recently.
“My opponent, Victoria Spartz, has pledged blind loyalty to Donald Trump’s chaos, but she has gone beyond that because she has become a pawn of that chaos,” he said. “She pretends to be a heretic and fails at the last minute every time.”
Source: Metro Weekly – www.metroweekly.com
