Now it’s one of Evan Bayh’s sons, Beau Bayh, seeking office in Indiana. On Aug. 8 at Potawatomi Park in South Bend, Beau Bayh delivered a kick-out-the-bums rallying cry to regular applause from 150 or so Democratic activists and local candidates. Beau Bayh, 30, is running for Indiana’s secretary of state — seeking not only his father’s political starter job from four decades ago but also trying to resurrect the moribund Democratic brand in the Hoosier State.

It’s been 14 years since Democrats won a statewide race in Indiana. Since then, Republicans have cemented control of both Senate seats, the governor’s office, overwhelming supermajorities in the state’s House and Senate, and no less than a White House-led effort to eliminate the state’s remaining two Democratic members of Congress (which was its own source of chaotic drama). President Donald Trump won Indiana in 2024 by 59% to 40% over Democratic rival Kamala Harris.

So, in the wilderness and under siege, the state’s remaining Democratic Party brass set their sights on Birch Evans “Beau” Bayh IV to spark something close to a renaissance. All from the office that oversees election administration and business licensing.

In other words, no pressure.

A three-way race

Speaking just off to the side from the picnic tables filled with activists, Bayh told the Washington Examiner he was called to public service by a desire to help and to clean out the corruption he said has grown in the past four years.

“I was raised in a family of public servants, and I was always taught growing up that no one forces you to run for public office, but if you decide to do that, you ought to do it to help your community, your state, and your country,” Beau Bayh said before taking the mic at the St. Joseph’s County Democrats third annual Picnic in the Park. “When I see the current secretary of state use his position of trust with the public, his office, not as it means to benefit our state, as it means to benefit himself, that kind of offends my sense of what a public servant should be.”

In any normal situation, the race would be a cakewalk for the candidate with the “R” next to their name.

But a whirlwind of state and national scandals, a chaotic intraparty Republican fight, and the emergence of a third-party wild card — as well as interviews with more than two dozen Indiana Democratic and Republican operatives over the last few months — give the impression Beau Bayh could indeed win in November.

Indiana’s secretary of state is rarely a blockbuster race, but in the absence of a governor’s race or top-tier Senate battle, it’s the main draw. The (limited) publicly available data reveal a surprising three-way showdown between Bayh, Republican Max Engling — a former congressional aide and losing 2024 House candidate — and former Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard, running as an independent under the banner of his newly created Lincoln Party.

Bayh had $2.3 million in the bank at the end of June. Engling is sitting on a meager $15,000 after a late entry (more on that in a second). And Ballard has raised and spent close to $1 million, according to numbers compiled by the Indiana Capital Chronicle.

Beau Bayh looks comfortable working the crowd, talking with older Democrats long sold on the Bayh brand dating back to Birch Bayh’s time in office and younger activists with barely a memory of the Bayh family reign.

“We need leaders here in our state that recognize that what we have in common as Americans and Hoosiers will always be more important than the little things they try and use to divide us amongst each other,” Bayh told the crowd. “I know, some folks here today might call me naive. I get it. I see this vitriol in our politics, I’m subjected to it myself, as is every brave person who’s had the courage to put their name on the ballot here this fall.”

At his back is a strong team of Indiana veterans and national Democratic operatives with Hoosier ties, including Mike Schmuhl, an architect of Pete Buttigieg’s rise from South Bend mayor with an unpronounceable last name to standout national Democratic star.

“Beau is an excellent candidate,” said Schmuhl, a senior adviser to Beau Bayh and veteran Indiana Democratic leader. “He’s doing all the right things. He’s very disciplined. He has a professional team. He’s taking it very seriously. He’s raising the resources to win a statewide race in Indiana, something we haven’t done obviously since 2012.”

But the state’s Democratic Party infrastructure, which was built on a framework of union workers, teachers, and rural and urban coalitions, has been gutted in recent decades through a mix of factory closures, offshoring, and strategic cuts to union and teacher support by the state’s dominant Republican Party.

Coming out of the summer, Beau Bayh looks in a surprisingly strong position, but the fall homestretch appears to be a grueling battle.

Bayh and his team built a strategy of running against the state’s unpopular incumbent Republican Secretary of State Diego Morales, who allegedly used tax dollars to buy a $90,000 GMC Yukon Denali from a dealer who donated to his campaign, traveled the globe on secret trips, and kicked up a steady storm of mini-scandals.

Just days before the filing deadline, the state’s new GOP powerbrokers, Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) and Attorney General Todd Rokita, called for Morales to leave the race. After he refused, they helped former congressional staffer Engling oust Morales at the state party convention.

Engling, a new Republican candidate with a clean record and strong ties in Washington and Indiana — not unlike Beau Bayh himself — entered the race late with an initial fundraising deficit.

But all expectations are that fundraising will pick up easily for the new candidate, not least because of his strong ties to former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a GOP fundraising juggernaut.

Still a red state

Republicans are confident they’ll have plenty of material to blast Beau Bayh with as the fall campaign heats up, starting with what critics call Beau Bayh’s rather tenuous ties to Indiana.

Bayh was born in Indianapolis when his father was governor. After Evan Bayh was elected to the Senate in 1998, the family moved to Washington, D.C. Beau Biden graduated from St. Albans School and then Harvard College. He was then commissioned in the Marine Corps and deployed to Europe following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He was honorably discharged at the rank of captain in 2023.

Bayh earned a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School and moved to Westfield, Indiana, to study for the bar exam in 2024. After passing, he clerked for a federal appeals court judge and then joined an Indianapolis law firm.

Indiana connections to Bayh family members have already proven a political liability. Evan Bayh’s ill-fated 2016 Senate comeback bid, after six years out of office, was undone in no small part by attacks that he was too much Washington and had forgotten his Hoosier roots. This was punctuated by an Indianapolis Star investigation that showed neighbors at his Indianapolis condo rarely, if ever, saw him.

And the “carpetbagger” attack has already been primed in a tough intraparty Democratic battle in which Army veteran Blythe Potter’s supporters roundly knocked Beau Bayh as an elite Ivy League product of Washington with little connection to Indiana beyond his last name. (Beau Bayh beat Potter at the state party convention 1,385 to 883 — hardly a knockout.)

W. JAMES ANTLE: DOES ANYONE WANT TO WIN THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS?

The wild card for Beau Bayh and the GOP’s Engling, ironically, is the surprisingly well-funded third-party bid of Ballard. He was Indianapolis’s mayor from 2008 to 2016, as a Republican. He joined the secretary of state’s race as an independent amid mounting reports of corruption by Morales, the GOP incumbent.

For Beau Bayh and the state’s Democrats seeking an institutional foothold, they’re now bracing for a flood of money for Engling and a subsequent wave of attacks in the final months of the race.

Tom LoBianco is editor and co-founder of 24sight News, based in Silver Spring, Maryland. He is the author of the biography about President Donald Trump’s first vice president, Piety & Power: Mike Pence and the Taking of the White House, and was an Indiana statehouse reporter for the Associated Press.