Indiana voters head to polls Tuesday for state primaries and U.S. House races

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Indiana voters will head to the polls Tuesday for state primary contests that set up nominees for Indiana’s 2026 state elections and for the U.S. House races running under existing district boundaries, according to the Associated Press. The statewide slate also includes Republican primary battles for a set of Indiana Senate seats and a Democratic primary in the 7th Congressional District where U.S. Rep. Andre Carson seeks renomination, the AP said.

Much of the political heat in Indiana’s Republican primaries comes from President Donald Trump’s efforts within the party, which the AP characterizes as a retribution campaign aimed at GOP senators who blocked a Trump-backed attempt to redraw the state’s congressional districts. In 2025, Trump urged Republicans in several states to redraw their congressional maps to help the party maintain control of a narrowly divided U.S. House, the AP said. Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio answered that call, but Indiana’s effort did not succeed when more than half the state’s Republican senators sided with Democrats to defeat the plan backed by Trump, the AP reported.

The AP said that the targeted Indiana state senators were all incumbents who represented districts Trump carried in 2024, including districts where he won by margins of 20 percentage points or more in most cases. The AP pointed to District 1 near Lake Michigan and just southeast of Chicago as the most competitive of the seven targeted seats, where Trump won with about 53% of the vote, about 7 percentage points ahead of Democratic then-Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump’s strongest performance among the targeted districts, the AP said, came in District 19 on the Ohio border, where he received about 68% of the vote and a margin of about 39 percentage points. The AP also said that only one of the incumbents it highlighted, state Sen. Spencer Deery of District 23, previously faced a contested primary in 2022, a contest he won with about 31% of the vote against a four-candidate field that included Paula Copenhaver, described by the AP as Trump’s pick to oust him this year. The AP said state Sen. Greg Goode of District 38 filled a vacant seat in 2023 and had not faced a full districtwide election before this year.

In the Democratic primary on Tuesday, the AP said Andre Carson faces three challengers in his bid for renomination to a 10th full term in the 7th Congressional District. The AP identified the challengers as attorney and political consultant George Hornedo, attorney and Army Reserve lieutenant colonel Destiny Wells (the 2024 nominee for state attorney general), and Denise Paul Hatch, a former Center Township constable appealing her 2024 felony conviction for official misconduct.

Beyond the U.S. House nominating contests under existing boundaries, Indiana’s general election in 2026 will also include state Senate and state House races: the AP said half of Indiana’s 50 state Senate seats and all 100 state House seats are up for election. Republicans hold supermajorities in both chambers, the AP noted, setting the stage for party control dynamics to play out through who wins these primaries first. The AP also said Indiana voters will choose nominees for the U.S. House even though none of the state’s nine seats is expected to play a key role in the effort to win control of the chamber in November.

Election-day mechanics are expected to shape the timetable for results. The AP said all Indiana polls close at 6 p.m. local time, with most of the state in the Eastern time zone closing at 6 p.m. ET, and some Central-time-area polls closing at 7 p.m. ET. The AP said State Senate District 1 is the only Trump-targeted seat where polls close at 7 p.m. ET, and that the last polls in the 1st, 2nd, 4th and 8th Congressional Districts also close at 7 p.m. ET.

The AP said the ballot includes contested primaries for the U.S. House, the state Senate and the state House, and that Republican incumbents face Trump-backed challengers in state Senate Districts 1, 11, 19, 21, 23, 38 and 41. The AP also outlined voting rules including that Indiana does not register voters by party, so voters are asked to select the primary ballot for the party of their choice and must show voter ID. The AP described an unusual state-law provision requiring voters in a party’s primary to have voted for a majority of that party’s candidates in the last general election or plan to do so in the next general election if they did not vote in the last election, adding that the provision is “essentially unenforceable” and that voters whose party affiliations are challenged at the polls must vote by provisional ballot unless they sign an affidavit aligning themselves with the party.

The AP said there were about 4.8 million registered voters in Indiana as of the November 2024 general election, and it noted registration totals varied by congressional district, ranging from about 442,000 in District 7 to about 505,000 in District 5. The AP also said voters are already casting ballots ahead of Election Day, with about 29% of the 2024 primary vote cast early or by absentee ballot, and that as of Friday more than 175,000 ballots had been cast in the Democratic and Republican primaries combined. Absentee ballots in Indiana may be processed once they are received, and the AP said elections officials in more than three-quarters of the state’s 92 counties indicated they tend to include absentee and early results in their first vote update of the night.

For updates on election night, the AP said it does not make projections and would declare a winner only when it determines there is no scenario that would allow a trailing candidate to close the gap. The AP said if a race is not called, it would still cover newsworthy developments such as candidate concessions or declarations of victory, and it would explain why it had not yet declared a winner. The AP said Indiana does not have automatic recounts, but losing candidates may request and pay for recounts regardless of the vote margin, with costs that may be partly or fully refunded depending on the results.