Here's my take on where the fall municipal elections in Indianapolis are right now. Indianapolis is one of the more conservative cities for its size in the country, but is also trending Democratic in a pretty dramatic way. For example, while Bill Clinton never won Marion County, Barack Obama carried it by an almost 2-1 margin.
One of the main reasons why Indianapolis has historically been so Republican is due to what's called Unigov, a 1970s move to set the city bounderies more-or-less to those of Marion County. So, Indianapolis proper has the inner city, and a lot of suburban area -- landwise, it's one of the largest cities in the country.
A perfect storm of bad stuff in 2007 (which I'm not going to fully review here), involving crime, property taxes, and the perception that the administration was out of touch all smacked into Mayor Bart Peterson and the Democrats -- sweeping him and the Democratic majority on the City-County Council out of office in one of the biggest upsets in Indiana history.
But, I think we're probably favored to take both the mayor's office and the council back this November.
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