Results of the Nov. 3 election in Indiana, and across the country, may not be known for days. The counting of ballots continues after election night most years. This year’s expected surge in mailed ballots means election offices may need extra time to tally all the votes. As that occurs, some candidates may call for the counting to end and for themselves to be declared the winner. However, winners will be decided when all the votes are counted — that’s the American election system at work. WFIU/WTIU's journalists will cover that process, and WFIU/WTIU will rely on The Associated Press and NPR to call races for the winner based on the AP’s rigorous, time-tested method.
The outcome of the hotly contested race for a central Indiana congressional seat was too early to call early Wednesday, with many votes still uncounted.
Republican Victoria Spartz and Democrat Christina Hale faced each other for the seat that’s been a GOP bastion for decades.
The campaign was largely fought in the northern Indianapolis suburbs amid a national trend of suburban women moving away from Republicans under President Donald Trump. The winner will replace Republican Rep. Susan Brooks, who didn’t seek reelection this year.
Spartz was cheered by supporters as they celebrated the preliminary vote count late Tuesday.
“We know they’re still counting the vote, but we feel that we’re on a good track to win,” Spartz said.
Hale did not speak in public Tuesday night, with her campaign saying it was still monitoring the vote totals.
“There are still tens of thousands of mail-in votes in the Fifth District that have not yet been counted, particularly in Marion and Hamilton counties, where we have done a significant amount of voter outreach over these past few months,” Hale campaign manager Joann Saridakis said in a statement. “This race is not over.”
At least $15 million was sunk into the race, with national party organizations and dark-money groups spending heavily on largely negative advertising.
The congressional race became a partisan battleground as cracks in the Republican dominance have appeared in the past couple years in the 5th District, which stretches from the north side of Indianapolis north into rural areas and the smaller cities of Anderson and Marion.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Joe Donnelly won in the district even as he lost statewide in 2018 to Republican Mike Braun and a handful of Democrats won city positions in the northern Indianapolis suburbs for the first time during 2019 municipal elections.
Spartz, 42, a state senator from Noblesville who immigrated from Ukraine, won the Republican primary after flooding TV screens and mailboxes with ads fueled largely by some $1.2 million she loaned to her campaign. That enabled her to build name identification after two years in the state Senate.
Spartz campaigned as more stridently conservative than Brooks, who built a reputation as a moderate Republican in comfortably winning four elections.
Hale, 49, is a former state representative from Indianapolis who was the 2016 Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor. Hale leaned heavily during the campaign on her personal story of working as a waitress and struggling with daycare for her son as a single mom while earning a college degree.