Indiana Senate District 1 covers the southern and western suburbs of Lake County in northwest Indiana -- Highland, Griffith, Schererville, St. John, Dyer, Munster, and parts of Gary, Cedar Lake, and Crown Point. This is The Region: the steel-mill and auto-plant corridor south of Chicago where union households and Catholic parishes once made Lake County one of Indiana's few reliably Democratic strongholds.
That era is ending. The district was held by Democrats for more than two decades, from 1999 through 2022. In 2022, Dan Dernulc became the first Republican elected to the seat since the Clinton administration, defeating Democratic incumbent Michael Griffin 52.3% to 47.7%.
The 2024 presidential results illustrate the trend. Trump carried St. John by nearly 2-to-1, won Dyer and Schererville comfortably, and essentially split Highland -- a town that went for Biden by 576 votes in 2020 and then for Trump by 25 in 2024. The district that was D+20 a decade ago is now a genuine swing seat trending Republican.
Dernulc voted against Trump's redistricting bill, endured swatting and bomb threats for it, and then watched Trump endorse challengers in six other anti-redistricting districts while skipping his. He issued a public statement: "It doesn't affect the way I'm going to vote."
Here is the twist: Trump did not endorse a challenger against Dernulc. On March 25, 2026, Trump issued 17 endorsement posts covering Indiana Senate primaries. He left SD-01 alone. Several plausible explanations exist: SD-01's competitive general-election dynamics make a bruising primary risky for Republicans; Dernulc's status as the first Republican to hold the seat in a generation may make him a less attractive target.
If any candidate in this race has a nationally significant biography, it is Houldieson. He is an electrician at Ford's Chicago Assembly Plant, where he has worked since 1989 -- 36 years on the factory floor. In 2019, after a corruption scandal that sent multiple UAW leaders to prison, Houldieson co-founded Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), an anti-corruption reform caucus. Under his leadership, UAWD successfully campaigned for a referendum on direct election of international UAW officers. He then helped recruit a slate of candidates including Shawn Fain for president. In the first-ever direct election in 2023, the reform slate won a majority of the UAW's international board. Fain went on to lead the "Stand Up Strike" against all three major automakers simultaneously, winning record contracts with 25% wage increases.
The May 5 primary will answer whether Dernulc's anti-redistricting vote costs him among Republican primary voters who lack a presidential signal telling them to punish him -- and whether SD-01 remains competitive enough to give a union Democrat a serious chance in November.