Senate District 26 is not one of the redistricting revenge races. There is no dissident senator being punished, no dark-money air war, no Oval Office meeting for the challenger. What SD-26 offers instead is a quiet case study in what a Trump endorsement means when there is nothing at stake -- when an incumbent who did exactly what the president wanted gets the presidential stamp anyway, and his underdog opponent comes back for a second try with a different last name and the same $689 budget.
The district covers all of Delaware and Randolph counties in east central Indiana. Muncie, the county seat of Delaware County and home to Ball State University, is the population center. Scott Alexander won the open seat in 2022. Katherine Kritsch lost it. Now they are doing it again.
In 2022, SD-26 was a brand-new district. Alexander won the primary with 64% of the vote to Kritsch's 36%. The fundraising gap told the story before the ballots were counted: Alexander raised $34,605; Kritsch raised $689. Alexander had the endorsement of the outgoing senator, Mike Gaskill, and the institutional support of the Senate Majority Campaign Committee.
Kritsch is secretary of the Indiana chapter of NORML, the marijuana reform organization, and ran on legalizing medical cannabis. Her defining issue was personal: she lost a son to a fentanyl overdose in 2017, and was motivated to run by what she described as the failure of elected officials to address drug deaths in Indiana.
Alexander went on to beat Democrat Melanie Wright with 61% of the vote in the general election. On redistricting, Alexander was a loyalist who voted for HB 1032. That loyalty was rewarded on March 25, 2026, when Trump called him "a Successful Entrepreneur and Civic Leader" and gave him his "Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election."
The fundamental challenge for Nunley-Kritsch is the same one she faced in 2022: a platform built around cannabis reform in a Republican primary in a conservative district. Medical marijuana has broad public support in polling -- even in red states -- but Republican primary voters in east-central Indiana have not historically rewarded candidates who lead with that issue.
Andrew Dale is the chairman of the Delaware County Democratic Party. He is a fourth-generation Munsonian -- his great-grandfather, George R. Dale, served as mayor of Muncie and is remembered for fighting municipal corruption and the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and 1930s. Dale brings a more serious profile than a placeholder candidate, but in a district where Alexander won the 2022 general with 61%, the general election is not expected to be competitive.
The May 5 Republican primary will almost certainly end the way it ended in 2022: Alexander with a comfortable win, Kritsch with a protest vote. But the race is a useful control case -- a measure of what Indiana state senate primaries look like when the redistricting drama, the dark money, and the presidential threats are absent, and all that remains is two people with different ideas about what the Republican Party should care about.