Erin Houchin wins Monroe County straw poll for 9th congressional district race
Exclusive interview with Crossroads Report on Ukraine, warmongers in the GOP and election security, and why Houchin really wants this congressional seat.
Is Erin Houchin the leading candidate in the 9th congressional district race?
Houchin took first place in the straw poll that followed the debate at the Monroe County Library on Saturday — a debate sponsored by the local Young Republicans.
Stu Barnes-Israel, an Army combat veteran, came in second and IU-Southeast economics professor Eric Schansberg and former 9th district congressman Mike Sodrel, who couldn’t make the event, tied for third.
It was a small poll — but still!
Present at the event were two county Republican chairmen, one past county chairman, a candidate for Secretary of State, Paul Hager, and a candidate for State Treasurer, Daniel Elliott. There were also several candidates for local office.
Erin Houchin lives in Salem, a town of 6,371 in Southern Indiana, about 37 miles north of Louisville, Kentucky.
She was a state senator from 2014 until early February 2022, when she quit to focus on her run for Congress, which is her second.
Houchin ran for the 9th congressional district seat in 2016, coming in second to Trey Hollingsworth.
In January, Hollingsworth announced that he would not seek a fourth term in Congress, as he’d promised to only serve three.
So it’s an open seat — and the hottest congressional race in the state, with the Republican primary winner likely to win in November.
The primary is May 3.
The top two candidates in the race are presumed to be Houchin, because of her record as a state senator and history in Republican politics, which includes founding the first Young Republican club in her county, and Mike Sodrel, who was the 9th district congressman for one term, from 2005 to 2007.
This will be Sodrel’s sixth run for the seat. Unfortunately, he could not make the debate in Bloomington on Saturday.
After the event, Houchin reiterated something she’d told me on the phone last year — that the Secretary of State’s office was the reason her bill that would have made people prove they are U.S. citizens to register to vote was stripped.
“They killed my election security bill,” she says.
I asked why she agreed to have that provision taken out of the bill.
“Because that bill wouldn’t have gotten a hearing,” she said. “My committee chairman wouldn’t have moved the bill.”
That chairman, she confirmed, was Sen. Jon Ford, R- Terre Haute, who chairs the Indiana Senate elections committee.
I asked why she didn’t fight for it, by writing an op-ed or speaking on the Senate floor, as she has been saying in her campaign that she is a “conservative fighter.”
“I mean I could have,” she responded. “But that’s not the only issue that, I mean it’s an important issue, a very important issue, but I was focused on what I could get done that session, which was trying to do Voter ID, and trying to protect the integrity of the time, manner and place [of elections], to not have bureaucrats changing election laws. So, just trying to get done what I could get done. That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t come back and try for that again.”
Houchin says she was told by the Secretary of State’s office at the time that the issue of requiring people to prove citizenship to register to vote “was still being litigated.”
(Attorney Jim Bopp had told me that there was no actual constitutional issue with asking for proof of citizenship, but that an Arizona law had been struck down based on something more technical.)
Houchin agreed that this year’s session of the Indiana Senate was a disaster, as the Senate substantially weakened or killed several bills, most famously the CRT bill.
They’d also come very, very close to killing the constitutional carry bill, which had made it through the House for the second year in a row and was again being held up in the Senate Judiciary committee, which is chaired by Sen. Liz Brown, R-Fort Wayne.
Houchin had already stepped down by the time conservatives in the Senate were doing an end-run around Brown’s committee, resurrecting the bill in its original form in a conference committee and spiriting it to the Senate floor at the 11th hour, where it was fiercely debated.
“People are giving me a hard time over it,” she said, “but I couldn’t…I really truly believe that we can’t go for candidates that you have to take their word for it. I just strongly feel that. And there’s nobody else in the race that I think [has a record], maybe Eric Schansberg, because I have seen his work over the last few years and he did speak out against Republicans when they were doing things they shouldn’t have been doing.”
“The fight there is very, very important,” she said of D.C. “Not that the fight here isn’t, but it’s important there too…so, fighting back against the federal takeover of our elections, not securing the border, just a thousand things.”
Houchin says she’s not in favor of the almost $14 billion in U.S. taxpayer money being sent to Ukraine.
“I think we need to secure our own border and protect America and the interests here,” she said.
I misheard her as I was speaking with her, and thought after this that she said she wished we (the United States) “weren’t engaged in that” — meaning Ukraine.
But as I’ve gone back and listened to my recording, I realize that she was referring to Russia being involved in Ukraine as she said, “I wish they weren’t engaged in that.” And then followed it with: “If Trump had won I don’t think we’d be in this circumstance.”
“He’s just emboldened this thug that is Putin,” she added.
I asked her if she would stand up to the warmongers in the Republican Party who appear eager to start a war with Russia.
She said she would, saying she doesn’t think we should be engaged in any wars around the world, unless Congress declares war.
“If the mission is clear, if it’s clearly in the interests of the United States, and the Congress votes to support it, then we need to carry it out, so we don’t have another Afghanistan,” she said.
She finished by saying, emphatically, that she would view all such things through the lens of “what’s in the best interests of the United States of America,” before being summoned by staff to leave for another event.
