A familiar name is entering the fray for Indiana's 8th District seat in Congress

EVANSVILLE — John Hostettler, who represented the 8th District in Congress from 1995 until 2007, is running for the seat again.

Hostettler, 62, announced his surprise candidacy for the 2024 Republican congressional nomination late Thursday afternoon in a nearly eight-minute video stuffed with fiscal and foreign policy prescriptions. He flung political arrows at Democratic President Joe Biden's administration, drawing parallels between today and 1994, the year he was first elected to Congress as a critic of then-Democratic President Bill Clinton.

"Thirty years ago, I made a similar announcement," Hostettler said before launching into his campaign appeal. "When I consider where our country is today, the words of Yogi Berra come to mind: 'It's deja vu all over again.'"

Hostettler joins an already-crowded race for the GOP's nomination in the wake of Republican 8th District Rep. Larry Bucshon's announcement last month that he will not seek re-election. According to the Indiana Secretary of State's Office, Hostettler had not officially filed his candidacy by Thursday night. But the deadline for filing doesn't arrive until noon Friday.

More: Will Trump get involved in the 8th District congressional race?

1994 was a banner year for Republicans in congressional elections across the country. Hostettler was re-elected five times after that. That is, until 2006, when he drew then-Vanderburgh County Sheriff Brad Ellsworth as an opponent and ran headlong into a nationwide Democratic buzzsaw. Republicans lost 31 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives that year.

The difference maker, arguably, was the Iraq War.

Fueled by a national wave of support for Democrats opposed to American involvement in Iraq under Republican President George W. Bush, Democrats swept aside local GOP candidates in Vanderburgh County from congressional to township levels. In the 8th District, Ellsworth defeated Hostettler by 61-39%, the largest margin of defeat for any incumbent in the country.

Hostettler's campaign website contains no biography updating voters on what he's been doing since leaving Congress more than 17 years ago, but a 2022 Texas Public Policy Foundation bio calls him "former vice president of federal affairs for States Trust, a Foundation initiative promoting state-based solutions to restore the principle of federalism, holding up states as innovators of effective public policy."

More: Bucshon built a very specific profile in Congress. He says he won't seek re-election.

Hostettler started the publishing company Publius House and founded the Constitution Institute, which held seminars throughout Indiana, teaching about the U.S. Constitution. He has written at least two books.

According to a biography of Hostettler that once appeared on his website, he had "accepted a position as director of the Center for Christian Statesmanship, an outreach of the late Dr. D. James Kennedy's organization Coral Ridge Ministries."

Hostettler did mount an energetic campaign for the 2010 Republican U.S. Senate nomination in Indiana, but he ultimately fell short.

An engineer by training, Hostettler graduated from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology with a degree in mechanical engineering.

It was unclear in the hours after Hostettler's surprise announcement Thursday how he might fare in today's Republican Party, dominated by Donald Trump and a vastly changed national media environment.

The race to succeed Bucshon in Congress has barely begun.

This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: John Hostettler running for Congress in Indiana