Hogsett faces 'real competition' in Shackleford as Indianapolis mayoral primaries heat up

Mayor Joe Hogsett easily won the Democratic nomination for mayor in his past two elections in 2015 and 2019, but in state Rep. Robin Shackleford, D-Indianapolis, he faces his strongest primary opponent yet.

She represents increasing division within the Marion County Democratic Party that spilled into public eye last year. Black Democrats, including Shackleford, slammed party leadership helmed by then-chair Kate Sweeney Bell and Hogsett over the since-ended slating process to endorse candidates, which they said was controlled by leaders and shut out Black and Latino candidates.

Still, most political watchers give Hogsett — and his overwhelming lead in campaign cash — the clear advantage.

And while Hogsett is being challenged, with the Indiana Black Legislative Caucus siding with Shackleford, many within his party are standing with him. One of Shackleford's Democratic colleagues at the Indiana Statehouse, Rep. Blake Johnson, D-Indianapolis, reached out to IndyStar to criticize what he called her political mudslinging when she released an infrastructure improvement plan on April 5 that attacked Hogsett for not adequately addressing pedestrian safety.

“What I think is it’s unnecessarily divisive,” he told IndyStar.

Both candidates stand to make history if they win.

Hogsett would become the only mayor other than Republican Bill Hudnut to serve more than two terms since 1970, when Unigov consolidated the city and county governments.

If Shackleford wins, she would become the city’s first woman, first Black and first non-white mayor, something which she has said is long overdue.

Indianapolis mayoral primaries: 5 things to know about the candidates, race

University of Indianapolis political science professor Laura Wilson said the election is like a referendum on Hogsett. He's been attacked by opponents on problems from rising gun violence to pedestrian safety to the pothole-ridden streets.

Wilson noted Shackleford has released a number of policies to emphasize how she'd do things differently.

"I think Robin Shackleford is real competition although the challenges for her are steep," Wilson said.

Community activists Clif Marsiglio, Larry Vaughn, and perennial candidate Bob Kern, also are running in what's become a crowded Democratic primary.

Joe Hogsett

It’s a story Hogsett has told many times. But it’s one he can’t seem to emphasize enough as he fields questions about why he’s running for a third term, which he said in 2015 he wouldn’t do.

He thinks he lost time to transform the city during the COVID-19 pandemic and wants another shot.

“In no small measure, the reason why I'm running for a third term is based largely on the fact that I think that we created a great deal of momentum in the first term,” he said.

One thing that hasn’t changed: he’s using the same west side storefront that housed his 2019 campaign.

Nestled beside a Mexican restaurant and auto insurance store along bustling West Washington Street, the Hogsett west side campaign nerve center is bedecked with campaign posters and hosts campaign volunteers phone banking, mailing and canvassing for his reelection.

The city’s $150 million violent crime prevention program and its historic $1.1 billion 5-year infrastructure plan passed in this year’s budget are some of the plans Hogsett wants to see through in a third term.

“While people may criticize my leadership for their own political agendas, I think continuity of leadership is what I, uniquely, the only candidate, provides,” he told IndyStar.

Hogsett said he knows problems exist, such as gun violence and potholes, which his opponents have attacked him on. But he said that what his administration has been doing is working and his pitch to voters is to stay the course. He points to the 15% reduction in homicides from 2021 to 2022 as evidence, saying it’s the largest decrease in year-on-year homicides in IMPD history.

Hogsett has, since his first term, sought to lobby state lawmakers to change Indiana’s outdated road funding formula that disproportionately shorts Indianapolis, and other highly-trafficked cities, of road money.

The Indiana General Assembly is now considering a bill, Senate Bill 283 authored by Sen. Aaron Freeman, R-Indianapolis, which would send about $8 million more road money each year to Indianapolis by correcting a glitch in the road funding formula. But Hogsett acknowledged that lawmakers have still not fixed the key funding formula issue.

He’s been working with regional mayors to see how urban areas can collaborate to fix the problem.

One thing Hogsett has sworn he wouldn’t do is raise taxes. He’s never raised taxes before and does not plan on doing so even to deal with Indianapolis’ $1 billion road funding gap.

“I’m not going to support any tax increases on Marion County residents unless and until we start getting our fair share of state support in terms of road funding,” he said.

He’s earned a reputation for fiscal prudence. Voters from 2015 might remember his campaign ads featuring his own decades-old shoes to underscore how he won’t spend unnecessarily.

When he took office in 2016, he inherited a structural deficit of $38 million. By his second budget, the city had eliminated it. The city has passed balanced budgets since then. Indianapolis has a triple A bond rating, the highest level, which Hogsett is proud of.

“We’ve had support of broad bipartisan agreement on our fiscal vision for the city,” he said. “That’s not a Joe Hogsett vision or a Democratic Party vision, but rather a city of Indianapolis vision for fiscal stability, fiscal prudence.

Hogsett has touted the $3.6 billion in current and forthcoming investments in downtown development as a cornerstone achievement of his time in office. “Gamechanger” is how he describes the redevelopment of City Market East, Pan Am Plaza, the expansion of the Convention Center, the expansion of IU Health Medical Campus, 16 Tech, the Elanco global headquarters, the Gainbridge Fieldhouse renovation and Elevator Hill.

“The next four or five years may be the among the most exciting in our city's history,” he said.

Those developments may be the crown jewels of his time in office, but some residents and political opponents have criticized the city’s overt focus on downtown at expense of neglected neighborhoods that still have no sidewalks or bus stops and said it’s driven displacement and gentrification.

“We continue to invest significantly, whether it be our Circle City Forward Initiative, which is transforming not only parks, but also neighborhood infrastructure throughout the community,” Hogsett said.

Robin Shackleford

For Shackleford, to be Indianapolis mayor is to be an advocate for the city, especially as a Republican-dominated Indiana General Assembly is increasingly at odds with its capital residents’ political views.

It’s a conflict she knows well and has navigated in her almost 11 years at the legislature, working across party lines to get bipartisan bills passed, notably, a temporary traffic amnesty program in 2019.

“As I reflect on what I've been able to get done at the Statehouse, I think about it, I should be able to get even more done with a Democrat-led city,” she told IndyStar.

She faces an uphill battle in the primary against the incumbent mayor. By her own admission, she has never had to put in a lot of work to keep her Statehouse seat, having been unopposed in her last three general elections to the District 98 seat representing Indianapolis at the Statehouse.

As of the most recent figures released by the April 14 deadline, Hogsett had about 77 times more money in his campaign war chest than she had. About 25 people are on Shackleford’s campaign staff, though she said they’d be more appropriately described as her campaign volunteers. Most of them, including her campaign managers, are unpaid.

Much like her campaign team built by grassroots volunteers, she hopes to beat Hogsett through mobilizing voters. But political experts have said that would be difficult, as a grassroots-only strategy isn’t likely to work in such a big race.

Like Hogsett’s challengers across the aisle, Shackleford said crime is the biggest issue facing Indianapolis and her top priority.

“It is a universal problem across the city," she said. "Everybody is concerned about their safety.”

While Hogsett has said the rise in violence was accelerated by the pandemic, Shackleford said that’s not an excuse.

“You can't blame the pandemic,” she said. “I think the issue was he was not focusing more on the preventive side of safety of law enforcement.”

Mental health, addiction, jobs without living wages, trauma — those are some of the root causes of crime that Shackleford said she would address in an expansive public safety plan.

Although Hogsett created the Office of Public Health and Safety in an effort to address those issues, Shackleford said she thinks it has been underfunded and under resourced. For example, she said, the $2 million funding the city’s Mobile Crisis Assistance Team, which responds to people in mental health crisis, is insufficient.

“That’s just a drop in the bucket for the resources that it's going to take,” she said.

Shackleford thinks Hogsett has pursued downtown growth at the expense of neighborhoods, including her own district on the east side, which have become neglected.

“What seems kind of lopsided is when one of our biggest issues is all that development going downtown and his top funders are developers,” she said. “What you start seeing is more crime in the surrounding neighborhoods, less development, less infrastructure, more health issues, more food deserts, more pharmacy deserts, more bank deserts, and nothing has been done to stop (it)…I don’t think he’s been focused on any of these issues at an adequate level.”

In multiple campaign emails, Shackleford has suggested that he’s been beholden to large donors expecting favors in return for their contributions, accusations Hogsett strongly denies. IndyStar reported in January that his campaign war chest is powered by some of Indianapolis' biggest players in business and real estate, who have developments downtown.

Shackleford also takes issue with Hogsett's spending decisions. Balancing budgets are important, she said, but so is taking care of the city.

“You don’t want to balance the budget on the backs of not making sure resources are out there and government is not ran efficiently,” she said. “When you have streets crumbling, when you have crime is so high, when you have lights not on, you're sacrificing just to say that you got a balanced budget.”

Similarly, Shackleford criticized what she said was Hogsett’s unwillingness to raises taxes for fear it would harm his prospects of reelection.

Given the city has reached a crisis point, she said, she would consider raising taxes to make sure roads get adequately funded. Her comprehensive infrastructure plan won’t be funded by tax hikes at the moment, however, and she would first audit available funds to see how to reorient spending.

As a state representative, she worked on a historic police reform bill passed in 2021 that defined the use of chokeholds during arrests as deadly force among other accountability measures. She also was the key driver behind the launch of Indiana’s first telemedicine pilot program in 2014.

This session, she has been part of the Democratic pushback against the Republican assault on transgender rights, proposing four amendments to try and water down the ban on gender-affirming health procedures for youth, to no success.

Marsiglio, Vaughn, Kern

Marsiglio is a longtime community activist and calls himself an unpolished politician. A self-described progressive liberal, he said Hogsett has not been committed enough to a progressive agenda, including social justice and infrastructure. Marsiglio's biggest priority, if elected, he said, would be improving public safety, drawing on his experienced as a trained mental health clinician to address mental illness and addiction.

Vaughn focused on not giving private businesses money through tax increment financing districts and said addressing mental illness and addiction in crime reduction is a waste of resources. He also ran against Hogsett in 2015, when he made local headlines for comparing school reform to sending kids to gas chambers.

Perennial candidate Kern has run unsuccessfully in six Democratic primaries for congressional and Statehouse seats before. His priorities are crime, infrastructure and homelessness. Kern made local and national headlines in the past for his congressional bid while having felony convictions.

The primary is May 2. Early voting has begun.

Contact IndyStar reporter Ko Lyn Cheang at kcheang@indystar.com or 317-903-7071. Follow her on Twitter: @kolyn_cheang.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Hogsett faces 'real competition' from Shackleford in mayoral primary