Let’s dispense with the polite fiction right up front: Indiana does not begin and end at the county lines of Indianapolis—no matter how many fundraisers, press conferences, and carefully lit interviews try to convince us otherwise.
You speak as though the state radiates outward from a single polished center. It doesn’t, ànd it never did.
The first capital sat in Corydon, where governance wasn’t choreographed for optics. It was hammered out in the open, quite literally under a tree. No branding consultants. No messaging decks. Just people building something that had to work because there was no illusion to hide behind.
Meanwhile, Vincennes was already earning its title as the “First City” way beforehand, not through designation, but through reality: trade, culture, conflict, coexistence. A place that mattered before “mattering” required a “communications strategy.”
And while modern campaigns love to borrow the language of humility and grit, a young Abraham Lincoln was actually living it in places like Jasper—working, hauling, selling grain. No audience. No applause. Just a life being built without the expectation that anyone would be watching, just selling his grain.
Contrast that with today: a political ecosystem so centralized that it risks confusing proximity to power with legitimacy itself. If it didn’t happen in Indianapolis, it barely happened at all—or so the script seems to go.
But here’s the inconvenient truth: a state that forgets where it started becomes dangerously good at pretending. Pretending that history is interchangeable. Pretending that representation can be managed from a distance. Pretending that the rest of Indiana is a backdrop instead of the foundation.
You can keep telling that story if you like. It’s efficient, it’s tidy, and it certainly polls well.
It’s also incomplete to the point of being misleading.
Because Indiana is not a stage set with one bright spotlight; it’s a landscape, uneven and older than your talking points, with roots that don’t all lead back to the same place.
So… if you’re asking for trust, for votes, for belief, try demonstrating that you understand the difference between where power currently sits and where it originally grew.
Otherwise, don’t mistake silence for agreement. Sometimes it’s just people outside the spotlight deciding they’ve heard enough.
Sincerely,
Me
Someone Who’s Not Impressed by Geography Masquerading as Importance