An Indiana city called Terre Haute is getting a new Democratic mayor after a 27-year-old candidate prevailed in elections this week against a Republican in his fourth term. Terre Haute is a county seat in the western portions of the state, situated a little over an hour west of Indianapolis.
The victor is Brandon Sakbun, who neared 60 percent of the vote in initially reported results. Democrats appear to generally hold political strength in the city, at least as of late, with the party also having swept the city council, winning all nine of its seats. Sakbun has served in the U.S. military and remains active in the Indiana National Guard, and a report from the Tribune-Star — a locally based newspaper — noted Sakbun aggressively campaigned in the lead-up to the election. “I don’t think there was a place you could go where you didn’t see Brandon. It was a well-deserved win,” George Azar, a Democrat who was re-elected to a city council position, said this week.
Sakbun promised the local community “big changes in City Hall.”
In general, Democrats ended up with politically uplifting results in elections held around the country on Tuesday. Kentucky Democratic Governor Andy Beshear won another term against Trump-endorsed GOP challenger Daniel Cameron, who’s currently the state’s attorney general and faced criticism on issues like his support for abortion restrictions and his apparent backing for a school voucher program, which uses funds meant for public schools to support individual educations outside that system — potentially seriously straining an already struggling public school set-up.
And in Ohio, residents resoundingly approved an amendment to their state Constitution enacting protections for abortion, adding yet another set of election results to the indications that many Americans aren’t in league with the restrictive GOP position on abortion. Similarly, Democrats took complete control of the Virginia legislature, curtailing stated ambitions from Virginia GOP Governor Glenn Youngkin of restricting abortion.
