Jim Lucas 69s again,

He won again. About 60 percent. Chris Bowen took 31. Tyler Henkle took 8. District 69 kept the man it has sent to Indianapolis since 2012 while the rest of the House got less Republican. Speaker Huston lost. The supermajority is gone. New speaker-elect is Ben Smaltz. The room just got smaller for Lucas’s side.

If you are a progressive in this district, the easy move is to file the whole thing under “they voted for the gun guy again” and go back to the doom-scroll. That is the move most people will make. This is a dare to do the other one: keep watching him for the rest of the term, and (gasp) actually reach out and ask how he thinks about the things he files.

Start with the property-tax piece, because that is what he ran on and it is already on paper. In January he co-authored House Bill 1288 with J.D. Prescott. The bill would kill property-tax assessments after 2026, kill the tax itself after 2027, block new property-tax-backed debt and TIF districts, abolish the assessor offices, and replace the revenue with a broader sales tax on services (health care and education exempt). It died in Ways and Means. In June he stood on the stage in Seymour, introduced Prescott to the local Chamber crowd, and closed with the line he has used before: every time the government introduces a new tax it just ends up screwing everybody.

You can hate the mechanics. A services tax hits different people than a property tax, and the distribution formulas are where the real fights live. But the diagnosis he is using is not a Chamber brochure. He is saying the current system is a century-old patchwork that lets too many entities out from under the bill for schools, police, fire, EMS, roads, and libraries. That is not a conservative talking point you have to invent for him. It is the argument he is already making in public. If you think the current system is also broken just broken in a different direction — the useful question is not “how do we stop him.” It is “what part of the replacement math do you actually accept, and where do you draw the line.” He has already put his name on a bill. The bill did not move. In a House without a supermajority it is even less likely to move without people who do not share his primary-night crowd. That is an opening, not a slogan.

The Second Amendment file is the one progressives usually stop reading at. He has been consistent for years. He co-authored constitutional-carry language that advanced out of the House in 2022. Indiana enacted permitless handgun carry effective July 1, 2022. He has also pushed elimination of the carry-permit fee and higher penalties for firearm theft. In 2017 he sponsored the bill that made firearm possession by a person unlawfully in the country a Level 6 felony. That one was signed. You can disagree with every one of those outcomes and still notice the pattern: he files the thing, he keeps filing the thing, and some of the things eventually become law. That is not the same as “he only talks.” It is also not the same as “he is a pure party messenger who never authors.” A 2022 Capital Chronicle review found he authored more bills than almost anyone in the House GOP caucus over three sessions and got none of them to the governor. Many were guns or marijuana. The pattern is real. He files a lot. Leadership and the calendar decide what moves. The ones that moved are the ones with either local fingerprints or caucus priority.

The local fingerprints are worth the attention. He authored the Hoosier First Responder Medal of Honor after the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department pointed out the state had no such award for firefighters, EMS, and officers injured or killed on duty. It was signed in 2024. It is a small law. It is also one that started because someone local called him and he wrote the bill. He supported the 2021 broadband measure that set up reverse auctions and vouchers so students, schools, and rural clinics could get better connections, paired with the larger Next Level Connections money. Those are not progressive trophies. They are also not nothing. They are the kind of thing that happens when a representative is still taking the phone calls from the same counties he has represented for fourteen years.

The cannabis file is the one that usually gets the eye-roll from both sides. He has filed medical and broader cannabis bills for years. They die. He still files them. If your politics include some version of “the state is wasting resources on a plant that is safer than alcohol,” that is a place where his public record and a progressive record are closer than the party labels suggest. The bills do not pass. The fact that he keeps introducing them is still data.

None of this requires you to like him. None of it requires you to pretend the 2A record is moderate or that the property-tax swap is automatically fair. It does require noticing that he has a longer public paper trail on specific structural questions than most people in this district are willing to read, and that the paper trail is not identical to the average caucus press release. The supermajority is gone. The next versions of the tax bill, the cannabis bill, or whatever else he files will need votes that are not automatic. That is the practical reason to keep the file open.

The dare is simple. For the rest of this term, read the bills he actually puts his name on instead of the ones you assume he will. When one of them touches something you have already decided is broken — property taxes, the size of the local bill for services, broadband access, the first-responder recognition that started with a local call — send the email or make the call and ask how he is thinking about the tradeoffs. Not the performative version. The version where you say what you would accept and what you would not. He has spent fourteen years being the guy who answers the local phone. The progressive move that requires the least amount of theater is to use it while the chamber is smaller and the math is less automatic.

District 69 just rehired him. The rest of the House just made it harder for any one caucus to ignore the other side. The useful progressive response is not to look away until the next filing deadline. It is to keep the file open and, yes, talk to him about the parts of the record that already exist.