The Democratic Party has been one of the two major political parties since Indiana became a state in 1816, as has the Republican Party since its inception in 1854. In that year, Hoosiers voted for Democrat James Buchanan for president, but in 1860, the voters supported Republican Abraham Lincoln. After voting Republican in four successive presidential elections, Indiana voted Democratic in 1876 and became a swing state. More recently, a Republican trend has been evident: the state voted Republican in 11 out of 12 presidential elections between 1940 and 1984.
Third-party movements have rarely succeeded in Indiana. Native son Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party leader who was personally popular in Indiana, received only 36,931 votes in the state in 1912, while garnering more than 900,000 votes nationally. Even in 1932, during the Great Depression, Socialist candidate Norman Thomas won only 21,388 votes in Indiana. The most successful third-party movement in recent decades was George Wallace's American Independent Party, which took 243,108 votes (11.5% of the Indiana total) in 1968. In each of the four presidential elections of the 1970s and early 1980s, minority party candidates together received only 1.1% or less of the votes cast.
In 2000, Indiana gave 57% of the vote to Republican George W. Bush, and 41% to Democrat Al Gore. In 1996, Democrat Frank L. O'Bannon was voted in to succeed two-term Democratic governor Evan Bayh; O'Bannon was reelected in 2000. However, O'Bannon suffered a massive stroke in September 2003, and Lieutenant Governor Joseph E. Kernan assumed the role of acting governor while O'Bannon remained in a coma. Republican Richard Lugar won election to his fifth term in the US Senate in 2000. The other Senate seat, which again went to the Republicans in the 1992 election, was surrendered to the Democrats in 1998 when Evan Bayh was voted in.
Indiana's delegation to the US House of Representatives following the 2002 elections included three Democrats and six Republicans. In mid-2003 the state senate had 32 Republicans and 18 Democrats. The state house was narrowly controlled by the Democrats, with 51 representatives to the Republican Party's 49. In 2002 there were 4,008,902 registered voters; there is no party registration in the state. The state had 12 electoral votes in the 2000 presidential election.