7th Congressional District Q&A: Destiny Wells talks about her last-minute entry into race

Originally published by the Indianapolis Star

Date: April 10, 2026

By: Hayleigh Colombo

Indianapolis voters have several choices when it comes to the Democratic nominee for the 7th Congressional District, which Congressman André Carson has held for the last 18 years in a district that's overwhelmingly Democratic.

Besides Carson, candidates George Hornedo, Destiny Wells and Denise Hatch are vying for voters' attention in what is likely to be Carson's toughest reelection challenge yet for the district that contains most of Indianapolis.

Wells, a U.S. Army Reserve lieutenant colonel who previously unsuccessfully ran for Indiana secretary of state and attorney general, says she's running to give voters who are frustrated with the status quo another choice. She has said Carson and other establishment Democrats are "phoning it in" in Congress and that the city needs a representative who will energize voters.

We recently interviewed all of the 7th District candidates as part of our "Meet the Candidates" series. Wells' responses to IndyStar questions have been edited for clarity, brevity and style. Watch her full interview here.

You were a late joiner in the race. What ultimately made you decide to run for Congress?

Well, there were a couple of things that were happening in the environment that made me really excited. For the first time since the 1970s, since Watergate, we see that our ballot is full for Democrats. We have 25 Senate seats that are competitive, and we have about 91 House seats. That has, again, not happened since the public was so upset with Nixon, so you're seeing that same energy. It's been a problem in Indianapolis, mobilizing energy to the polls, and I wanted to take full advantage of it.

Also, I've ran a couple of cycles now and have diagnosed some of those systemic problems that we have with the party, and I believe that this position is where we can make a lot of ground. It is the highest elected official for the Democratic Party in Indiana, because we have no statewide elected officials. And I decided to seize the moment, the energy coming off those two cycles, and to give it a go.

Do you think André Carson is phoning it in Congress? And if so, why?

I do. I've ran on the ballot with the congressman twice now. So a lot of that involves the field process of elections, making sure that we are doing the basic blocking and tackling moves. Unfortunately, in Indianapolis, we have the worst turnout, not just in the state, but ... in the country. (Editor's note: Out of the 50 biggest cities, four cities ranked lower than Indianapolis when it came to 2024 voter turnout, according to a University of California San Diego study.) For the primary elections, we're only getting one out of 10 voters to the polls. And when I talk to people about Congressional District 7, I remind them who drew Congressional District 7. Republicans did. Republicans drew it so that it wouldn't be competitive, that it would pack the most Democrats in, and that we would succumb to our own complacency. And that's what I see across the party, and that is what I see out of the Congressman's office.

The race already had a challenger to Carson — George Hornedo — when you decided to enter. Why did you feel like it was necessary to give voters another option?

I just didn't think George was going to be able to scale his campaign and get the job done. And so when I was sizing up the race and seeing who was in the field, I was not deterred by the presence of George Hornedo, but I think it's great that we're giving Indy voters choices. Choices means that we can bump up the energy, and if we can drive more people out into the primary, then that means we're more likely to drive people out into the general.

Unfortunately Indy is (creating) a lot of drag on the ticket. We are not posting the numbers that we need to post to be able to win a statewide race. We have some great candidates running. We have Blythe Potter, we have Beau Bayh running for secretary of state. I want to help them in this effort. When I win the primary in May, I plan to be mobilizing voters to the polls come November.

You've increasingly become more outspoken about criticism of the Indiana Democratic Party. What's your response to the charge that infighting doesn't ultimately help Democrats win?

Well, I would say if they have given four years of their lives to running for two statewide offices to watch people phone it in, I would say it's not petty, right? It's rolling my sleeves up and getting business done. I'm not going along to get along. I didn't come from the party. I brought myself to the party because it's where my values align.

I have 23 years of military experience. I'm an Army lieutenant colonel. I just came off command. I teach leadership and organizational management with the troops, with the officers. And I can identify various things that are going on within the Indiana Democratic Party that, if we were able to remedy, we would be doing much better performance-wise in a now supermajority Republican legislature. We're obviously not doing something right, and so I'm here to diagnose the issues, and I understand that there's some pushback. I like to get along with people. I don't like upsetting people. But I'm also just not going to turn a blind eye to some of the things that the party can improve upon.

What does it mean to you to be a Democrat?

To relate to voters, we have a growing pool of independents where they're not feeling a home in the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. To me, you need to pick a home to win. And the things that brought me to the Democratic Party, well, one, I went to law school when Obama ran for president. I came from Martinsville from a very White town. I'll just put it that way, a very Republican town. I got to go to Indiana University and kind of broadened my viewpoint.

And then when I went to law school and came under the knowledge of the rule of law and saw what Barack Obama was doing as president, I didn't look back. Issues lately have solidified my position as a Democrat. In 2016, I was in Afghanistan when we did the handover from Obama to Trump and that was my commander in chief.

That had a huge, huge impact on me and then when I came back, I saw rights being scaled back. In 2022, I was on the front lines for the fight for women's reproductive health. That issue has not gone away. People aren't talking about it very much, but it's very much there.

We have less rights today than when we started.

The affordability issue: Look, I have been a beneficiary of subsidized health care my entire adult life because I'm able-bodied and could join the military. Not everybody can do that, but they should be able to have health care. They should be able to live like I've been able to live and to provide for my family in that way. I see it as a human right.

So these basic tenets, these basic ethos have solidified, like I said, my position in the Democratic Party, and I appreciate the movement right now with independents. I think that we need to push the boundaries in what our election law looks like and break up that straight-ticket voting. I do think, even though I'm a Democrat, we're way too polarized. But that's why I'm a Democrat today and why I continue to show up as a Democrat.

You've criticized Carson for taking corporate PAC money, including from BlackRock and AES. You said recently you wouldn't take corporate money, but have acknowledged taking it in the past when you ran for secretary of state. Why did you change your stance on this, and how did it evolve?

It took me getting really inside the political machine to see the downfall of the influence of corporate money. In 2022, I took a check from Eli Lilly, had a great sit down with them because they're headquartered here, and they said, "Hey, Destiny, we care about our employees' voter rights. We want to protect them." And so that was a corporate PAC check that I took, and I believe it's the only one. I didn't take any in 2024 because, to me, part of the attorney general's responsibilities is to sue corporations when there are consumer protection violations. And so I saw it as a conflict of interest. I see it as a conflict of interest in Congress.

When you are asking an elected official for something, it almost feels like you have to get in line., and the people who are having poor outcomes, not seeing the results, are usually the people in the very back of the line. And instead you have donors who are in the front of the line. You have corporations who are in the front of the line.

I called out the AES, BlackRock thing in particular because the timing is just so questionable. On September 30th, the Congressman took a donation from BlackRock. It had not even hit public news that BlackRock was thinking about acquiring AES until Oct. 1. And then I think the IndyStar covered it about a week later. And then you heard comments about it in the state legislature for the first time mid-October. And then he took AES money again in December.

And my thing is, why weren't you coming back and saying something? You have the platform. Again, you were the highest elected Democratic official. It may not be in your purview, but it was enough so that you took a meeting and you took a check. And we could have been doing something about it while we were having (the legislative) session. Instead, the can got kicked. There were a couple bills that weren't taken seriously. Now that the deal is done, now that it was publicly announced, then he had something to say.

It's too late. The damage has been done. And that is why I am saying all corporate money needs to go out of campaign coffers.

There is a war in Iran right now. I take that very seriously. I spent my time in Afghanistan. My husband did too. I'm still deployable. I could be mobilized or deployed myself.

And when I see that the Congressman has taken six, seven defense contractors' checks, when I see that he's also taken money from Elevance Health, from Anthem, and that people are showing up every day, and what is important to them, where they're feeling squeezed, are their health insurance, right, are their utility bills.

And so how are you going to be accountable to voters first when you're taking those checks and they can't see what you're doing in D.C. or what you are doing in committee?

What do you think about the war in Iran right now and what Congress's role should be?

I was vocal about the War Powers Resolution being slow-walked. You could see it was being slow-walked intentionally by both parties. Congress was not making sure that they showed up before this conflict kicked off. In fact, I got some pushback because I thought that the congressman and Congress members should have been at the State of the Union. And people said, "Well, Destiny, they don't need to validate these norms that are being violated."

And my thing is, no, it's the reality. And when you really look at what was going on, the Gang of Eight had been briefed that day that we were going to attack Iran, and the Speaker knew that we were going to attack Iran. Congress knew that we were going to do this, qnd then they took the escape hatch by slow-walking that in so that they didn't have to take political onus of the situation. You have to take ownership of it, even when it's unpopular, and they need to be debating these issues.

Look, like I said, I have two identities, right? I have the identity in uniform. You owe it to me to do that. You owe it to my soldiers to do that. Don't sham. Show up, even when you might have some political blowback and risk.

What do you think should happen now at this point? What should Congress do?

Yeah, this is Pandora's box, right? The conflict started. You can't take it back. You can talk about how (Congress hasn't) approved (a war), but we're in it now. We have the 82nd who's deploying right there, right now, and we could possibly have boots on the ground.

I think that we need to be holding the administration accountable. We need to be asking some really hard questions. I put myself at risk in uniform, running for office too. I'm a reservist. But I have to be vocal and say that I don't have any confidence in the secretary of defense who wants to call himself the secretary of war.

We jumped in with no strategy, and it really pains me that we are here again. My entire career was framed post-9/11. It's part of the reason I joined. And the thing is, is that it's not so much about us today, my generation, it's about our kids. And it's going to be our kids, and it's going to be the middle class and lower class, that is going to be enlisting. It's not going to be the people who are in D.C. making money off of these decisions.

(Original Editor's note: This interview happened on March 25, prior to thousands of troops being deployed to the region, threats of attacking civilian infrastructure and a tenuous ceasefire.)

ICE's conduct as it carries out the Trump administration's immigration enforcement priorities has been criticized by Democrats and others. Do you think the agency should be abolished?

I absolutely think it should. We've abolished agencies before. We can do it. DHS needs reformed, and ICE needs abolished. It is going to be a stain on this country's history. It already is. And, you know, we're capable of doing that. We can find out how to do those enforcement mechanisms in a different way, but the agency needs wound down.

Violent crime in Indianapolis has continued to attract national headlines. Is there anything you think should be done to address this or even the perception of crime?

I can advocate for things like safe storage laws, right? I can diagnose problems and introduce legislation that may or may not be able to assist. We have a huge perception issue of violent crime in Indianapolis. I think it takes leadership who has the podium being out front and showing up and messaging on these topics and then collaborating across the city. What I don't see is collaboration.

You mentioned earlier calling it in. A lot of these relationships have been in place for over a decade. The mayor's on his third term, but the congressman has also been in office for 18 years. He took it from his grandmother. We've had a Carson in Congress now for almost 30 years. So I think that there should be some accounting on what Indiana has transformed into while on these elected officials' watches.

There are ways to bring money into the city to assist with violent crime. A lot of voters actually don't know about community project funding, and community project funding is meant to bring money back for things like public safety, for infrastructure.

If you look at Indianapolis's community project funding for Congressional District 7, this last iteration, what you see are the biggest getters in that funding are actually organizations that already have nine figures, whether it's an endowment, a foundation or capital already. So the highest getter was Indianapolis Airport Authority. The money, $2 million goes to them. It looks like infrastructure, but in reality, it was a specific request for baggage machines, and those machines and the technology is held by a company called Leidos. If you look on the congressman's finance reports, he took a $10,000 donation from Leidos right before he put that request in.

Other people that are getting this money, Indiana University, they have a $3.5 billion-dollar endowment. Ivy Tech, again, over $300 million. Butler, over $300 million.

And so we need to be prioritizing the people above what some would consider boondoggles. Taxpayers are already paying for these very bloated institutions. Instead, bring that money back and address issues like safety where you can help stopgap and collaborate with local policing authorities and with the city in addressing those issues.

Is there anything that you would do in Congress to help the issue of homelessness in our city?

Again, what I just said. So community project funding, we can do that. We can use that for homelessness. I'm very upset to see the criminalization of homelessness passed this past year. That came from, I think, Sen. Carrasco (and) maybe had been quietly supported by the city.

But where was the Congressman? And he may not be in charge of state legislation, but he has the platform. And again, I think that's what we need to be doing with this office is we need to be using it as a matter of influence, not just what you're supposed to be doing on paper.

If you were elected, what's the first piece of legislation you would author?

I want to join the effort right now to have a moratorium on data centers. I live in Martindale, Brightwood, and I live down from Sherman, where the data center is being proposed that has no community support. But it has support from some key stakeholders that will be recipients of contracts,

And again, you asked me earlier about why I'm so against corporate checks. Part of that is because a lot of the ways that you see this town ran at the end of the day is the movement of money. It's the movement of money, whether it be through some of the trades — not all trades, not all unions are the same — but sometimes we put construction contracts before community needs, whether it's law offices that have clients who may be engineering firms or ... builders.

And so everybody's kind of got their financial interests into these activities, but the people don't understand why are (elected leaders) not doing what we the people want to do? We're down at the City-County Building. We're saying "We don't want this, but none of you are listening." Well, there are reasons why. It's because of these incentives that elected officials have to show up for other people rather than voters.

Contact senior government accountability reporter Hayleigh Colombo at hcolombo@indystar.com or follow her on X@hayleighcolombo.

Contact: press@wellsforindiana.com

Note to press: High-resolution headshot available here.

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Destiny Wells is a candidate for Indiana’s 7th Congressional District. She is an attorney, U.S. Army Reserve Lieutenant Colonel, and combat veteran with more than two decades of service at the local, state, federal, and multinational levels.

Wells previously served as a Deputy Attorney General for the State of Indiana and as Assistant Corporation Counsel for the City of Indianapolis. She grew up in a blue-collar Indiana family, built her career in public service, and is raising her children in Center Township.

She is running for Congress because she believes working families deserve representation that is independent, reform-minded, and accountable — not financed by corporate PACs or written by special interests. Wells has pledged to accept no corporate PAC money and to prioritize transparency, consumer protection, and national security in Congress.