On Sunday, March 30, 2025, more than 250 people filled two rooms of the West Lafayette Public Library. They brought signs. They brought questions. They had a congressman in mind.

Jim Baird was not there. He had been invited, several times.

"Kinda doing his job for him," is how Matt Gyure of Greater Lafayette Indivisible described the evening to WTHR. His group had reached out to Baird's office repeatedly — to ask why he wasn't holding town halls, and to invite him to the one they were organizing anyway.

The room did what rooms do when the chair is empty. Attendees stood up and talked about Medicaid, about the federal budget, about Elon Musk. One woman said: "What representative Baird and his colleagues are doing is taking the lives of America's most vulnerable and sacrificing them on the altar of conservative billionaires."

At some point the room broke into a chant: "Where is Jim?"

13News reached out to Baird's office and his press secretary that day — for comment, and to ask whether he had any town halls planned. They did not get a response.

This was not the first time somebody asked

Go back a year, to April 2024. There was a 4th District candidates forum at that same West Lafayette Public Library. Baird did not attend that one either. His campaign said he was in Washington because Congress was in session.

His Republican primary challenger that year, Charles Bookwalter, said this to the room:

"Where's Jim Baird? He's the incumbent and he's not here. Where's he been? He only comes back when he needs your vote."

Same question, same library, two different years, two different sets of people. A congressman who wanted to be found would have noticed by the second time.

Even his 2026 primary challenger ran on it. Craig Haggard, a state representative who took Baird on in the May primary, told Based in Lafayette he was running "because I believe we need someone who will show up, be accountable and work for the people of Indiana." Baird won the nomination anyway, and is on the ballot in November for a fifth term.

Where he was, instead

Baird files a financial disclosure every year with the Clerk of the House, and Section H of it lists travel somebody else paid for. For most of his time in Congress that section says "None disclosed."

Then comes his annual report covering 2024, filed August 12, 2025. Three trips, all paid for by the Aspen Institute Congressional Program:

That's roughly three weeks on three continents in a single calendar year, on someone else's dime.

Nobody is saying a member of Congress shouldn't travel and learn about the world. That's rather the point: the calendar was never the problem. He found a week for Cape Town in February, a week for Sydney in May, and ten days for Dublin in August. He could not find one evening for the West Lafayette Public Library, in the district that elects him.

The office nobody wants to work in

There's one more measure of how this office runs, and it comes from the trade publication that tracks congressional staffing.

In October 2023, LegiStorm published its analysis of House staff turnover. Reporter Keturah Hetrick wrote:

"Reps. Brandon Williams (R-N.Y.), Jim Baird (R-Ind.) and Mary Peltola (D-Alaska) each have turnover roughly three times the average and round out the House's five worst staff-retention rates."

Five worst in a 435-member House. Three times the average rate of losing people.

Staff are the constituent-service operation. They are who answers when you call about a Social Security check that stopped, a VA claim that stalled, a passport that won't come. When an office churns through them at triple the normal rate, the institutional memory of your case walks out the door with them.

So the picture from the outside is consistent: constituents can't get a town hall, reporters can't get a call back, and the people hired to help you don't stay long.

What he doesn't want to be asked about

It's worth being specific about what those 250 people were trying to ask him, because it wasn't abstract.

Baird voted Aye on final passage of Trump's budget bill on July 3, 2025. In IN-04, the Joint Economic Committee projects 21,540 people will lose health coverage — 11,000 losing Affordable Care Act coverage and 10,540 losing Medicaid. Another 21,647 households in his district rely on SNAP to buy groceries, including 12,569 households with children and 7,735 with someone over 60.

And on the cuts coming out of Washington that spring, he told Fox59:

"I am concerned about our indebtedness. We've been concerned about that for quite some time, and apparently, this is a means for accomplishing that."

That's the whole answer. It is a lot easier to say that to a TV camera in Washington than to a librarian in West Lafayette who wants to know what happens to her mother's coverage.

He is not the only one who figured this out. Jeff Hurd skipped a town hall 400 people showed up to and called it "political theater". The playbook is the same everywhere: telephone town halls you control, mobile office hours staffed by aides, and no room where a constituent gets to follow up.

Baird represents 16 counties. He can find Cape Town. He can find West Lafayette.

Source

'Doing his job for him' | Indiana District 4 residents hold town hall without congressman accepting the invite — Ashton Hackman, WTHR 13News, March 30, 2025, and Hundreds ask 'Where's Baird?', vent during West Lafayette town hall, Based in Lafayette via The Indiana Citizen. Photo: The Indiana Citizen.