On June 20, 2026, about 70 people gathered in the Browning Rooms at the Central Library in Evansville for a town hall with their congressman.

Their congressman did not come. He also never told them he wasn't coming.

Mark Messmer has represented Indiana's 8th District since January 2025. In that time, according to WNIN, he has not held a single in-person town hall anywhere in the 21 counties he represents. The closest thing was a telephone call-in event in May 2025, where a staffer decided which questions reached him.

The invitation

Wendy Bredhold, president of Indivisible Evansville, did it by the book. She called Messmer's office first, and they gave her an email address to send the request to.

Her letter, dated May 15, 2026, is published in full on WNIN's site. It is about as non-confrontational as an invitation to a politician gets. It offers him opening remarks about "your experience in Congress thus far and the issues you are currently focused on." It spells out the ground rules: attendees must "remain civil, limit themselves to one question at a time, and ask questions rather than make statements." It offers to change the format entirely if he'd prefer: "We are also happy to discuss any format preferences or accommodations that would help make the event constructive and comfortable for your office."

The reply, in Bredhold's account:

"I did call Representative Messmer's office and I said I wanted to extend this invitation and they said okay, here's the email address. Send the request to this address, I did, I was very polite, I offered him all kinds of accommodations. They didn't reply at all."

It later turned out the Indiana Republican convention was in Fort Wayne that same Saturday. Nobody from his office mentioned that either. As Bredhold put it:

"That would have been an easy thing for them to tell me: 'It's the Republican State Convention so he has to politely decline.' But instead I got no answer and didn't know until after we had scheduled the event."

So the group held the meeting anyway. Bredhold ran a slideshow on Messmer's record in the Indiana Statehouse and in Congress, and on where his campaign money comes from. People wrote their questions for the absent congressman on poster board and held them up. One member held a sign with his face on it.

March 2025: the library called on to call the police

This didn't start in 2026.

Messmer's office runs "mobile office hours" — staffers at a table in a public building, taking questions one at a time. On March 11, 2025, about a dozen constituents showed up at the Warrick County Public Library. Most were seniors. They wanted to ask their questions as a group rather than one-by-one, and the library offered a bigger conference room so they could.

What happened next is documented by the library's own director, Brooke Bolton, in WNIN's reporting: a Washington, D.C.-based staffer — Bolton identified him as Messmer's chief of staff, Michael Curcio — phoned the library and asked staff to call the police on the attendees.

The library refused.

"My staff told (Curcio) that no one was breaking any rules of this library," Bolton said. "They were not being hostile, they were not being disruptive."

The topics those seniors had come to raise were Medicaid, Social Security, and care for a special-needs child. One of them, Kristina Bickle, described what they were after:

"So really, all we were wanting to do was have a public discourse in which we could ask questions in a respectful way of the people who are supposed to represent the people who represent us. That's all we wanted."

Bolton said the library had never had anything like it happen at a congressional office-hours event before. She added that they'd host Messmer's staff again — in a bigger room next time.

March 2025: 300 people outside his office

Eleven days later, on Saturday, March 22, 2025, people rallied outside Messmer's Evansville office asking for a town hall. "We held an event here on Saturday and over 300 people at least were here to express their concerns," Bredhold told WFIE. On the Monday, dozens of them came back and delivered letters to his office — on health care, on economic policy, on environmental rules.

Messmer's statement to WFIE was gracious and beside the point:

"The Evansville weekend protest reflects how blessed we are to live in the United States of America. And while I disagree with many of their positions, I fully respect and embrace their right to freely protest. I am in Washington, D.C. today so I was not in the Evansville office to receive the letters the protesters dropped off, but my staff was happy to collect them."

He respects their right to protest. He has never given them the meeting they were protesting to get.

May 2025: the telephone town hall

Under that pressure, Messmer did agree to something — a virtual town hall on May 6, 2025, held by phone with a moderator and screened questions.

About 30 people gathered at the McCullough Library in Evansville to listen together at an event they called "Unmuting the 8th District." Roughly nine of them submitted questions to his staff. None were chosen.

Bredhold described the format:

"Once he answered a question or read his answer, whatever the case may be, he was done. There was no opportunity for follow up, like people were silenced after."

WNIN's account of the call is worth reading in full. In the first half hour, a few harder questions got through — one caller pushed back on Trump's tariffs. After that, the questions turned friendly. One asked about the effort to rename the Gulf of Mexico, which prompted this from Messmer:

"'The Gulf of America' just makes more sense."

Another asked how DOGE's cuts could be made permanent. Another simply thanked him for supporting a county music festival.

Laura Brown had wanted to ask him to publicly commit that he wouldn't support sending any 8th District resident to a foreign prison — a petition with more than 600 signatures behind it. She didn't get on. Tom Zeta wanted to ask who exactly was defining "waste, fraud and abuse" in the DOGE cuts. He didn't get on either.

Messmer's office didn't answer WNIN's questions about how many people registered, how questions were picked, or whether rejected questions would ever be answered.

Mitzi Mathieu, listening at the library, summed up the evening in three words: "It's just unbelievable."

The pattern

Line it up:

• A dozen seniors ask to be heard as a group — his chief of staff tries to get the police called.
• Three hundred people rally for a town hall — he issues a statement about how blessed we are to live in America.
• He holds one call-in event where a staffer screens every question, and not one of the nine questions submitted by the group that organized around it makes the broadcast.
• Fourteen months later, a polite written invitation offering him any format he likes gets no reply at all.

He is not unavailable, exactly. He does interviews with friendly outlets and appears at ribbon-cuttings. What he does not do is stand in a room in his own district and take an unscreened question from someone who might disagree with him.

That's not unique to him — we've documented Republicans who were told to stop holding town halls as a matter of party strategy. But Messmer is running for re-election in November 2026, and he has now gone his entire first term without doing it once.

Bredhold's read on why it might finally matter:

"I think that he's quite vulnerable right now, given that he's gotten, he's been under a lot of criticism for how he's not available to constituents, he's not available to the media, he refuses to answer any questions, like that's not going to make him a very popular guy."

Source

John Gibson, "Town Hall Carries On Without Messmer", WNIN, June 24, 2026. Photo by Brody Atchley / WNIN News.