Power to the Indiana People's Party — in 1855

Riddle me this. When did the Indiana People's Party control nine of Indiana's 11 congressional districts?

If you not only know that the answer to that question is 1855-1857, but you can also explain what the Indiana People's Party is, then your name is probably Trevor Foughty.

Or you've read CapitolAndWashington.com, the website Foughty created as a sort of Baseball-Reference.com for Indiana politics.

Foughty, an aide to Rep. Todd Young, spent more than four years creating the site in his spare time. That meant not just writing the code, but also entering information on more than 2,000 candidates and listing the results of more than 600 elections.

"Why have I spent so much time on it?" the Wells County native says on the site. "The short answer is that I love Indiana history and politics."

The longer answer is that when Foughty was the spokesman for the Indiana Republican Party in 2010, and then-Rep. Mike Pence was considering running for governor, Foughty would get questions from reporters like: "When was the last time a sitting member of the U.S. House ran for — and won — a gubernatorial race?"

Foughty also explains why, for 20 years, Indiana elected its congressional delegation five months after the start of the Congress.

He also explains why no one running from office from 1816 to 1832 used a party affiliation.

But what he calls the "heart and soul" of the website is its database of election results. As a self-described "big political history nerd," it bugged Foughty that this basic information was so hard to get. The Indiana Secretary of State's website, for example, only has online election results back to 2000.

Foughty's site goes beyond telling you that Mitch Daniels received 1,563,885 votes for governor in 2008. It also shows that that's the most votes ever received by an Indiana candidate.

The smallest margin of victory? That honor belongs to Frank McCloskey, who won his 1984 congressional contest in southwestern Indiana by four votes.

Former Rep. Lee Hamilton won the most general elections in a political career: 17. Allison Wrentmore, who unsuccessfully ran for 10 offices from 1930 through 1958, lost the most often.

Richard Lugar amassed the most cumulative votes — 8,137,898 — during his seven general election Senate races. And although he lost his 2012 renomination bid, Lugar still holds four of the top five spots for largest vote margin in an election.

And if you're wondering what the Indiana People's Party was, it was the conservative/anti-slavery party that emerged in the wake of the dissolution of the Whig party. Foughty says that while party members initially thought Republicans weren't conservative enough, they assimilated with the GOP after one election cycle.