Alex Chambers: If you haven't seen Werner Herzog's movie Fitzcarraldo, it's worth knowing what it's about. It's the early twentieth century, and there's this opera-loving Irishman, Fitzcarraldo, in Peru. Unfortunately for him, there's no opera house in his town, so he decides to build one. But building an opera house is expensive, so he comes up with a plan that involves an out-of-the-way rubber plantation in the Andean mountains. For complicated reasons, the plan's success depends on Fitzcarraldo and his team lugging a 320-ton steam ship over a mountain. That's the bulk of the movie: trying to pull a ship over a mountain. By hand. Anyway, I was just thinking about that. This is Inner States. I'm Alex Chambers, and this episode isn't about opera or movies. It's about electoral politics, because election day is around the corner. We're going to be choosing candidates for offices, from the President to the County Coroner, and a lot of those offices are going to be sitting uncontested on the ballots, with only one person running. And, interestingly, the races that aren't being contested, they're not split evenly between the parties.
In 2022, Republicans let 14.5% of races go unopposed. Democrats? 51%. There were so many more Republicans running unchallenged than Democrats. In this election cycle, here in Indiana, people have been trying to change that. That means Democrats running in solidly Republican districts, a lot of them rural. It seems like for most of those rural Democrats, getting into office is going to be a heavy lift, and I wanted to know what would motivate people when the odds are so stacked against them. Are they as crazy as Fitzcarraldo? Luckily, just down the hall, there were a couple of reporters who’d been looking into it, so I brought them into the studio to ask them a question.
Alex Chambers: Why would you try to run for office in rural Indiana as a Democrat in 2024?
Clayton Baumgarth: Oof. That's a good one.
Alex Chambers: That's the question we're going to try to answer, after this.
Alex Chambers: We should probably start with each of you introducing yourselves.
Ethan Sandweiss: Sure. My name is Ethan Sandweiss. I'm a reporter here at WFIU, and I did a little bit of reporting a couple of weeks ago on the Democrats here running for State House positions in these really rural districts in Indiana - places that are 79-80% Republican.
Alex Chambers: Which is crazy.
Ethan Sandweiss: Yes. I mean, that's really high.
Clayton Baumgarth: I'm Clayton Baumgarth - I'm also a reporter here at WFIU, typically the rural affairs reporter, but Ethan went ahead and took point on this one.
Alex Chambers: Great. Okay. Ethan, do you want to set the scene?
Ethan Sandweiss: Sure. To find some of these people, we had to meet them where they're at, so I went out with our videographer, [PHONETIC: Devin], to Washington, Indiana, which is in the middle of Daviess County.
Alex Chambers: Where is Daviess County?
Ethan Sandweiss: Daviess County is southwest of Bloomington, so it's between Bloomington and Terraho. It's very, very rural, with lots of forested hills, farmland. Washington, Indiana, is this small, very historic-looking town in the middle of the county. It's a pretty nice place; it's quiet, and we went there at around ten o'clock on a Wednesday morning, to meet Ron Critchlow.
Ron Critchlow: I'm the County Chairmen of Daviess County Democrats.
Ethan Sandweiss: He's the Chairman of the Daviess County Republican Party. Sorry, the Daviess County Democratic Party.
Alex Chambers: It makes sense that you said Republican Party at first, because it's hard to find Democrats in these places.
Ethan Sandweiss: It's extremely hard, and he knows it. He'd be the first person to admit it.
Ron Critchlow: Jesus Christ would not have a chance in Daviess County if he was a Democrat. That's how bad it is.
Ethan Sandweiss: We went to the Eagles Lodge, because that's where he wanted to meet; that's where he hangs out and spends his time.
Alex Chambers: So for someone who hasn't been to an Eagles Lodge, like me, what's it like?
Ethan Sandweiss: It's a place where mostly older folks can hang out with their buddies - they can get a drink, play Bingo. There's a big meeting-hall area at the front, and in the back is a bar with a jukebox, dartboard; they're having various fundraisers, things like that.
Clayton Baumgarth: Imagine a dive bar with a membership, and that's exactly it. Typically these are some of the last places you're allowed to smoke inside now. It's a very unique atmosphere. I used to go to these places all the time in Missouri when I was a kid; my parents would take me there. So I know exactly what this is like when Ethan describes it.
Ethan Sandweiss: Picture this: it's like a church basement, but they have ashtrays.
Clayton Baumgarth: So you meet him there, at the Eagles Lodge.
Ethan Sandweiss: That's right. And he's sitting there, with his friends. He tells me they're basically all Republicans, and even though he's organizing there, in Daviess County, he's trying not to talk politics with them, because he thinks talking with them about the election is basically a losing gambit - he's not going to convince them, and he knows that.
Ron Critchlow: These are all my friends. I don't get mad at them. I get upset sometimes, when they start arguing, but that's just facts of life.
Ethan Sandweiss: But he still thinks he has a chance at one day helping the Daviess County Democrats win elections.
Alex Chambers: And so, what's Ron like?
Ethan Sandweiss: Ron has been around a long time. He was a newspaper editor in Washington. He went to IU, way back in the sixties, so he's college-educated. A lot of folks, he says, who have more college experience, have left Daviess County, searching for better-paying jobs elsewhere, which he says is one of the reasons why the county is so red, is because a lot of the kids of his neighbors who have gone to college and got that kind of exposure to what you might consider more liberal politics have moved on.
Alex Chambers: And what's kept him there?
Ethan Sandweiss: That's a good question. I get the feeling that he really cares about where he is. Like I said, he's been a newspaper editor there for a long time, so he's got deep roots. His kids don't live there, but he's from around there - grew up around Daviess County, and also around near Kentucky, so he's from southern Indiana. When you're talking with him, you're definitely talking with a Hoosier. You don't get the sense that this is a Bloomington Democrat who's descended on this small town and just doesn't fit in. Ron's one of the guys, and he's also a Dem. Like I said, it doesn't really come out until you start talking politics with him, and then he's pretty clear about what he believes.
Alex Chambers: So he really fits in. How aware are people of him being a Democrat? Do they give him flak about it?
Ethan Sandweiss: I think it's complicated. He tells me that these folks are his friends, but then he also tells me these anecdotes. He went to a funeral of one of his friends not too long ago who was a Republican, and apparently somebody else he knew at the funeral came up to him and said, "What's a good Democrat like you doing at a Republican's funeral?" It made him really mad, he said. If you are from a minority political viewpoint in either of these locations, you are going to be crossing over like that, and when people remind you of that separation, it can be really alienating.
Alex Chambers: It seems really unpleasant.
Ethan Sandweiss: Especially when you are a local, and this place is a huge part of your identity.
Alex Chambers: Totally. You're actually really involved in the community.
Ethan Sandweiss: Of course. You care about this place, and they care about this place too, just in a different way, and they think different things are good for it. I think it's important that I add that Ron has been trying to get people to run for County positions as Democrats, and he just cannot find people. He's telling me it's extremely frustrating - not because he doesn't know Democrats, but because the Democrats he's talking to just don't have any hope that they're going to win.
Ron Critchlow: The excuse that I get is, "Why run when I'll just get embarrassed?"
Clayton Baumgarth: Huh.
Ethan Sandweiss: Which is funny, because Washington, Indiana, has had, not constantly, but fairly consistently, elected Democratic mayors. He says, back in the nineties, Daviess County did regularly elect some Democrats to County positions.
Ron Critchlow: We've always had a County Commissioner. We've always had County councilmen. We've had auditors, treasurers, assessors.
Ethan Sandweiss: It's become more red, but he still sounds frustrated. He's getting older, and he has to pass on leadership to the party, and it sounds like there's a lack of people stepping up to fill that role.
Alex Chambers: And that's partly because it feels like the only point of running a campaign is to win, which I think maybe is it's a little more complicated than that.
Ethan Sandweiss: If you're a Democrat running in one of these places, you have to change the parameters for what you consider a victory, right? Victory's not just an electoral victory, but building some kind of ground-work, it's organizing, it's trying to talk to people and trying to convince people that there is another way to vote. One of these candidates who I talked to in one of these really rural areas around Muncie is a guy named John E. Bartlett - there's more than one John Bartlett running, right now, for Indiana State House seats, so it's important I mention he's John E. Bartlett. But when I talked to him, he was pretty honest about what he thought his chances were, there.
John E. Bartlett: I will be ecstatic if I take back some more percentage points. I would be over-the-top happy if I win, and I can go to the State House and change some things.
Ethan Sandweiss: In the last election, because he ran in his district before, he pulled around 30% of the vote against his Republican opponent, and he says that's about 6% better than he did the year before that. When he describes why he's a Democrat, as opposed to his neighbors who grew up around him, he comes from a union household, and he says that that was really important for shaping his perspective. Clayton, have you encountered more of these folks who maybe live in a rural area, but they work in an industrial setting, and have this kind of union background?
Clayton Baumgarth: Yes - actually, you're talking about my dad. He's a crane operator, and he's been in a union his whole life, so that was something I experienced a lot growing up, was in the rare event that I would talk about politics with friends, it would always come up about unions, and union-busting, and I said that I grew up in a union house. There's nothing I can say, because that gave us our livelihood. It's a little more common than you might think.
Alex Chambers: Did that mean that you also grew up in a household that leaned a little bit more Democrat?
Clayton Baumgarth: Yes. And again, if you looked at our neighbors, or talked to any of the friends that my family kept at times, they were definitely Republican. Even my dad, who still works to this day, and he goes into these oil refineries, and he talks with his co-workers. It's all the classic Trump rhetoric, and classic Republican-leaning stances, and he said, "I can't. I work in a union. These guys gave me my job; there's no way I could ever not vote for that."
Alex Chambers: Right. So that's one of the ways that in the rural areas that actually adds some complexity to what is generally a sea of red.
Ethan Sandweiss: A greater percentage of the Indiana workforce is in manufacturing, than almost any other state. Even though this is a really rural, red place, manufacturing and labor is a really huge part of Indiana.
Alex Chambers: What is John E. Bartlett running for again?
Ethan Sandweiss: He's running for State House.
Alex Chambers: And is he feeling somewhat optimistic?
Ethan Sandweiss: He is feeling optimistic that he's going to win more voters than he did last time. I did not get the impression from speaking with him that he expected to win the election, but I also got the impression from him that he would not be running if he didn't think there was a chance of winning. I think all these candidates see a path to victory - I just don't know if they see it in this election, or even the next election.
Alex Chambers: Oh, very interesting! So they're playing the long game.
Ethan Sandweiss: Exactly.
Clayton Baumgarth: And especially, things like women's rights issues, the current Harris campaign, as those have cropped up, I'm sure that that's also given him a little fuel for his fire.
Ethan Sandweiss: Absolutely. As you probably know, Indiana passed a near-total abortion ban after Roe V. Wade was overturned. I think the Democrats that I've talked to, including Ron Critchlow, are hopeful that women are going to turn out and vote for them as a response to that. They're also hopeful that there's a lot of women who might ordinarily be straight-ticket republican voters, who may not be wearing it on their sleeve, but they are going to vote for Democrats, at least at the state or local level in the fall.
Alex Chambers: And John E. Bartlett is one of those people who's feeling hopeful about that?
Ethan Sandweiss: If they're going to be possibly voting for the Democrats at the local level, breaking with their party, this gets us to another issue that's been going on, for people who might want to be running as Democrats in rural areas, or in red areas, which is straight-ticket voting.
Alex Chambers: Can you tell us about that, and how it's an issue?
Ethan Sandweiss: Definitely. Indiana is one of the few states that allows you to check all of your candidates just by marking a single box - Democrat or Republican. Functionally, what this does, if you lean towards a particular party, is make it a lot more likely that you are going to select all the candidates from that party, and makes it a whole lot harder for Democrats in rural areas - or for that matter, Republicans in urban areas - to win these elections, because even if they run a really strong campaign, a lot of voters are just going to go in and be like, "Oh, this party represents my values; I'll check this box." That's what these rural Democrats are really trying to challenge. They're not trying to convert people to being Democrats for the most part. They're not even really trying to convince people not to vote for Donald Trump, first of all. They just want people to vote for Democrats at some level.
I talked to Paul Helmke - he's a Civics professor at IU; he also used to be the Republican mayor of Fort Wayne, in Indiana, and he's an expert on Indiana electoral politics. He says that if you can run the successful Democratic campaigns at a local level, there's a chance that people are not going to vote straight-ticket, and they might break with the party on these higher seats as well.
Paul Helmke: It is hard, and this is one of the reasons that they lose, too. If you don't run somebody for County Commissioner, or for State Rep, or for the local offices, then it's going to be harder to get votes out for President, or Governor, and Senator.
Alex Chambers: Interesting. So actually running at the local level means that it's a potential strategy, even, to affect national races?
Ethan Sandweiss: Exactly. There may be, for example, a Republican voter who thinks, "I really like Mike Bron and I want him for Governor, but I hate my Republican State House rep; I don't particularly care for Donald Trump, so I'm going to vote for Harris for President, and I'm going to vote for this Democrat for the State House, and I'm still gonna cast a Republican vote for Governor."
Alex Chambers: Right. But the ease of straight-ticket voting makes that less likely?
Ethan Sandweiss: Exactly.
Alex Chambers: We checked: only seven states allow straight-ticket voting. We're going to take a break. When we come back, the rural Democrats have to figure out how to connect with rural voters. They've got some ideas.
Alex Chambers: One of the outcomes the rural Democrats are hoping for, is that being in the races will help them break up some of the straight ticket votes in their district, including on races other than their own. But, to do that, they do have to convince people to vote for them. And the rural Democrats generally aren't talking about national issues.
Ethan Sandweiss: I think with rural Democrats, you tend to see, generally more conservative policies, for instance, regarding the border and stuff like that, [INTERRUPTION] not necessarily, but that's not the issues that they're campaigning on. They're campaigning on things like, public school consolidation, which has been a big issue in Indiana. [INTERRUPTION] This is a state that has been moving towards providing vouchers, so that people can get money from the state to send their kids to a private school.
Ethan Sandweiss: This might appeal to some suburban voters who have more options for private schools that they can send their kids to, but if you're looking at these really rural areas like where Bartlett's running, or in Daviess County, they don't really have that many options for private schools, so a lot of voters there see this as a way to just take money away from rural schools, and they aren't happy about it.
Alex Chambers: Yes. And so, is Bartlett talking about this?
Ethan Sandweiss: Bartlett's talking about it. Pretty much, everyone's talking about it. I think it's important to note that the candidate for Governor for the Democrats in Indiana, Jennifer McCormick, is herself a former teacher. Her running mate, Terry Goodin, is also a former teacher, and a farmer.
Alex Chambers: Yes. So interesting, all these former teachers.
Ethan Sandweiss: Exactly. In fact, one of the other candidates I talked to, Trish Whitcomb, who is running against Jim Lucas, who's one of the more well known Indiana State reps for some of the controversy surrounding him. Trish Whitcomb is also a former educator, and that's a big part of how she drives to appeal the voters.
Trish Whitcomb: The communities take so much pride in their small schools, and the legislators last session, said that they were going to put in force consolidation, so.
Alex Chambers: And how is she hoping that that's going to help appeal?
Ethan Sandweiss: Well, she knows that a lot of rural voters really care about their schools. Their local schools are not just something that's valuable to the community, in terms of providing education, but they are a source of pride. And, anything they see as potentially taking resources away from those schools, or closing those schools and consolidating them, it's something that they are going to respond negatively towards.
Alex Chambers: Yes. I mean, you just think about, like, football games, in a small rural town, like a high school football game. It feels like a really important place for where people like to be, and thinking about it, you pay attention to how the team is doing, who's playing, and all these different things. The marching band too, is so important. The football field is just one way that is very important.
Clayton Baumgarth: Right. It's a gathering spot. [INTERRUPTION] A community gathering moment that happens [INTERRUPTION] weekly, at a certain time of year.
Alex Chambers: Yes, exactly.
Ethan Sandweiss: And, that's what she's doing. She's going to houses of Republicans. She's not going to the houses of Democrats. All of her campaigning so far has been at Republicans houses, because she sees and in here. She sees a way to appeal to these voters on something that is very locally specific and very important to them, and she thinks that she can get them to break with the party on this.
Alex Chambers: Is she getting some response from them? Like, that this really does matter and they're concerned about this?
Ethan Sandweiss: Yes. Actually, I had the opportunity to go canvassing with Trish. I didn't actually go canvassing, I tagged along as she was canvassing.
Alex Chambers: I hope you didn't actually go canvassing.
Clayton Baumgarth: Right. I did not actually go canvassing.
Alex Chambers: You're a reporter here. Come on.
Ethan Sandweiss: Yes. Me and Devon, we tagged along in the news van, and kind of hung back, as the creepers in the van, as she went up to the door and was charismatic and talked to people. [INTERRUPTION] A lot of the people that she spoke with were not too keen on having reporters there, so we didn't get to witness all those conversations. We did see her talk to one man, a guy named Barry, who's a former educator, who really cared about schools, in particular. And so, that was what a lot of the conversation was about.
Clayton Baumgarth: When I hear that she's canvassing, that's crazy to me, because it's one thing to do it here in Bloomington, to go from door to door. But, in a rural area, houses aren't always that close together, so she's actually going door to door, to all these different places in a rural area?
Ethan Sandweiss: Oh, yes. And she will tell you that can take a really long time to do.
Trish Whitcomb: It takes about one hour to go to five farms. [LAUGHS] So, it's not like canvassing in an urban area.
Alex Chambers: It's very inefficient.
Ethan Sandweiss: It's not efficient. Keep in mind that, even though Whitcomb is running in a rural district, it's still a district that has tens of thousands of people living in [INTERRUPTION] the rural towns of Indiana. It doesn't look like rural Wyoming, it's not [INTERRUPTION] unpopulated. So, there's a lot of doors to knock.
Alex Chambers: But, they're far apart.
Ethan Sandweiss: But, they're far apart. It takes a long time. She's having long conversations with voters. These stops that we made, she would be at the door sometimes, ten to 15 minutes, having a conversation with this person.
Alex Chambers: If she's maybe convincing two of those people to vote for her, how many people does she have to convince for her to actually win?
Ethan Sandweiss: Well, don't ask me to do math, Alex. That's not my job.
Alex Chambers: But, we can just imagine. Let's imagine some numbers, because there were maybe others in here, like, near English majors...
Ethan Sandweiss: Yes.
Alex Chambers: ...and we can just imagine numbers, we don't have to crunch them. We can think that the number of hours that it would take to meet that many people, and then convince that many people, would possibly be more hours than there are in the day.
Clayton Baumgarth: Oh, yes.
Ethan Sandweiss: Certainly. I'm not exactly sure what the size of her campaign team is. [INTERRUPTION] I'm sure there are other people canvassing for her, but when we went out, there was just her. As I mentioned before, even if there are people there who are willing to vote Democrat, there's not a lot of people who are involved in the Democratic party.
Alex Chambers: So, how is she feeling?
Ethan Sandweiss: She has a lot more optimism than some of the other candidates I've talked to, even though, Jim Lucas, her opponent won by a landslide in the last election. Trish is really hoping that, first of all, dissatisfaction with one party rule and maybe, dissatisfaction with what might be seen as some of the sharper edges of his personality, might drive more voters over towards her. She's also the daughter of a former Republican Governor of Indiana, and is hoping that her family's reputation might help her. She grew up in Seymour, Indiana. She knows a lot of these people. Some of the people whose doors we went to, were her classmates. I don't know if she was classmates with them, she said she was a couple of years behind John Mellencamp in high school.
Ethan Sandweiss: Yes, she's got deep roots there, and I think she's hoping that will help her too.
Trish Whitcomb: My dad was a Republican Governor, and very popular in Southern Indiana, and so, I think that my name recognition in that way, and people knowing my family in that way, kind of takes the edge off that margin.
Alex Chambers: So, good for her that she's feeling optimistic, even if the odds don't seem great. Canvassing in rural areas is difficult, time consuming, is there anything else that people are trying to do to deal with the challenges of getting recognition in rural areas?
Ethan Sandweiss: Recognition, of course, is a problem, and it's not just that these rural areas tend to lean to the right, it's also that there is a degree of gerrymandering in Indiana. I don't know exactly how much it actually affects general elections, but a lot of the candidates I talked to felt like it disadvantages them in elections. So, they're trying to reach across districts and build these connections between them, and not so much being silos of, "I'm running in this district. I'm running a campaign in this district," but, thinking about, not just Southern Indiana, but rural Indiana as a whole. Thinking about a network of Democrats who are all campaigning together, and trying to build a movement, and get each other elected.
Ethan Sandweiss: I recently went to Martinsville where the Indiana Rural Summit was taking place. This is a meeting that's been going on for a few years. [INTERRUPTION] It was started by Michelle Higgs, who is a Democratic candidate for State Representative, and a community organizer, she's been involved in housing issues. She started this summit to try and get these Democratic candidates to meet each other and build some kind of network on the ground, and some kind of power structure, so that, even if she doesn't win this election, they're getting more recognition and they're building more connections.
Michelle Higgs: I'm really not interested in running and then fund raising, and doing this all over, and killing myself, and getting nowhere if I'm not building some kind of power. I know that power is organized people and organized money.
Alex Chambers: So, all of these things seem like small things that they can do, or big things, in terms of the level of effort and the potential. But, especially in the short term, it still seems like a serious uphill battle. What do you feel like you got from talking to all these people about why they keep trying to do it?
Ethan Sandweiss: Well, first of all, these are a lot of people who really believe in their cause. I especially got this picture when I was talking to Ron Critchlow, who, despite saying that he could fit all the Democrats in the northern half of Daviess County on his couch, [INTERRUPTION] really does feel like the tides are going to turn. And, he thinks it's going to happen soon. But, some of these candidates are seeing some level of traction. Bartlett too, says that he gets some degree of satisfaction, just from knowing he's winning a bigger share of the vote, even if he's still losing by a pretty wide margin.
John Bartlett: Over the last several years, we keep losing five percent every election cycle. Last time, I was able to bring back six percent, for my race. So, I think we've finally gotten to the point where people are going to start clicking another button.
Ethan Sandweiss: We talked about it earlier, I think a lot of people see women's issues as something that's really going to affect turn out this year. [INTERRUPTION] They see young voters and minority voters in rural areas, as probably being more likely to turn out and vote for Democrats.
Ron Critchlow: Now, it may not happen to Daviess County, but it'll break the ice a little bit, you know? We'll get closer. We'll get closer.
Alex Chambers: So, this is more about bringing people out of the woodwork, who might not necessarily have bothered in the first place?
Ethan Sandweiss: Yes. This is not about necessarily convincing people who are confident that Republicans represent their value, that they agree with Republican policies. They're looking for conservatives, but they're looking for conservatives who are on the fence and might be dissatisfied with the party, or just one party rule in Indiana, in general. I mean, this State has been pretty much controlled by a Republican majority for the past 20 years. It wasn't always that way, of course. Indiana has had Democratic Governors. It's had Democratic led State House, as recently as the 2008 election, and, you know, went blue for President. They went blue for five of their nine Congressional Representatives.
Alex Chambers: That many? Wow.
Ethan Sandweiss: Yes.
Alex Chambers: In 2008?
Ethan Sandweiss: In 2008, yes. Which is, on some level, not that long ago.
Alex Chambers: No, feels recent to me. That was recent. Definitely feels recent to me. [LAUGHS] So, Critchlow, Bartlett, Whitcomb, Higgs, all of them are feeling like they're seeing some potential?
Clayton Baumgarth: So, to answer your question that you brought up in the beginning, [INTERRUPTION] of why people do what they do. I mean, these processes take a long time. And it takes a few people to start trying to make something happen. It's going to happen over night in these areas. They're not going to turn blue over night. We'll see, but I think it's going to take time. It's just little bits of progress, here and there.
Ethan Sandweiss: And, you see also, places like Daviess County, even in elections like 2008 where Democrats do surprisingly well in Indiana, they're still going red. There are areas that are always going to go Republican, probably. So, Democrats keep organizing there. But, I think they realize that they just don't share the same beliefs as their neighbors, and that's probably not going to change for a long time.
Alex Chambers: Awesome. Ethan, thanks for going out and doing this reporting. Really good to hear all this.
Ethan Sandweiss: Yes. Thank you, Alex.
Alex Chambers: Clayton, thank you for helping set this up, and help us thinking through all this too.
Clayton Baumgarth: Yes, it's a lot of fun.
Alex Chambers: And good to hear what the Eagles Lodge was like as a kid.
Ethan Sandweiss: Do you have an Inner States theme song?
Alex Chambers: I do, actually. Yes. A. Milsner. Greta.
Ethan Sandweiss: Oh. Amy O?
Alex Chambers: Yes. Amy O. Yes, yes. Just got to listen to the whole episode. It only plays at the end.
Clayton Baumgarth: Okay.
Alex Chambers: It feels like a landing place now so much. Like, here we go!
Ethan Sandweiss: Yes.
Clayton Baumgarth: Nice.
Alex Chambers: But, yes, I do have Inner State's theme song.
Ethan Sandweiss: Cool. [LAUGHS]
Alex Chambers: So, that's coming in right now.
Alex Chambers: And, that's our show. We'd love to hear what it made you think about. Send us an email, or a voice memo through the contact tab on our website, wfiu.org/innerstates, or get in touch on Facebook or Instagram. And, if you like the show, tell a friend about it. To really make it sink in, you should probably tell them what you were doing while you listened. Like, when you were helping your son get ready for Halloween, and he was all set to be a vampire corporate CEO, complete with blood dripping down his front, and you'd followed a recipe you'd found online for fake blood. But when you poured it over his white shirt and tie, it somehow came out more blue than red, and your kid got mad, and you panicked a little, but in re-reading the directions it said, you have to wait a while. And you decided it was time for you to step away and let your kid's dad take a turn. And you sat back to listen to the latest Inner States, and eventually, your partner came out and reported that--
Ethan Sandweiss: It's gotten more red, but he still sounds frustrated.
Alex Chambers: And you were like, "Well, let's give it some more time. We all need to learn the long game." Like that. Okay. We've got your quick moment of slow radio coming up, but first, the credits. Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers Our associate producers are Dom Heyob and Karl Templeton. Our master of social media is Jillian Blackburn. We get support from Eoban Binder, Natalie Ingalis, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, Lisa Robbin Young and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge. Thanks to Ethan Sandweiss and Clayton Baumgarth, and to Mark Elesia for editorial oversight on this episode. Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music. All right, time for some found sound.
Alex Chambers: That was "putting the trash and recycling away," recorded by Bertie Chambers. Thanks, kiddo. Until next week, I'm Alex Chambers. Thanks for listening.
