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. Only one person running. So many of those. And, interestingly, the races that aren’t being contested – they’re not split evenly between the parties. In 2022, Republicans let 14.5 percent of races go unopposed. Democrats? 51 percent. There were so many more Republicans running unchallenged than Dems.

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. Luckily, just down the hall, there were a couple of reporters who’d been looking into it. Clayton Baumgarth is our rural affairs reporter; he’s got a good perspective on rural life in Indiana. And Ethan Sandweiss recently did some reporting on all this. (You can read the article he wrote about it here.)

So I brought them into the studio to ask them a question: Why would you try to run for office in rural Indiana as a Democrat in 2024? That’s what we try to answer in this episode.

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 Ingalls, 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 Alesia for editorial oversight.

Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from the artists at Universal Production Music.