(Devan Ridgway, WTIU)
As part of WTIU/WFIU News’ 2024 election coverage, reporter Ethan Sandweiss invited the two candidates for Indiana Lieutenant Governor.
The candidates are Democrat Terry Goodin and Republican Micah Beckwith.
The interview with Micah Beckwith can be found here.
Ethan Sandweiss
You grew up in Scott County.
Terry Goodin
I grew up in Scott County, a little town called Austin, and actually went to college here at IU later on.
Ethan Sandweiss
You grew up on a farm and worked for the USDA. I'm curious, Indiana is a pretty rural state. How do you feel like that experience is going to help you as lieutenant governor?
Terry Goodin
As we travel around the state of Indiana, we realize how rural it is and how big it is. And one of the main responsibilities of lieutenant governor is you're in charge of rural economic development, and you're also in charge of the Secretary of Agriculture. So it's going to work very well in the McCormick-Goodin favor whenever we're elected, because that's my background, that's who I am. I grew up on a small farm in Scott County, Indiana. We raised beef cattle, and I bring that farm work ethic with me everywhere I go, and you don't finish the day until the jobs done, and that's the work ethic that I want to bring to the table.
Ethan Sandweiss
What are some of those issues that are important to voters in rural southern Indiana? You mentioned that economic development is something that you want to focus on. Could you get a little more specific?
Terry Goodin
Yeah, I can get very specific on that, because as I traveled the state of Indiana for rural development with the United States Department of Agriculture. When I talk to folks, the very things that Indiana has created a crisis in and are those very things that have been impacting rural Indiana. Healthcare: we're losing our small county hospitals. That's a real crisis, and that's happened under the current leadership and the previous leadership. And I want to point out very clearly that the Republicans have been in total control now for 20 years in our state, so all of those things that we're living now are really the product of what their leadership has brought forth to the state. So, we're living out their goals and their aspirations on what they wanted the state of Indiana to be like. In rural Indiana, some folks have to drive 55, 60, 70 miles just to get healthcare. Unacceptable. Unacceptable.
In Indiana, we've got a housing crisis. There's some areas in Indiana where there's not been a new house built in five, six, seven years in a township.
We've got a very serious educational crisis. And with what's going on with the increase in the vouchers, which the Braun team has said they want to expand and just make vouchers available for everyone, that disproportionately hits rural school corporations and urban school corporations very badly, and I know that as being a former superintendent of a small rural school. The other side wants to say, ‘Hey, we're all about choice. We want people to choose where their kids go to school.’ That sounds great, and that's a great mantra to work with. But here's the reality of that: if you live in Medora, Indiana, and you go to school there, and you'll say that you're disenchanted with that or, and I don't even want to use a particular school name because I don't want any anybody to feel like I'm picking on them or whatever, I'm just using as an example. But if you're living in a very small rural area, how do you choose to go to another school without driving 25, 30, 40, miles? That's not practical. You just cannot do that. There's a lot of small towns in Indiana that have schools that are very good schools, like Medora, and they want to keep their school. And as we move forward, those are the kind of schools that are disproportionately being impacted in a negative way by the increase in vouchers of people who go to school in the cities, in the suburban areas. So if we can figure out a way to equalize that and make sure that we're not hurting one group of people to help another, then we would probably sit down and have a conversation. But until we figure out that equalization, until it's really equal and fair, then we're going to make sure we support the Medoras and the smaller school corporations around our state.
Ethan Sandweiss
Republicans have been in control of the state of Indiana for around 20 years. You mentioned a couple of problems that people in rural Indiana especially are facing crises with. But Republicans still remain very, very popular in rural Indiana. Why do you think that is?
Terry Goodin
I think it's because folks don't realize, and the story is getting out now who's really in charge. As people get busy in their daily lives, they don't necessarily worry about state government. They don't care about what goes on at the statehouse or anywhere else in government. They care more about what happens at their local level, which, yes, they should, but they also need to be involved in the state level. And as we continue to talk about the problems that rural Indiana folks are facing, as we talk about the crisis in education, let's also talk about the crisis in connection and network connection. I mean, in Indiana, there's still areas that still have dial up internet. Unacceptable. In 2024, completely unacceptable. The Republicans have been sitting on billions of dollars that has come from the Federal Government to expand out and build out internet and broadband, and they've not done it. And this is ridiculous, and we've all experienced this. How in the world can you be driving down an interstate highway in 2024 and lose cell reception? We have got to build out, we've got to expand our technologies. We've got to expand the opportunity for communications. And really it's a transportation issue, because as we look at this transportation, what we're going to be doing is we're transporting ideas, thoughts, and language across these telephone lines, right? It's really a mechanism of transportation. We've got a very poor transportation system when it comes to communications. We need to fix that. Rural Indiana is the one that suffers from that exponentially. And let me say this, I just It wears me out being from rural Indiana when I hear politicians, those leaders that at their statehouse now say that we're going to work on rural development, we're going to increase rural development, and not in the same sentence say they're going to build out broadband, they're going to build out high speed internet. You cannot talk about rural economic development without in the same sentence talking about the build out of high-speed internet. Can't do it, and we hear it all day long, coming from the statehouse, from Republican leadership.
Ethan Sandweiss
You’re from a rural background, and you're running as a candidate for the Democratic Party in Indiana. How do you get more people with a similar background, more people from rural areas, to decide to vote Democrat?
Terry Goodin
I think what we do is, is we let people know what the truth is and what's going on. We cut through all the smoke and the mirrors, and when the dust settles and then the smoke clears out, we look at which group is going to be best for us in rural Indiana. And you look at the Democrat proposals that we're proposing, number one is we're going to lower your property taxes, but we're not going to do that by cutting services and defunding the police and the fire departments like the Republican proposal was. They came out with a property tax proposal because they have literally crushed rural Indiana taxpayers with these property taxes that have gone up 17, 20 percent in some areas, even more. And this is all of their mechanisms. This is all of their doing. They're the ones that created this system. And what we're going to do is we're going to lower that. Well, their proposal to fix that is they're just going to go and cut local taxes and cut services. You know, that's called defunding when you cut local resources. So they're going to defund the police, they're going to defund fire departments. They're going to defund the ambulance service. And shucks, man, I like it when they come pick up my garbage at least once a week, right? Why do you want to cut those services? It makes no sense. We put together a plan, the McCormick-Goodin plan, where we lower property taxes. We lower those property taxes, because we're going to fulfill the obligations of those local entities from the state level. And what we say is this, ‘Hey, if the state is going to cut your taxes, then we need to be the ones that are responsible.’ We're filling the gap with resources to make sure that there's not a there's not a cut in services. So that's the state's responsibility to recover and to make sure that there's no shortfalls in that funding if we're the ones going to be cutting their taxes. They did not do that.
Let's talk about something else that's very critical in rural Indiana, and that's called Medicaid. The state of Indiana had an over $1 billion mistake. It was a $1 billion mistake, a screw up, whatever you want to call it, in Medicaid. What was their first response? Their first response was to cut services to the people who needed it the most. What kind of response is that, in the response to a huge mistake that they made at the State House in their accounting system? That's no response. These knee-jerk reactions that the current leadership in the Republican Party has given us over the last 20 years has resulted in Indiana being on the wrong track.
We've got to get Indiana back on the right track, and we've got to return the respect, once again, being a Hoosier nationwide, what that was. We're going to return that respect back to Indiana, and something else we're going to bring back to Indiana, we're going to bring the hospitality part back to Hoosier hospitality. In the last 10 years or so, Indiana has become a very unhospitable state. There’s been a lot of hate that's been spewed. There's been a lot of conversation about people calling people names. Let's bring civility back to Indiana. There's no reason that because we disagree, that we have to hate each other. Let's disagree and go on to the next topic or the next subject. Man, there's no reason to sit around and spew about it, right?
Ethan Sandweiss
Returning to the rural development part, one of the areas where rural development and maybe the priorities of rural voters have come into conflict is the issue of solar energy taking over farmland, or farmland being converted to solar energy. How do you balance this?
Terry Goodin
That’s an easy question for me, because I'm from rural Indiana, so I deal with that. We know that at some point we're going to run out of coal. We know that oil is going to become less and less viable for us to use. We get that. We understand that. So what we have to do is we have to move in that progression. We have to move forward in these renewable energies, and we got to make sure we increase those where it makes sense. If solar makes sense in certain areas, then the people that live in those areas need to make that decision. Say, ‘Yes, this makes sense for us to be here.’ But let me ask this question. We're sitting at Indiana University among some of the brightest, most brilliant minds in the entire nation and probably the entire world. And, God forbid I'm going to say Purdue on an IU campus, but then we've got another campus that's farther north, with the same type of clientele. There is no reason why we can't fix the energy crisis and the energy problems in our state with the two leading universities. That's not even to mention Ball State, Indiana State, the University of Southern Indiana and the Notre Dames and the Manchesters and the private colleges that we have. We can fix this renewable energy problem. And what we’ve got to do is we got to rely on technology.
Hey, let's look at solar if solar right now is the most popular. But is solar going to be the way that we're going to be able to energize Indiana in the future, or does it look different? So we need to make sure, when we make these decisions about whether it's solar or whether it's whether it's capturing methane, or whatever that mechanism is, we got to make sure it's the most technologically advanced system, and we got to make sure it's sustainable, because we don't want to fix a problem now that's going to create a problem 10, 12, 15 or 20 years from now. We need to look at that entire picture as we move forward with that. And yeah, solar is going to be a part of that. I'll tell you straight up: as a school superintendent, I put solar panels on my roofs in my schools. We eliminated our electricity bill. So yeah, there's opportunities and there's options to be able to make these things work, but we've got to be very smart when we make these decisions on where we place these panels.
Ethan Sandweiss
You just mentioned IU and Purdue. There's been a couple of bills recently in the state house that have targeted certain research and teaching activities on campus. One of them, of course, is now law SEA 202, which places certain regulations on how a teacher can lead their class and what sort of ideas they're supposed to present in their class. There's also state budget 2024, which was amended to remove funding for the Kinsey Institute at IU. I wanted to ask somebody who could be sitting in Indianapolis in a leadership position, what is the state government's role, If it has a role, in regulating speech, research, these kinds of activities?
Terry Goodin
Hey, look, we all know this: teachers, college professors, all of those folks who work around educational institutions. They're easy targets because they deal with large amounts of people. They deal with mostly young adults and children, and it's easy for those folks who have no real leadership thought on how to move the state forward to attack. And so, what these bills do, they just simply attack those folks who are trying to move and progress our state forward. Hey, leave these people alone in the educational field! They've got folks and supervisors who are overseeing what they do to make sure that they stay in the guardrails. We don't need a legislator or we don't need a state representative or a state senator or someone telling these folks what to teach in these classrooms. What we've got, what the state legislature should be working on is they should be working on the simple fact that, let's stop the number one export of in Indiana, and that's the export of our young adults leaving our state and going other places, because there's other opportunities and better opportunities in other states as compared to Indiana. That's what the legislators should be legislators should be working on when it comes to higher education and what's being taught. Let's keep young Hoosiers here, instead of letting them migrate to the rest of the nation. They need to get their priorities straight. They need to get out of attack mode. And they need to quit attacking professors. They need to quit attacking high school teachers, elementary teachers. They need they need to quit attacking the educational world. Because the deal is this, in the education world, they can't fight back. They have to take that, and those legislators that are weak know that, so they're attacking folks that can't even fight back. Absolutely ridiculous, man. Let's move forward. Let's get this straightened out, and let's get off the backs of the people that are creating or trying to create a better Indiana for the future by educating our young children and our students.
Ethan Sandweiss
Speaking of, you know, young Hoosiers, I wanted to bring up, you know, LGBT rights, same sex marriage, and also reproductive rights. You voted against same sex marriage in 2011 and you since changed your stance on that. And you said at one point in an interview that your record on reproductive rights was ‘spotty.’ But you oppose the restrictions on abortion that are now in place in Indiana. What led you to change your mind, and where do you stand on those positions?
Terry Goodin
Well, I think as you grow older, you get more gray hair, I think you create more relationships, you come into contact with more people, and you just become more educated, you learn more. And I'm proud of myself and being a lifelong learner. And as I've came through the process and I've talked to people and individuals, one of those things that my parents and my grandparents taught me is don't be afraid of the unknown. Reach out and educate yourselves on those things you don't know about. And I was able to do that. I wasn't afraid of the unknown, of pro-life or pro-choice. I reached out and grew on that, and the same with the LGBTQ+ communities. I reached out and I learned more, and I realized in my past decisions I was wrong. I'm saying that right now as a grown man sitting here in an interview with you, I've made bad decisions in the past, and those bad decisions reflected in bad votes, and when you recognize that, and you recognize that you were wrong, to stand up and say you were wrong, and then rectify that and move in the in the correct direction and start making the right decisions, because you're informed, that's what I wish every Hoosier could do, and that's why we want to try to push lifelong learning. Want to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to continue to learn and to reach out into areas that they may not be familiar with, or areas that they've not come into contact people they've not come into contact with.
Ethan Sandweiss
Would you be supportive of more permissive abortion laws going on the books in Indiana?
Terry Goodin
Here's where I stand on that. I think what we've got to do is we've got to bring women to the forefront and let those folks be more involved in the decision-making process. I'm pro-choice. I'm unabashedly pro-choice now, and at the time I was I was pro Roe versus Wade. I think you've got to have a safety net. And that's one of the of the areas when I was voting on some of those issues, I always counseled with the women around me, and at the point they said, ‘Hey, no matter what, we've got Roe v Wade, they can't take this away.’ So there was always like a safety net.
Dobbs changed all that. It's a completely different playing field. It's a completely different game now, so the strategies and the thoughts and the processes that one may have used when we were under Roe versus Wade, and that law, that process, is completely gone. Now you have to start all over, and with me starting all over I'm unabashedly a pro-choice candidate, because I understand that there's situations that are going on in Indiana right now that a lot of people don't hear about. Because what the other side wants to do is they want to demonize women who have an abortion, and they don't even explain what the reasons were for those people having abortions.
My opponent and his boss, Mike Braun, have openly said that they oppose any kind of exceptions to the abortion law in Indiana. Now, here's the deal. You've got a fellow like Todd Rokita who did a complete witch hunt on a young child who was raped, and he implemented a witch hunt on this poor child who was going through a very traumatic experience. And what he did was he made it worse, and then he went after the people that tried to provide that service to help this poor child. That's wrong, man. Where do these people come from, and where are these elected officials coming from? Because here's the deal, if you can't save a life of someone a child, if you can't save the life of a woman who is bleeding out in an emergency room because of a state law, you need to reexamine those state laws, and you need to try to figure out, hey, there's something wrong here. Let's fix this where we can help people survive.
Ethan Sandweiss
Now, changing to a topic that I feel like is not discussed a whole lot in the press. Governor Holcomb and Todd Rokita have scheduled the first state execution in 15 years in December. Obviously, even if you and McCormick win the election, this would happen before you went into office. But I wanted to ask where you stand on the state death penalty.
Terry Goodin
In the past, I've always supported the death penalty. What I always want to say is there's always one caveat to this. We have to be beyond a reasonable doubt that these individuals are guilty. And one of the situations that happened under a previous Republican governor, Mike Pence, who forced a gentleman to sit in jail for years after he was found to be innocent, through new technology and DNA, he continued to force that individual to sit in a jail until the new governor was elected, and that was one of the first acts that the new governor did, was release that individual who was innocent. So we've got to make sure now, with new technologies and all of this, that we are convicting the right people. We’ve got to make sure that when it gets to that point in our justice system that we have resolved all questions. There should be no question about the guilt of an individual, and there should be no questions about any other opportunities or options or thoughts that may come up to exhaust, preventing from putting this person to death. But at the end of the day, I do support the death penalty.
Ethan Sandweiss
So if there was someone on death row who you felt wasn't convicted beyond a reasonable doubt, would you encourage the governor to pardon?
Terry Goodin
Absolutely. If you cannot say that there is no doubt in our legal minds or in the minds of just common sense and common human decency that this person did this, then there's no way they should ever be. No way.
Ethan Sandweiss
I wanted to ask you also about your opponents. Talk about Braun and Beckwith. How do you think that you and Jennifer McCormick would work together compared to how those two would work together?
Terry Goodin
It’s quite ironic that you ask that because I get asked that question a lot. As you know, Jennifer McCormick chose me to be her running mate. I openly accepted that because I want to work with her to move the state of Indiana forward. As we know, Mike Braun chose someone else to be his running mate. Micah Beckwith got mad because he wasn't asked to the prom. He runs against that person and wins. And so now you have that disconnect. But I do want to say this. I'm going to start saying that it's actually the Beckwith-Braun ticket, because Mike Braun has kind of went dark, you don't hear anything from him now. But Micah Beckwith is more than vocal. He's the one that must be in charge of this ticket. Mike Braun has said over and over that, ‘Micah and I believe the same things. We just probably present them differently,’ or whatever that means. I don't know.
So what we're saying is this, there is a stark and a very, very, very dedicated difference between the candidates of McCormick Goodin versus Beckwith Braun. Number one, the McCormick Goodin ticket believes that Indiana's better days are ahead of her. We’re going to take Indiana to a new direction. We're going to create opportunities that's going to allow our young adults to stay in the state of Indiana. The Braun or the Beckwith Braun ticket, and we're going to throw in Rokita with that, they have put out statements, and they believe that Lutheran and Methodist pastors are trying to cut the private parts or mutilate the private parts of young kids. They're saying that the Indianapolis Star is trying to publish pornography. The things that they're coming out with are, let's just say it, man, they're weird. Okay? Todd Rokita instills a 1000 times over witch hunt against a 10 year old young lady who had been raped. Where are these people coming from? Man, I mean, I never grew up with people like that. I don't know where they're coming from out of our state. Let’s bring some common sense and some common human decency back to our through the state of Indiana. And I think that's the stark difference here is I think, you talked about voting in Indiana leaning Republican, and in these rural areas, I think when people really see the difference between the candidates and what the McCormick Goodin ticket is going to offer with that with that hope, with the opportunity, bring Indiana up, lift Indiana up, improve our public schools, at least put together a program. When a kid graduates from high school, they can decide to go to college to a state university, which, as you saw their plan, the universities had to step and if you all pass this plan, you're not even going to be allowed to enroll when they accept you into our colleges. So there's a huge difference here.
The opportunity for health care. Hey, health care and women's reproductive rights, that's creating a whole new issue in the state of Indiana, because we have got the nation's best and brightest doctors who are leaving our state because they're afraid to practice here because of the laws, the draconian laws that we're passing in the legislature. That is a health care crisis, as we talked about earlier. We've got small rural hospitals that are closing down. They're not talking about any of that. They're talking about God sending in the rioters to on the January 6 Capitol incursion. It's like, wait a minute, let's talk about the issues that are really going to impact Hoosiers here. Let's talk about education. Let's talk about health care. Let's talk about lowering property taxes, not cutting services. They're not talking about any of that. They're talking about issues that don't matter, issues that they're making up.
The next thing you know, the Beck Braun ticket is going to be talking about people eating dogs and cats in our state, all right? That's the trajectory that they're on. That's where they're at, and those are the things they believe in. That's just weird, and I'm gonna borrow those words, that's just weird, and we don't need that in Indiana. We can do better. We can do much better in the state of Indiana.
Ethan Sandweiss
You’re a self-described moderate. Jennifer McCormick, self-described moderate, former Republican, been a Democrat for a while. What do you say to Democrats who might say that you're not progressive enough?
Terry Goodin
What we talk about has moved forward. It's kind of ironic, because, as you said, Jennifer was a lifelong Republican who's now a Democrat. I'm a lifelong Democrat who some people said was a Republican, right? So it's kind of like a dichotomy there. But I think what we bring to the tickets, we bring balance. And I think the most important thing that progressives understand is the fact that we will sit down, and we will listen to them. And if the thoughts and ideas that they're bringing to the table are legitimate and we can implement those, then we're going to listen and we're going to be able to implement those. The other folks won't even listen to them. It's like they consider them out in, literally, left field, right? So we're going to sit down and we're going to listen. We're going to listen to everyone. That's the beauty of being a moderate is we don't cull people that we listen to. We listen to people all across the political spectrum, because we want to bring the best thoughts, ideas and processes to the table. We will do that. Jennifer and I both share the philosophy that, hey, more people working on a project and a problem or a thought is much better than just one of us working alone and we'll bring that mentality to the state house as well.
Ethan Sandweiss
I'm just taking this back all the way to the beginning of the interview. You talked about trying to reach out to those straight ticket voters, people who might be voting for Republicans in local races and might want Democrats in a statewide race. I want to talk about the folks who are dissatisfied with the job that President Biden has been doing, or just don't like Kamala Harris as a candidate, and might support Trump at a presidential level. What do you do to reach out to people like that? Are those voters you think you can win?
Terry Goodin
I think they are. And, matter of fact, we are winning a lot of those voters. I mean, we're going to events where, literally, people are saying, ‘Hey, we're voting for Donald Trump, but we're also voting for Jennifer McCormick and Terry Goodin.’ And there's a lot of moderate Republicans who don't like Donald Trump who are saying, ‘Hey, we're voting for the Democrat ticket.’ And so that's really how we're winning this election. We’re bringing a lot of disaffected voters to the table and saying, ‘Hey, we like what you're saying. We're tired of the crazy. We want Indiana to get back to what some folks would consider normal and start moving in a positive direction, to try, instead of trying to live in the past and chase old demons or dogs out of the woodwork.’ So yes, those are people that we're reaching out to.
And here's the simple fact, really, as we go along and in life, we should really be voting for the best people or persons that's going to do the best job for us. Now, if that's different at the presidential level than at the state level, then we should be making those choices as individual, responsible voters. We should be educating ourselves on the issues that matter, and then we should be voting for those issues that matter.
Now, if you look at that ticket, I think you're probably going to look at that ticket and say, ‘Hey, I'm going to vote straight Democrat.’ Because as you look at the Trump-Vance ticket, which we're not even going to jump into because I said we've got supporters that are supporting them, but I think you if you look at that and the issues they talk about, and you look at the issues we talk about, they're completely different. The issues of federal government are completely different from the issues of state government. And what you see at the at the state level is you see the state candidates trying to bring in federal issues into the state campaign, like the border, like other federal issues, like the military. Those are all national and federal issues. And as much as we probably think about voting, it's obvious that when the presidential race is on the ballot, more people go and vote. The reality of it is that what happens at the statehouse and what happens at your courthouse impacts you so much more than what happens at the White House. And we're trying to get people to understand that just like at the statehouse, there's not a day that doesn't go by in our lives, that within every hour something that we do, a law that we follow, was debated and passed at the Indiana State House. We can't say that about laws that are passed at the federal level. So as we as we educate voters and we talk about our campaign and what we're trying to get accomplished, we're trying to let folks know that there's a complete different level of government here. We're not the federal government, we're the state. So if you're concerned about education, if you're concerned about your property taxes, if you're concerned about health care at the local level, listen to us. We've got the answers those folks don't.
Ethan Sandweiss
Thank you. Did you have any points that maybe I didn't get to ask you about that you really want voters to understand?
Terry Goodin
Yeah, I think really as we move forward here, what people really need to focus on kind of ties into your last question about the folks who are on the ballot at the federal level moving on down. We really need folks to understand who their choices are in this election. As I pointed out earlier, you've got Mike Braun, who agrees with Micah Beckwith. He says that they're of the same cloth. This is nothing I'm making up. Everything I'm saying I'm regurgitating from information and papers and TV and news sources like you folks. So they're of the same thought. That tells me that Mike Braun believes that Lutheran and Methodist pastors are trying to cut the private parts off of young adults. That's ridiculous, man, that's absolutely ridiculous. Todd Rokita chases down a 10-year-old girl who was raped and tries to prosecute everyone involved in that. That's not normal. That's not normal at all. So what we've got to look at is these people are on the ticket, they're on the same ticket. So if you're going to go in and vote straight ticket for your friend who's running for the county council, think about that. Because if you're supporting your friend who is voting for county council, who's completely normal, and they're good people, and there's good people in the Republican campaigns, just like there's goods in the Democrats as well, i you're voting for those people, don't make the mistake and vote for the people who don't think like you do, who are not normal, who are bringing ideas and thoughts and processes across the table that make no sense whatsoever, and are not going to contribute to the common good. And that's what the Democrat party in the state of Indiana, that's what Jennifer McCormick, that's what Terry Goodin is going to do. That's what Destiny Wells is going to do. As we work through this process, we're going to bring the common good back to the forefront in the state of Indiana, and we're going to bring the causes and the concerns of Hoosiers to the forefront, and not the causes of concerns of whoever it is these folks are servicing or trying to work for.
