Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Victoria Martz is taking on a big challenge with her run for the House of Representatives in Indiana’s District 55: Beat the incumbent Republican candidate in what the state’s Democratic Party has declared the “least competitive race” in Indiana. That’s because this rural district consistently pulls 80% of the Republican vote and 20% of the Democratic vote in an election. But Martz isn’t letting that stop her.
Enjoy our conversation about what it’s like to run as a Democrat in a predominantly red corner of Indiana, below.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Claire Carlson, The Daily Yonder: Tell me about yourself – what’s most important for people to know about you?
Victoria Martz: I am a criminal defense lawyer. In my day job, I work as a public defender out of Decatur County, which neighbors the county I live in. I live in Batesville, Indiana. I work as a public defender for adults facing criminal charges in Greensburg, Indiana, and I also work as a public defender for juveniles facing alleged acts of delinquency out in Ripley County, Indiana. And then I also work with a private law firm out of Indianapolis.
Beyond my work, I am a mom. I have a three-year-old daughter and she is just amazing. I’m really loving this stage of life. And then I also am the chair of the Ripley County Democratic Party. I just kind of do everything that I can to try and make sure that people know that Democrats do exist in rural Indiana, because a lot of people are quiet about their politics in these rural communities because they feel like there’s nobody else out there like them and they don’t want to feel ostracized if they are open about their political affiliation.
DY: What made you interested in running for the Indiana House of Representatives?
VM: So I moved back [to Batesville] in 2022 when I was expecting my daughter because my dad lived here and my partner’s parents live here in town as well. I wanted to be close to family as I had my first child because community is everything when you’re a new parent.
But when I came home and I went to vote in my first election here, I didn’t have any candidates to vote for as a Democrat. I went to the primary election and they asked me which ballot, Democrat or Republican. And I said, Democrat. And the ladies were kind of like, “What? Are you sure you don’t mean Republican?” I was like, “No, Democrat.” And they’re like, “Well, you’re not going to have anybody to vote for. ” And I was like, “Oh, well, I can’t change the fact that I’m a Democrat. I’d still like my Democratic ticket, please.”
And so that was kind of the first thing that turned me on to the fact that we need some people to start getting into the work to make a presence known out here and to give people actual options.
DY: What do you think is the most urgent issue facing the folks you would represent in the House?
VM: I genuinely think that this issue is the same from my rural pocket of Indiana here to across the country. And it’s that large corporations are trying to drown out the voices of individual workers and individual people.
Ever since the passage of the Citizens United decision, which recognized corporations as equivalent to people, making it so they could donate in the same ways to campaigns that an individual could (whereas before there would have been limits on how much they could donate), corporations have really taken over the political scene. And you can see it in how corporations have donated to candidates that they knew would be most likely to represent right-to-work laws, which, in fact, work against the ability of unions to exist in states where those are in effect. And we are one of those states here in Indiana where a right-to-work law exists.
Corporations also work against the everyday worker in the sense that our federal minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2009. That runs the same here in Indiana. Our state has done nothing to change it. And in fact, our state has passed a law that banned local municipalities from raising their minimum wage above what the state minimum wage is. Quite frankly, holding down minimum wage really holds down every individual worker’s ability to move upwards in their income-producing ability because it just weakens all of our stances when it comes to talks with our employers about what is a respectable wage for the level of labor that I put into my work for you.
A third way that you can really see it more clearly than ever is through the way corporations are trying to come into rural communities and city areas and build these massive data centers that monopolize all the natural resources of the area while giving very minimal jobs in return.
DY: I’m glad you mentioned data centers, because they’ve really become a major rural issue. How has Indiana been affected by data center development?
VM: A giant, hyperscale data center was approved and is already partially in operation in Northern Indiana along Lake Michigan. They’re also trying to come into multiple of the counties within my district. We’ve seen it the furthest along in Franklin County where a data center corporation called ABEI Energy has been trying to convince local residents that they’re going to bring thousands of jobs to the community and it’s going to be this great thing. There’s also a data center push down here in Franklin County, Indiana, along a massive reservoir of water called the Brookville Lake.
Right now we’re very lucky. We have had people show up in large numbers at county council meetings and at private meetings put on at a church. We were able to get a moratorium passed by the Franklin County Council for one year while the area planning commission put together ordinances to regulate data centers coming into the community. But it is still very troubling because the current representative [House Rep. Lindsay Patterson] voted yes on a law that would have made it permissible for land with a four through eight soil level quality to be automatically rezoned for industrial use without having to go before a zoning board or have any public hearings.
So we’re really glad to have this moratorium right now, but I’m also still troubled because if we don’t change our representation, I am afraid that we are going to see representatives acting against the will of the people. And across the political spectrum out here in rural Indiana, everybody is on the same page that they do not want data centers to come into our community.
DY: You’re running in a predominantly red district as a Democrat. What has been surprising or maybe not so surprising in your run for office so far?
VM: Two things have surprised me. I really thought that the legalization of cannabis would be a much bigger crossover issue that people support broadly on both sides of the political spectrum, but I was surprised that a lot of conservative-leaning people say they don’t really care about cannabis legalization. And I just find it interesting because we are currently losing sales tax revenue to every state that borders us because every state around us – Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, and Kentucky – have all legalized cannabis sales in some way, most of them fully recreationally. I find that really interesting because I always hear complaints about how high property taxes are, how we’re underfunding our local government resources, and I see legalization of cannabis as a great way to improve that.
Another thing that was interesting is that a lot of people across the political spectrum out here agree that we need to be fully funding our public schools. I kind of came in with the belief that people from a Republican background maybe didn’t care about that issue because our Republican representatives are the reason that we currently have universal school voucher programs in Indiana right now. So everybody gets school choice vouchers, whether they make over several hundreds of thousands of dollars per year or not. And that takes funding away from our public schools, obviously, because that money travels with the child when they remove them from a public school to put them in a charter school. But across the spectrum out here, when I ask people how they feel about fully funding our public schools, they tell me that they care about that a lot and they want to see our kids have access to a quality public education. So I was very, very heartened by that because that’s a big issue for me.
DY: Is there anything else you want to add to this conversation?
VM: I am a fully grassroots candidate. So because of that, I really need every individual donation that I can get. It doesn’t have to be from Indiana. Anybody out there who’s got a couple bucks that they could put into this campaign, I would really appreciate it because we need every dollar we can to reach all the voters that we are going to need to reach to actually win this November’s election. I’m really fighting the hardest House district race here in Indiana, but every single dollar donated to this campaign helps us build name awareness and reach more voters so when I go talk to them, it rings a bell.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
Subscribe
The post Q&A: Rural Indiana’s State Rep Hopeful appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
