Hamilton County is one of those places Indiana politicians love to point to when they want proof that the state’s economic model is working. The county is growing, businesses are opening, neighborhoods are expanding, schools remain a major draw, and economic development officials rarely seem to be more than a few weeks away from another ribbon cutting. By the usual measurements, this is what success is supposed to look like.
But those measurements do not tell the whole story.
Beneath the growth statistics is another reality, one that Lauren Cole says she hears constantly while campaigning for Indiana House District 37. It is the couple with two bachelor’s degrees who still needs a second job. It is the young worker who has stopped imagining homeownership because rent already consumes too much of the budget. It is the family caught in the absurd arithmetic of childcare, where one parent needs to work to afford daycare but cannot afford daycare on the wages that job provides. It is the employee helping build one of Indiana’s wealthiest counties while wondering whether they can afford to keep living there. It is the household that appears financially stable until one medical emergency knocks the whole structure sideways.
That contradiction sits at the center of Cole’s campaign. She is not arguing that Hamilton County has failed. Her argument is more uncomfortable than that. Hamilton County has succeeded according to the measurements Indiana leaders keep telling us matter, and yet many of the people living and working there still feel economically insecure. If growth, new businesses, strong schools, and a highly educated workforce are all present and families are still falling behind, then perhaps the problem is not the absence of success. Perhaps the problem is how we define it.
When Hard Work Stops Being Enough
Cole describes herself in deliberately ordinary terms. “Before I was a candidate, I was just another Hoosier trying to build a life,” she said. She still sees herself that way, and that matters because political conversations about affordability often become strangely abstract once everyone arrives at the Statehouse.
Cole and her fiancé both have bachelor’s degrees. Both work full time. Yet, she says, one of them has consistently needed a second job just to make ends meet. That is not a story about people refusing to follow the rules. It is a story about what happens when the rules stop producing the result people were promised.
For years, the formula was presented as simple: go to school, get the degree, get a job, work hard, be responsible, save, and build a life. That was the bargain, or at least the brochure. Now, healthcare costs more, childcare costs more, housing costs more, groceries cost more, utilities cost more, and wages have not kept pace. The definition of financial success has quietly contracted from building wealth to making it through the month without falling behind.
Cole described the new standard as living “pretty much paycheck to paycheck, but at least your bills are paid at the end of the day.” That is not prosperity. That is survival with decent credit.
What she hears from voters across party lines is not a demand for luxury. “I don’t think anyone’s asking for anything unreasonable,” Cole said. “I think that people are asking for a chance to work hard and have that be enough.”
That sentence may be the clearest summary of the affordability crisis in Indiana. People are not asking to become rich. They are asking for work to once again produce stability.
No, It Isn’t the Avocado Toast
Younger Americans have spent years being told that their economic problems are really personal failures disguised as policy debates. The usual suspects are familiar: too many lattes, too many subscriptions, too much avocado toast, too little discipline. Somehow, previous generations apparently secured affordable housing through sheer moral superiority at breakfast.
Cole rejects that argument because neither the numbers nor lived experience support it. Young people pursued education, entered the workforce, found jobs, and in many cases work more than one. Yet many still cannot get ahead.
“We’re delaying having children because it’s too expensive,” Cole said. “I don’t think I know anybody my age that owns a house right now.”
That matters because younger Hoosiers are not simply dealing with high prices in the present. They are also being asked to make long-term decisions about retirement, family, housing, savings, and Social Security while struggling to create basic financial stability today. Many older workers at least had time to build some equity, buy a home, or begin saving before the current affordability crisis intensified. Younger adults entered the storm before they had time to put up a roof.
Cole specifically rejects the tired “avocado toast and lattes” explanation. The real pressures are healthcare, childcare, housing, and other necessities that have risen much faster than wages. There is a point where blaming consumer behavior stops being analysis and becomes a convenient way of avoiding policy failure.
You cannot budget your way out of housing costs that outpace wages. You cannot coupon your way out of childcare that rivals a mortgage payment. You cannot skip enough coffee to solve medical debt. At some point, the problem is no longer personal spending. The problem is the structure around it.
What If We Tried the Scientific Method?
Cole’s professional background gives her a different instinct toward policymaking. She works in medical research and clinical trials, a field where asking the wrong question, ignoring contradictory evidence, or bending the data toward a preferred conclusion is generally considered a problem rather than a governing philosophy.
Politics often works differently. Cole argues that too many policy debates begin with ideology and only afterward go searching for facts that support the conclusion already chosen. “As a scientist, I was kind of trained to do the opposite,” she said.
Her approach is straightforward: define the problem, examine the evidence, test assumptions, and let new information change the conclusion. “I work by asking questions and gathering evidence and then testing those assumptions and following the data,” Cole said. “Even when the data challenges what your original beliefs or ideologies are, it’s important to change your mindset when we have new information presented to us.”
That standard would be useful in a Statehouse where policy too often becomes an exercise in defending the team instead of evaluating the result. Did the policy work? Who benefited? Who paid? Did the promised jobs arrive? Did costs actually fall? Did the program reach the people it was supposed to help? What happened five years later? Were the assumptions wrong?
The last question is the one government has the most trouble asking.
Cole does not argue that policymaking should become a spreadsheet exercise stripped of humanity. She specifically includes lived experience and empathy as part of the information lawmakers should consider. People are part of the data set. That combination, evidence plus lived reality, is a healthier way to build policy than starting with a party platform and asking the facts to behave.
Indiana does not need government by laboratory coat. It could, however, use fewer conclusions in search of evidence.
The Public School Question Is Really a Taxpayer Question
Hamilton County’s public schools are not simply educational institutions. They are part of the county’s economic infrastructure. Families move there because of them. Employers benefit from them. Property values are influenced by them. The educated workforce Indiana leaders praise did not simply materialize from the cornfields one morning wearing business casual.
That is why Cole sees a contradiction in Indiana spending enormous amounts of taxpayer money expanding private-school vouchers while public schools face pressure over teacher retention, transportation, facilities, classroom resources, and growth.
Her position is clear: public dollars should prioritize public schools.
Cole wants stronger funding for teachers, transportation, textbooks, staffing, and the infrastructure needed to keep strong schools functioning well. She also supports raising the minimum teacher salary to $60,000.
Her broader point is economic. If strong public schools are one of the main reasons families and employers choose Hamilton County, then weakening those schools does not just affect education. It eventually affects the economy the state celebrates.
A voucher expansion can be announced today. The teacher who leaves five years from now does not get a press conference. The larger classroom does not have a lobbyist. The bus route stretched too thin does not sponsor a legislative dinner. Yet those consequences accumulate.
Indiana cannot keep pointing to Hamilton County’s schools as evidence of success while steadily weakening the system that helped create that success in the first place.
Growth Is Not the Same Thing as Success
Hamilton County is growing rapidly, and growth creates both opportunity and strain. New residents and businesses mean more economic activity, but they also mean more traffic, greater housing demand, more pressure on infrastructure, and higher expectations for public services.
Cole’s concern is that government too often responds only after those pressures turn into crises. “We need to do a better job of planning for the growth rather than responding to it later on,” she said.
That distinction matters because Indiana tends to treat growth itself as proof of success. A business opens, a project is announced, jobs are promised, a ribbon is threatened with ceremonial scissors, and the victory lap begins.
Cole thinks the measurement should continue after the cameras leave. Are wages keeping pace with the cost of living? Can people working in Hamilton County afford to live there? Is childcare accessible? Are the jobs being created good jobs? Do they offer benefits? Can employees actually build wealth?
Those are not anti-business questions. They are the questions that determine whether economic development is actually improving people’s lives.
“We have to stop acting like we either have to support businesses or support the working class,” Cole said.
She is right. Healthy businesses need healthy communities. Companies need workers. Workers need housing, childcare, healthcare, schools, and transportation. Treating those things as separate policy universes is how government ends up subsidizing job creation while ignoring whether those jobs actually support a decent life.
Cole frames taxpayer incentives as investments, and that is a useful way to think about them. If taxpayers are investing public money into private companies, taxpayers should expect a return. That return should not be measured only by the number of jobs created. It should also be measured by the quality of those jobs, the wages they pay, the benefits they provide, and whether they strengthen the communities absorbing the growth.
Otherwise, taxpayers are not investing. They are underwriting.
The Speaker Problem
House District 37 is not an ordinary legislative race because its current representative is also the Speaker of the Indiana House. That means voters there are not simply deciding between two candidates. They are voting on keeping the current Speaker or have the House vote on a new one.
Cole’s concern is not that legislative leadership has influence. Leadership is supposed to have influence. Her concern is how concentrated that influence has become.
The Speaker helps determine which bills move, which bills stall, and which bills die before most Hoosiers ever know they existed. A proposal can have bipartisan support and public support and still never reach a meaningful vote.
Cole argues that District 37 deserves a representative whose first priority is the district itself rather than the broader interests that come with legislative leadership. She says defeating the Speaker would send a message that people are tired of “bills dying on the floor,” tired of concentrated power, and tired of feeling like their voices are not being heard.
That argument extends beyond party. Representative government becomes weaker when leadership has enough control to prevent representatives from ever voting on legislation their own constituents want considered.
Power does not have to be openly corrupt to become unhealthy. Sometimes it simply becomes too comfortable.
Indiana’s Republican supermajority has been comfortable for a long time. Comfort does not always produce accountability.
A Legislature Should Not Be a Corporate Customer Service Desk
Cole also raises another issue that Indiana politics tends to approach delicately: corporate influence.
She supports economic development, but she does not believe corporations should receive public incentives without obligations to workers. She also supports stronger campaign-finance laws and argues that voters should not have to wonder which corporate interests are attached to their elected officials.
There is nothing inherently wrong with businesses advocating for their interests. Teachers advocate. Veterans advocate. Workers advocate. Healthcare organizations advocate. Businesses should have a voice too.
The problem begins when access follows money more reliably than it follows citizenship.
Ordinary Hoosiers do not have government-relations departments. The family struggling with daycare does not have a PAC. The renter staring at a renewal notice does not have three lobbyists standing outside a committee room. The teacher buying classroom supplies with personal money does not have a catered reception waiting for lawmakers.
That imbalance is why elected officials are supposed to represent the people who cannot purchase institutional influence.
Cole says taxpayers should expect a return on what they invest in government through strong public schools, affordable healthcare, safe communities, and an economy where working families can get ahead. That is a useful way to think about public spending. People are investors in government, and the return should not be measured by the number of corporations that received incentives. It should be measured by whether daily life actually works.
The Radical Politics of Being Normal
Cole’s political identity is almost aggressively ordinary. She does not describe herself as someone who spent childhood dreaming of legislative procedure. She describes herself as a working Hoosier who looked around, saw other people struggling with the same things she was struggling with, and decided someone like them needed to step forward.
“When I say that I’m just a genuine normal Hoosier that decided to step up and try and make a change because I see other normal Hoosiers struggling, that’s exactly why I did it,” Cole said.
There is something increasingly unusual about that idea. State legislatures are supposed to be citizen institutions. The people serving in them should understand rent, childcare, medical bills, work schedules, public schools, grocery prices, utility bills, and the general anxiety that comes from knowing one unexpected expense can knock a family sideways.
Representation should not require membership in a permanent political class.
Cole says voters deserve to look at the Statehouse and “feel proud of the people that they elect” without waiting for “the skeletons that are gonna come out of the closet someday” or worrying about “the corporate interests that they’re tied to.”
That is an accountability argument more than an ideological one. Voters should not have to wonder what they are going to discover about their representative after Election Day. They should not need a flowchart to understand who benefits from a law. They should not have to check campaign-finance reports every time a legislator suddenly develops an intense interest in a corporation’s preferred policy.
Representation should feel less transactional than that.
Cole says District 37 is “very ready for change.” Whether voters agree will be decided at the ballot box. But the frustration driving her candidacy is real regardless of the outcome.
Hard Work Should Be Enough Again
The strongest idea in Cole’s campaign is not specifically Democratic, and it is not limited to House District 37.
“We’re just asking for hard work to be enough again,” she said.
That sentence lands because it describes something millions of people understand without needing a white paper. They are not asking to become wealthy. They are asking for work to produce stability.
They want housing they can afford, healthcare that does not threaten bankruptcy, childcare that does not consume a paycheck, schools that are properly funded, jobs with benefits, wages that move when costs move, and a retirement that feels like something more than a rumor.
This should not be considered a radical economic demand. It used to be the promise.
Hamilton County is a useful place to test whether that promise still exists because so many traditional indicators say the county is thriving. If families are struggling even there, Indiana’s leaders should pay attention.
The danger is not that Hamilton County will stop growing tomorrow. The danger is that Indiana will keep calling growth success while the people underneath that growth lose ground.
Cole’s campaign is asking voters to change the measurement. Do not just count jobs. Ask what they pay. Do not just count businesses. Ask whether workers can afford to live near them. Do not just brag about public schools. Fund them. Do not just celebrate development. Build the infrastructure before the crisis arrives. Do not just call the economy strong. Ask the families living inside it.
And do not start with ideology and hunt for facts afterward. Start with the problem, look at the evidence, listen to the people living it, and then govern.
For someone who works in clinical research, Cole’s political prescription is remarkably simple: Indiana has spent years telling people the economy is healthy. Maybe it is time to check the patient.
