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SUMMARY:
In this conversation, Scott — a self-described progressive Democrat and socialist — sits down with former two-term Republican Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard, now running for Secretary of State as the founder of the new Lincoln Party. It’s a deliberately odd pairing that Scott addresses head-on: with roughly 41% of Indiana voters and 46% of Americans nationally identifying as independent, and with both major parties polling underwater, Scott wants to know whether Ballard represents a genuine off-ramp from a broken two-party system — or just a different flavor of the same problem. The conversation covers Ballard’s biography from Indianapolis’s near northeast side through 23 years in the Marine Corps and two terms as mayor; his diagnosis of Indiana’s closed primary system, where roughly 10% of voters decide 95% of the legislature in low-turnout May primaries; his Voter’s Bill of Rights and voter guide proposals; his refusal to hand Indiana’s voter rolls to the Trump administration; hard questions about privatization deals and campaign transparency from his mayoral record; and a candid account of what the Lincoln Party actually is and isn’t.
WHAT’S INSIDE:
00:00:24 Introduction: Greg Ballard Joins the Show
- Scott introduces a special Monday morning edition, a conversation originally scheduled weeks earlier and rescheduled: former Republican Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard.
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00:02:19 Welcome: Mayor Greg Ballard
- Ballard grew up on Indianapolis’s near northeast side (30th and Emerson, Martindale-Brightwood), attending Catholic schools his father worked multiple jobs to afford after being disabled by severe rheumatoid arthritis in his 30s while working at Eli Lilly.
- After a self-described unstructured but trouble-free run at IU, Ballard joined the Marine Corps at 23, serving 23 years on active duty including service in Desert Storm, and met his wife Winnie — a naturalized citizen from the Philippines — in California. They’ve been married 43 years.
- His final duty station was Stuttgart, Germany, working on plans for U.S. European Command. He retired in 2001, was elected Indianapolis mayor six years later, served two terms as a Republican in a Democratic city with approval ratings in the 70s when he left office, and has since worked in nonprofits and written three books.
00:07:35 Individual Liberty, Less Government, and Why Both Parties Have Lost Their Way
- Ballard says he still holds traditional Republican values — individual liberty, limited government, free markets — but believes neither party actually practices what its platform claims anymore.
- His military service and time as mayor exposed him directly to tragedy, poverty, and how people actually live, which he says informs his politics more than party doctrine.
- His core objection to both parties: purity tests and extreme ideology have pushed out the average person. He cites polling showing 41% of Indiana voters and roughly 46% of voters nationally identify as independent — meaning the real 50-50 split in the country isn’t Democrat vs. Republican, it’s party-affiliated vs. independent, and both parties have worked to close off access to protect their power.
00:12:22 The Two-Party System’s Unpopularity and the Case for More Options
- Scott notes Trump’s approval ratings are in the 30s, but Democrats poll even lower — around 28% — and connects this to a conversation with British author Metin Pekin about alternatives to the party system.
- Scott’s read: the vast majority of Americans, regardless of where they land on individual issues, want more options than two parties can offer, and multi-party democracies elsewhere seem to handle this better on balance.
00:14:08 The Final Straw: Leaving the Republican Party
- Scott asks what pushed Ballard to leave the GOP. Ballard references an IndyStar piece by James Briggs calling him the most progressive mayor Indianapolis ever had, and reframes the question: for him, the “team” was never Republican or Democrat — it’s America, it’s Indiana.
- His pointed observation: Republicans control Indiana with low approval ratings, which raises the question of why Democrats aren’t winning — the answer, he argues, is that whoever holds power sets the rules, and the rules are rigged to keep it that way. He cites the roughly $700,000 he had to spend to gather signatures for ballot access, compared to nominal thresholds of 5,000-10,000 signatures in neighboring Kentucky and Ohio.
00:17:04 One in Five: How Closed Primaries Lock Out 90% of Voters
- Ballard connects this to the Republican Secretary of State nominee’s call to close Indiana’s primaries further, which he says would mean only about 10% of voters choose candidates in their respective party “clubs” while the other 90% pay for the process.
- His headline statistic: only about one in five registered Indiana voters can actually run for office under the current system. Because roughly 10% of voters — those who show up to May primaries — effectively elect 95% of the legislature, Ballard argues November elections have become largely inconsequential, and that’s precisely why neither party wants outsiders like him disrupting the primary system.
00:18:47 How to Fix It: The Voter’s Bill of Rights and a Statewide Voter Guide
- Ballard’s centerpiece proposal is a Voter’s Bill of Rights, framed from the voter’s perspective, some elements of which would require legislative action.
- Within existing budget authority, he wants to launch a statewide voter guide — something many other states already do — sent to registered voters ahead of elections so they know who’s actually on their ballot, building on work already done by the League of Women Voters rather than starting from scratch.
- Scott notes his own preferred candidate in the Democratic primary championed the same voter guide idea and is pushing the eventual Democratic nominee to adopt it — a rare point of cross-partisan agreement.
00:23:08 Voter ID, the SAVE Act, and Actual Voter Fraud Numbers
- Ballard cites the actual scale of the “problem” voter ID laws claim to solve: roughly 21 non-citizens out of 2.9 million voters, a fraction of a percent, and notes Indiana’s voting machines are offline and can’t be hacked.
- Ballard says he supports photo ID to vote — he draws a clear line between that and the SAVE Act, which he calls “way, way, way beyond the pale.” Scott raises the practical burden of obtaining ID for people of color, rural residents, and lower-income voters; Ballard is open to considering free voter ID but maintains that basic ID requirements are reasonable.
00:26:01 Diego Morales, the Voter Rolls, and Why He’s Off the Ballot
- Scott raises Diego Morales’s removal from the Republican ballot; Ballard offers a pointed alternative explanation — Morales wasn’t going to lose in a two-person race, but internal Republican polling showed he’d lose in a three-person race with Ballard included, which is why the swap happened at the last minute. Ballard says he’s certain Morales would otherwise have been the nominee.
00:27:36 Who’s Taking Votes From Whom? The Three-Way Race Math
- Scott raises his own read of early polling (from March, before Morales was swapped for Max Engling) showing Ballard competitive in a three-way race.
- Ballard says both parties pressured him to drop out — Bayh’s team directly, multiple times — and claims quiet support from Republicans and Democrats alike who won’t say so publicly. He cites his 70s-range approval ratings as mayor as the reason both parties feared he’d pull centrist votes from them in Central Indiana. He frames himself as running to win, not to spoil, drawing a parallel to his underdog 2007 mayoral run where he trailed by 30-40 points and was outspent 20-30 to one.
00:30:01 Would Ballard Have Handed Over Indiana’s Voter Rolls to Trump?
- Scott raises Diego Morales’s decision to hand over Indiana’s unredacted voter rolls when the Trump administration demanded them, while many other secretaries of state — Democrat and Republican alike — refused. Ballard is unequivocal: he would not have done it, calling it a violation of federalism and privacy principles Republicans used to actually hold. Elections belong to the states, not the federal government, and he sees no legitimate reason the federal government needed that data.
00:31:49 Business Registry, Farm Loans, and a Website Stuck in 1997
- Scott shifts to the Secretary of State’s non-election functions: business registration, which supports things like farmers’ seasonal loans. Ballard, who has personally registered businesses through the office, says the actual registration process is simple but the website and backend systems are badly outdated — a problem he attributes to the legislature’s budget cycles rather than any single administration’s priorities, and one he intends to make a priority.
- Scott notes his own experience with the campaign finance database, joking it looks like it was built for Netscape.
00:34:51 The Privatization Question: Are Ballard’s Donors Cashing In?
- Scott raises his core concern as a socialist and public-goods advocate: whether Ballard’s mayoral privatization deals (parking meters, and broader questions about outsourcing) enriched his own donors, the same critique he’s leveled at the Democratic Secretary of State nominee.
- Ballard says he had minimal campaign funding in his surprise 2007 win and states he never tracked who donated how much, even in his better-funded 2011 campaign. He cites his administration’s record on minority and women business contracting — up 4x and 10x respectively from prior levels — crediting his first public works director, Dave Sherman, a nationally known water utility executive with a strong record on diverse contracting in his own private business.
00:39:00 The Parking Meter Deal: From $330,000 to $3.5 Million a Year
- Ballard’s central privatization case study: the city’s parking meters netted about $330,000 a year under direct city management. After competitive bidding, a consortium (Park Indy), primarily minority- and women-owned, took over and the city’s net rose to $3.5 million within two years — with higher public approval ratings, modernized meters, and no city payroll, pension, or insurance costs. By law, that revenue is required to go back into infrastructure in the areas served by the meters.
00:42:14 The Velodrome at Marian: A Closed Facility Reopened
- Ballard’s second case study: the city was paying two employees $70,000 combined annually to keep a world-class velodrome, built for the National Sports Festival and Pan Am Games, closed to the public — sitting next to Marian University, home to the nation’s top competitive cycling program.
- Ballard leased the facility to Marian for 15 years; it now hosts national championships, road races, and a cyclocross track the university built itself. He frames both examples as taxpayer value questions, not ideological ones — asking which arrangement actually served the public better.
00:44:21 Transparency, Online Contracts, and the RebuildIndy Questions
- Scott raises specific transparency concerns from Ballard’s mayoral record: a Public Access Counselor ruling that his administration withheld public procurement records related to the Criminal Justice Center bid, falsified petition signatures during his current Secretary of State campaign (which he says were caught and addressed), and RebuildIndy-era engineering firms that donated substantially to his 2011 reelection.
- Ballard says his administration was first to post all city contracts online and enacted a citywide ethics package requiring lobbyist registration in his first months in office. He says the engineering firms in question are the same firms virtually every city and state contract uses, and points to two specific minority- and women-owned businesses still operating today that credit his administration’s contracting practices directly.
00:47:41 Minority and Veteran Contracting Goals — and Why the State Just Rescinded Them
- Ballard says his administration originated veteran- and disability-owned business contracting goals in Indiana — goals the state only recently adopted more broadly and has now, in the past week or two, rescinded entirely for diversity categories.
- He credits Greg Wilson, his administration’s point person on minority and women business development, who went on to run the state’s Civil Rights Commission for roughly seven years under Governor Holcomb. Ballard says he doesn’t understand the rationale for eliminating the goals, relaying a conversation in which he was asked what white person was ever harmed by them — his answer: none.
00:49:36 Hoosiers for Competitive Elections: Who’s Funding the Lincoln Party?
- Scott presses on the funding behind the PAC supporting Ballard’s campaign and the Lincoln Party, Hoosiers for Competitive Elections, noting donor disclosure won’t be public until October.
- Ballard says the money is overwhelmingly from Indiana donors, with some contributions from out-of-state friends. He explains some donors prefer routing money through the PAC rather than his direct campaign account for timing reasons, not secrecy — names will be disclosed before the election. He compares this to C4 dark-money structures both parties and Senator Banks already use, acknowledging the practice is legally permissible but debatable, and predicts donors will include both Democrats and Republicans who don’t want to publicly cross their own parties yet.
00:52:38 What Is the Lincoln Party? Vehicle, Platform, and Long-Term Vision
- Ballard is direct: for this cycle, the Lincoln Party is a vehicle — Indiana law requires either repeating a roughly 37,000-signature ballot access campaign every four years or forming a recognized party, so the Lincoln Party exists to avoid redoing that process.
- Longer-term, he describes it as a landing spot for independent-minded, practical, problem-solving candidates — including sitting and former Democratic and Republican officeholders who’ve already approached him about using the party as a path back to public service outside their own parties’ purity tests. He says the party will run candidates selectively and deliberately, not flood every race, with the informal platform being simply “practical problem-solving people you’d be proud to have in office.”
- Scott, describing himself as a leftist who wants his own party to become more progressive, says he sees value in giving displaced centrist Democrats and disaffected Republicans a political home if the Lincoln Party can provide one.
00:57:00 The Closing Pitch: Why Vote for Greg Ballard
- Asked for his final pitch to disaffected Republicans and distrustful progressives alike, Ballard leans on his record: 23 years in the Marine Corps, two terms governing a Democratic city as a Republican mayor, and the argument that he’s the only candidate in the race who’s actually done comparable work before.
- His central promise: as Secretary of State, he won’t endorse, fundraise for, donate to, or accept donations tied to other candidates — a genuinely independent office, which he says neither major-party nominee can credibly promise.
00:59:04 Closing and Sign-Off
- Scott thanks Ballard and closes out the show, previewing the next night’s interview with independent House District 65 candidate Sean Steele (Bedford area) and Sunday’s HoosLeft This Week.
