SUMMARY:
Scott opens tonight’s episode with an extended metaphor: state government, done well, should run like a well-directed production, with specialists in the right roles, a competent cast, and a show that comes in on time and on budget. His guest, Michelle Milne — a theater director, producer, and educator running as the Democratic candidate for Indiana House District 49 (Elkhart County, including Goshen and Middlebury) — picks the metaphor up and runs with it, arguing that voters, constituents, and residents are simultaneously actors, audience, and designers of the world they’re building together. The two trace Michelle’s path from a childhood split between Elkhart County, Bloomington, Malawi, and Haiti, through years working theater, hospitality, retail, and nonprofit research, into a campaign built on the same skill she’s used throughout her career: bringing people with real disagreements into a room and listening. They dig into the empathy gap in a legislature dominated by attorneys and business owners, the actual winners and losers of 2025’s Senate Enrolled Act 1 property tax overhaul, a looming crisis in public school funding driven by the voucher system, and the pressure that pushes officials — including Michelle’s opponent, Rep. Joanna King — to vote against the interests of the people who elected them. The conversation closes with Michelle’s belief that government works best as collaborative theater rather than a scripted one-man show, and stories from the doors about first-time voters finding their reason to show up this November.
Progressive Indiana Network: https://progressiveindiana.net
HoosLeft: https://hoosleft.us
Michelle Milne: https://michellemilnein49.com/
WHAT’S INSIDE:
00:00:21 Introduction: Government as a Well-Run Production
Scott frames the episode with his opening metaphor: well-run government looks like a well-directed production, with specialists in the right roles and a show that comes in on time and on budget — a standard Indiana’s Republican supermajority hasn’t met for ordinary Hoosiers.
Introduces Michelle Milne, a director, producer, educator, and the Democratic candidate for Indiana House District 49, covering Elkhart County including Goshen and Middlebury.
00:03:31 Everyone’s an Actor, Audience, and Designer
Michelle argues that voters, constituents, and residents of a district are simultaneously actors, audience, and designers of the world they’re creating together — a frame she says she brings to directing, teaching, coaching, and now campaigning alike.
00:05:58 From Elkhart County to Malawi, Haiti, and Back
Michelle traces her path: born in Elkhart County, early childhood in Michigan, time in Malawi and Haiti and three formative years in Bloomington while her educator parents studied, elementary through high school back in Goshen, then four years in Indianapolis working theater (including children’s theater at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis) before time out west, in Chicago, and back home.
00:08:08 Many Hats: Hospitality, Retail, and Door-Knocking Lessons
Michelle recounts work in hotels, restaurants, retail, and nonprofit research across Indiana, framing each job — however short-term for her — as a window into how differently people experience the same economy.
Connects that same instinct to canvassing today: finding what people share and where their needs genuinely differ.
00:12:18 The Empathy Gap in a Legislature of Lawyers and Business Owners
Scott raises the narrow professional range of Indiana’s legislature (attorneys, business owners, people who inherited the family business) and the disconnect that creates with everyday Hoosiers’ struggles.
Michelle argues theater trains exactly the skill missing here: imagining a life circumstance you haven’t lived, using the example of a public defender versus a corporate attorney developing very different worldviews from who they represent.
00:15:47 Empathy as a Dirty Word on the Right
Scott and Michelle discuss the political right’s recent framing of empathy itself as “toxic,” and tie Indiana’s declining education, healthcare, and environmental quality over the last generation to a broader empathy deficit in state leadership.
00:18:32 The Stock Market Isn’t the Economy
Scott argues the stock market functions as a measure of how effectively capital extracts value from labor rather than a measure of ordinary economic health, noting roughly 10% of Americans own meaningful stock.
Michelle shares a canvassing story about a single mother, new to the area from Chicago, who is paying more in rent in Elkhart County than she did in a major city and for whom stock market gains mean nothing.
00:20:57 First Order of Business: Healthcare, Medicaid, and SNAP Red Tape
Asked what she’d prioritize first in the legislature, Michelle names healthcare access, citing new paperwork burdens on SNAP and Medicaid and the erosion of home- and community-based waiver programs that let families care for disabled loved ones at home instead of in institutions.
00:23:50 Public Education and the Voucher Crisis
Michelle warns of a looming public education funding crisis, noting roughly 90% of Indiana children attend public school even as voucher programs — pitched around 2014 as targeted help for the neediest students — have driven private school tuition up while mostly benefiting families who would have enrolled their kids privately regardless.
Notes students with disabilities are often turned away from private schools lacking the resources to serve them, even when those schools want to, undercutting the “choice” argument.
00:27:05 SEA 1’s Ripple Effects: Firehouses, Trails, and Triplicate School Funding
Michelle traces her own political awakening to local fallout from Senate Enrolled Act 1’s 2025 property tax overhaul, which she says delivered real tax cuts mainly to the wealthy while stalling a planned firehouse south of Goshen and a safety trail near Millersburg used heavily by Amish commuters.
Scott connects the dots between the property tax shift, the three parallel K-12 systems (public, private, charter) Indiana now funds, and a Yale study finding a single-payer healthcare system could save over 114,000 lives and $1 trillion annually nationwide, even though such a system isn’t feasible at the state level alone.
00:31:02 What Pressure Makes Good People Cave
Michelle reflects on why officials who ran on good intentions — including her opponent, Rep. Joanna King, a former school board member — end up voting against the interests of the people who elected them, describing it as a kind of institutional bullying that rewards those who aren’t trying to get reelected.
00:34:21 The Redistricting Fight and Who Got Bullied
Scott and Michelle discuss last winter’s redistricting fight as a clarifying moment: some Republicans who faced the same outside pressure stood up and were voted out for it, while others — including Rep. King, despite her own constituents asking her directly not to — voted for the map anyway.
00:36:03 Back to the Metaphor: Government as Improv
Scott returns to his opening framing, comparing citizen participation to an improv show with audience call-outs. Michelle pushes back gently, saying her ideal isn’t audience members directing actors from the sidelines without putting themselves on the line — it’s everyone having real agency in writing the play together.
00:39:51 Main-Character Syndrome and Every Role Matters
Scott describes Indiana’s supermajority leadership as suffering “main character syndrome” — treating the job as their own star vehicle regardless of whether it serves the larger production.
Michelle illustrates the opposite lesson from teaching theater students at Columbia College Chicago: every student was the star of their own high school play, but a healthy ensemble depends on everyone valuing supporting roles too.
00:43:10 The China Temptation, and Why the Tradeoff Isn’t Worth It
Scott and Michelle discuss how the two-year election cycle discourages long-term planning — citing the slow-to-land benefits of the Biden administration’s Build Back Better-era investments — and jokingly flirt with (and firmly reject) the appeal of China’s longer planning horizon, free of electoral pressure.
00:45:18 Control vs. Collaboration: Two Kinds of Directors
Michelle contrasts directors who arrive with every detail of a production pre-planned against her own collaborative style — slower, messier, but more humane — and draws a parallel to democracy’s own inefficiency being a feature, not a bug, worth preserving over a more “efficient” but less humane alternative.
00:48:24 Listening as the Common Thread
Scott names listening as the throughline of Michelle’s approach across theater, teaching, and campaigning, and the model he thinks government itself should follow.
00:49:37 What Did We Miss? Stories From the Doors
Asked what the conversation missed, Michelle shares a door-knocking story about a man who initially said he wasn’t going to vote, broke down discussing empathy and community after she crossed the street to talk with him, and later returned with his girlfriend to say they’d both vote because she’d listened.
Reflects on neighbors who disagree politically but still show up for each other in practical ways, and the gap between that reality and the division Americans are told exists.
00:54:46 Closing: Where to Find Michelle Milne
Michelle’s contact info: campaign site michellemilnein49.com (yard signs, volunteering, donations, and voting information), and Facebook.
Early voting and Election Day are three weeks out at the time of this taping.
00:57:20 Show Outro
