In House District 30, Chance is tying AI, wages, unions, healthcare, and economic development to one question: who benefits when Indiana changes?
Kokomo has spent generations learning what happens when technology changes work.
The city grew around manufacturing, particularly the automobile industry, and generations of families built middle-class lives around jobs that required skill, labor, and enough human beings to fill parking lots at shift change. The work was not always easy, glamorous, or secure, but it created something that mattered: leverage. A worker with a useful skill, backed by a union and surrounded by an economy that needed thousands of people like him or her, had bargaining power.
Now the next industrial transformation is arriving, and Jack Chance thinks Indiana is asking the wrong question about it.
The Democratic candidate for Indiana House District 30 is not particularly interested in debating whether artificial intelligence is good or bad. He is asking what happens when companies use AI, automation, data centers, tax incentives, and public infrastructure to build an economy that needs fewer workers, while government continues behaving as though every new development announcement automatically means prosperity.
For Chance, the argument is not really about technology.
It is about power.
Who owns the technology? Who gets the jobs? Who receives the tax breaks? Who pays for the roads and utilities? Who gets displaced? Who negotiates the wages? Who absorbs the healthcare costs? And when a company can choose between hiring a worker and buying a machine, who is sitting at the table protecting the worker?
Those questions have pushed Chance’s campaign into territory that does not fit especially neatly inside standard Democratic or Republican messaging. He is openly pro-union, deeply skeptical of corporate power, hostile to Indiana’s current minimum wage, opposed to school vouchers, and interested in a state-level universal healthcare model. Yet he is also willing to criticize his own party when he thinks Democratic leaders are accepting short-term economic gains without looking closely enough at the long-term consequences for workers.
“I think that both parties are really messing this up big time right now,” Chance said.
That may be the sentence that best explains his campaign.
The Data Center Debate Is Really About What Comes After the Construction Jobs
Data centers have become one of the newest political fault lines in Indiana.
To state and local officials, they can mean investment, construction, infrastructure, and tax revenue. To building trades, they can mean significant work. To technology companies, they are the physical backbone required for an increasingly AI-driven economy.
To many residents, they also mean questions about electricity, water, land use, environmental impact, utility rates, transparency, and how much permanent employment remains once construction ends.
Chance says the issue now appears constantly in his conversations with voters.
He is not dismissive of the workers who support data-center development because they see immediate employment opportunities. Quite the opposite. He says he understands why a union staring at an uncertain construction future would embrace a massive project promising years of work.
“I don’t blame them,” Chance said. “I don’t fault people looking for jobs.”
His concern is what happens next.
Chance points specifically to manufacturing unions that may have far more to lose from automation than construction unions have to gain from building AI infrastructure. If automakers eventually determine that increasingly automated production systems can replace large portions of their workforce, the economic consequences for places built around manufacturing could be profound.
Kokomo does not have to imagine what industrial disruption looks like. It has lived through enough versions of it already.
That makes the data-center debate different here than it might be in a community without the same manufacturing history. A new facility can represent hundreds or thousands of construction jobs today while simultaneously helping build technological infrastructure that could threaten other jobs tomorrow.
There is no simple equation that settles that tradeoff.
Chance believes policymakers should at least stop pretending the second half of the equation does not exist.
“There’s other unions that are terrified,” he said.
That tension is one of the more interesting cracks emerging inside modern labor politics. Organized labor has never been one single economic organism. A policy that benefits electricians may hurt autoworkers. A construction boom can benefit tradespeople while the technology being constructed eventually reduces employment elsewhere.
Solidarity becomes much more complicated when yesterday’s job creator is tomorrow’s job eliminator.
Chance’s warning is that policymakers cannot afford to measure development only by the groundbreaking ceremony.
The future arrives after the ribbon is cut.
Indiana Loves the Jobs Announcement. Chance Wants to Read the Fine Print.
Indiana politicians have spent decades competing to attract employers through tax abatements, incentives, infrastructure spending, and favorable regulatory treatment.
That strategy is not inherently irrational. Jobs matter. Investment matters. Manufacturing matters enormously in Howard County.
Chance’s objection begins when public incentives become detached from public obligations.
He points to major manufacturing investments in Kokomo and asks why companies receiving significant tax advantages are not required to prioritize qualified local workers.
“I’m not against doing things financially to attract a business,” he said.
What he opposes is a system where local residents shoulder the long-term tax burden of incentives while jobs go elsewhere, local workers are bypassed, or companies actively resist unionization.
His answer is a proposal he calls the Hoosier Jobs First Act, which he says would require companies benefiting from local incentives to prioritize workers from the community providing those incentives before expanding recruitment elsewhere.
The idea raises obvious implementation questions. Labor markets do not stop at county lines. Highly specialized projects may require skills unavailable locally. Residency requirements can become complicated when workers commute across municipal boundaries. Businesses would almost certainly object to restrictions that make hiring more difficult.
Chance acknowledges that some projects will require talent from outside the immediate community.
His principle is narrower: use the local workforce first when it exists.
“If you’ve exhausted the application employment workforce, great,” he said. “We can start looking at other avenues.”
That is fundamentally a taxpayer-return argument.
If a community sacrifices revenue to attract a project, residents should reasonably ask what they received in return. A company investing billions of dollars is certainly bringing economic activity, but public investment should be measured by more than the size of the private investment announced beside it.
How many local residents were hired?
What were they paid?
Were benefits provided?
Were unions allowed to organize without interference?
How long do the jobs last?
How much public revenue was waived?
How much additional infrastructure did taxpayers have to build?
Economic development should not require advanced archaeology to discover whether the economy was actually developed.
Maybe Indiana Does Not Have an Affordability Crisis. Maybe It Has a Wage Crisis.
Chance’s argument about affordability is similarly blunt.
Indiana regularly markets itself as a low-cost state. Housing can be cheaper than in many coastal markets. Taxes are relatively low. Businesses frequently hear some version of the pitch that their money will go farther here.
But household affordability is not determined by prices alone.
It is determined by the relationship between prices and income.
Chance argues that Indiana’s problem is better understood as a wage crisis. Something can be relatively inexpensive and still be unaffordable to the person earning the paycheck.
“The issue is people get drawn in with that lie of Indiana’s cheaper than its neighbors,” he said. “Sure, but we also have horrible wages.”
His first target is Indiana’s $7.25 minimum wage. Chance says he would support a significant increase, mentioning $15 or potentially $20 while also acknowledging that he has not settled on a final number.
What matters more to him is the gap between existing wages and actual household expenses.
A worker may earn more than minimum wage and still be unable to afford housing, groceries, transportation, insurance, and childcare. The math becomes particularly brutal for parents. Chance points to families who discover that taking a job can mean earning barely enough to pay for childcare while potentially losing public assistance that had been keeping the household afloat.
At that point, the traditional command to “get a job” collides rather violently with a calculator.
Chance says his experience working around subsidized housing exposed him to families facing exactly that problem. More income could trigger the loss of benefits while childcare and transportation absorbed much of the additional paycheck.
The worker is technically earning more while becoming financially worse off.
That is not an argument against employment. It is an argument for examining the incentives built into the system.
Chance believes stronger unions would accomplish more over the long term than simply legislating wages. He supports repealing Indiana’s right-to-work law and strengthening collective bargaining, arguing that workers with bargaining power will negotiate wages and benefits better than government can dictate them.
“We know what works,” he said. “We know strong unions.”
Whether voters agree will depend partly on how they view organized labor, business competitiveness, and the effect of stronger union rules on employment. But Chance’s economic philosophy is unmistakable: prosperity should be measured less by how cheaply a company can operate and more by whether the people doing the work can support themselves.
Public Education Is Another Labor Issue
Chance treats education as part of the same economic argument.
He strongly opposes Indiana’s school-voucher system and believes public money should remain with public schools. Private education and homeschooling should remain available, he says, but families choosing those alternatives should generally pay for them themselves.
His larger ambition is to make Indiana’s public schools strong enough that families do not feel they need to escape them.
“I just believe that every single public school in the state needs to be raised to such a level of quality that the desire to leave the public school system and find something better is non-existent,” Chance said.
That may be aspirational to the point of impossibility. Families choose schools for all sorts of reasons government cannot eliminate, including religion, pedagogy, culture, class size, athletics, special programs, and simple preference.
But Chance’s focus on teachers is more concrete.
He wants significantly higher teacher salaries and proposes a starting salary of $75,000, along with substantial increases for educators currently below that level. He also opposes tying teacher compensation too closely to student performance.
His reasoning is unusually personal.
Chance admits that he was not exactly a model student.
“I was a humdinger,” he said.
He describes himself as a teenager who did not consistently complete homework or perform well on tests, despite teachers’ efforts. His point is that measuring a teacher’s effectiveness by what a student like young Jack Chance decided to do creates a distorted incentive.
Teachers can influence students.
They cannot remotely control them.
Chance believes performance systems built too heavily around student outcomes can produce anxiety and encourage teachers to teach toward metrics rather than concentrate on the broader work of education.
He also objects to teachers spending personal money on classroom supplies, a practice so normalized in American education that society has somehow convinced itself it is charming rather than bizarre.
Imagine telling a firefighter to bring hoses from home.
The reaction would be different.
Healthcare Is Where His Economic Argument Gets Most Ambitious
Chance’s healthcare proposal is easily the largest policy idea he discusses.
He favors universal healthcare and believes Indiana could potentially build a statewide system even without waiting for Congress to enact Medicare for All nationally.
His proposed Better Indiana Health Plan would redirect money currently flowing through employers, individuals, government programs, and private insurance toward a state-level coverage system. He argues that replacing premiums and employer insurance expenses with a different financing structure could ultimately reduce what households and businesses spend.
Chance cites his own experience paying roughly $190 every two weeks for coverage while earning about $12.45 per hour as evidence of how disconnected insurance costs can become from income.
He also describes voters showing him pay stubs where healthcare consumes a significant portion of wages, only for those workers to face deductibles and copays when they actually need care.
That frustration is hardly unique to one party.
Where Chance’s proposal becomes more difficult is in the numbers.
He estimates that Indiana collectively spends around $100 billion or more annually on healthcare and suggests a universal system might provide coverage at dramatically lower cost. Those estimates would require extensive independent actuarial analysis. State-level universal healthcare systems raise complicated questions involving ERISA-governed employer plans, Medicare, Medicaid, federal waivers, provider reimbursement, taxation, interstate care, prescription pricing, and the enormous administrative challenge of creating an entirely new financing structure.
Chance does not pretend to be an economist.
“I’m not a genius when it comes to finances,” he said.
That admission does not make the idea right or wrong. It does mean the proposal would need much more rigorous modeling before anyone could responsibly promise the savings he envisions.
Still, the political insight behind the proposal is worth separating from the arithmetic.
People already spend enormous amounts of money on healthcare.
When politicians talk about the “cost” of universal coverage, they sometimes behave as though premiums, deductibles, employer contributions, copays, prescriptions, uncompensated care, and government subsidies are currently being paid with Monopoly money.
They are not.
The relevant comparison is not government spending versus zero.
It is one healthcare financing system versus another.
Chance is arguing that Hoosiers should at least be willing to make that comparison.
The Picket Line Changed the Campaign
For all the policy discussion, the moment Chance describes as most important to his campaign did not happen in a legislative hearing or economic-development meeting.
It happened on a picket line.
Chance joined United Steelworkers during a labor dispute and says the experience reinforced his belief that class politics can cross partisan boundaries more easily than party politics often does.
There were Republicans on the line.
There were Democrats.
Their stories sounded remarkably similar.
Chance recalls arriving to find workers holding signs and maintaining the line. His campaign team decided to become more confrontational, joining workers in blocking vehicles and attracting police attention.
Later, Chance heard that one of the union members had told his mother, “Jack Chance taught me how to picket.”
The moment clearly stuck with him.
It also helps explain why his campaign language often sounds less like conventional Democratic messaging and more like something pulled from an older American tradition of labor populism.
Chance is trying to build his politics around the worker before the party.
That is easier said than done.
Class solidarity has always competed with race, religion, geography, immigration, culture, party identity, and countless other forces. Workers who agree completely about wages can disagree violently about abortion, guns, immigration, LGBTQIA+ rights, education, policing, or the presidency.
A picket line does not erase those disagreements.
But it can reveal that people wearing different political jerseys may still share the same employer, the same utility bill, the same insurance deductible, and the same fear that the job they built their life around may not exist ten years from now.
Chance thinks there is politics hiding inside that overlap.
“I Don’t Bend to the Democratic Party”
The most unusual part of Chance’s closing argument is that he is running as the Democratic candidate while explicitly telling voters he does not belong to the Democratic Party in the way they may expect.
“I don’t bend to the Democratic Party,” he said. “I don’t bend to the Republican Party, to the Libertarian Party. I am an independent, I am a constitutionalist, and I fight simply for you.”
There is an obvious tension there.
Candidates run with party labels because parties mean something. They organize coalitions, recruit candidates, raise money, establish platforms, and signal broad governing priorities to voters. Chance benefits from the Democratic ballot line while simultaneously distancing himself from the idea that the party should control him.
His answer is that representation comes first.
He says he has fought for Democrats, Republicans, and people who told him they never vote. He wants voters to remember his willingness to show up regardless of party affiliation.
“I fight because I believe in people,” Chance said.
That is campaign language, but it also provides a useful standard by which to judge him if elected.
Independence is easy to declare when disagreeing with the other party.
Its real test comes when your own party wants something from you.
If Chance reaches the Statehouse, voters would have every right to remember the promise he made during the campaign. If Democratic leadership asks for a vote he believes harms workers in his district, does he resist? If a Republican authors legislation he believes genuinely helps those workers, does he support it? If a union backs a project he believes harms another group of workers, does he maintain the position he articulated on data centers?
Those would be the moments when “I don’t bend” stops being a slogan and becomes measurable.
That is what accountability is supposed to do.
Kokomo Has Seen the Future Arrive Before
House District 30 sits in a particularly interesting place for the political argument Jack Chance is making.
Kokomo knows manufacturing.
It knows unions.
It knows what a major employer can mean to an entire community.
It knows what happens when technology changes factories.
It knows the excitement of a new investment announcement and the anxiety that follows when workers begin wondering whether the next machine is coming to assist them or replace them.
Now artificial intelligence, automation, data centers, healthcare costs, wages, public education, tax incentives, and global investment are colliding in ways that make the old categories increasingly inadequate.
A data center can create union construction jobs and help accelerate automation that threatens other union jobs.
A manufacturing plant can represent billions in investment while residents question who receives the jobs.
A company can bring economic development while receiving tax treatment that shifts costs toward everyone else.
A state can advertise affordability while workers cannot afford childcare.
A teacher can be responsible for preparing Indiana’s future workforce while spending personal money on classroom supplies.
An employee can have health insurance and still be terrified to use it.
Those contradictions are the real subject of Jack Chance’s campaign.
He believes Indiana’s political system spends too much time arguing about teams and not enough time asking who actually benefits from the policies both teams produce.
That does not mean his answers are automatically correct. Some of his proposals are ambitious enough to require far more analysis than a campaign interview can provide. His healthcare numbers deserve serious scrutiny. His local-hiring proposal would have to survive economic and legal questions. His teacher-pay proposal would require a substantial funding discussion. His approach to school vouchers would provoke an immediate fight over parental choice.
Those arguments should happen.
But they should happen around the question Chance keeps dragging back into the room.
What happens to the worker?
Because Indiana is going to change whether politicians are ready or not. AI will improve. Automation will spread. Manufacturing will evolve. Data centers will be built somewhere. Healthcare will continue consuming enormous amounts of money. Companies will continue asking communities for incentives. Schools will continue trying to prepare children for jobs nobody can perfectly predict.
The real choice is not whether that future arrives.
It is whether the people building it have any power over what happens when it does.
Jack Chance has made his answer clear.
The voters of House District 30 get to decide whether it is theirs.
