https://progressiveindiana.net
https://www.kellythompsonforcongress.com/
SUMMARY:
Kelly Thompson, Democratic candidate for Congress in Indiana’s 3rd District, joined Scott Aaron Rogers for a PIN virtual town hall covering her evolution from a Republican upbringing to a progressive Democrat, campaign fundraising and her opponent Marlin Stutzman’s refusal to debate or hold town halls, voter disillusionment and turnout, the root causes of the affordability crisis, a single-payer healthcare system, her opposition to AIPAC money in congressional leadership, free public college and trade education, the U.S.-China relationship, government regulation (and in some cases nationalization) of utilities and other essential industries, and the risks and regulation of AI and data centers.
IN DEPTH:
0:00:21 - Introductions and welcome
- Scott opens the town hall, explains PIN’s mission, and notes how viewers can submit questions via chat, the web form, or QR code
- He frames these virtual town halls as a public service for voters who can’t attend in-person events
0:02:49 - Kelly introduces herself and her “Running Like a Mother” campaign
- Thompson describes her background: lives in North Webster, runs a concrete contracting business with her husband, has six adult children and 13 grandchildren, and founded a nonprofit serving local families
- She recounts an unsuccessful 2020 statehouse run, after which her district was redrawn around her home
- She explains her campaign slogan, “running like a mother,” as a mama-bear instinct to protect people before they’re the ones getting hurt
- She says her family’s diversity (including a mother with stage four breast cancer and a sister lost to addiction) shaped her decision to run after watching Congress fail to check the executive branch
0:05:56 - Q (Tom Snyder, Facebook Live): With Indiana being so “Trumplican,” do you have funds for advertising?
- Thompson pushes back on the “Indiana is red” framing, arguing it discourages turnout and reinforces the idea that votes don’t matter
- She says the campaign is nearing a $100,000 fundraising threshold needed to launch a full digital ad campaign (TV, streaming, and social) focused on the district’s rural counties
- She argues her policies for farmers, educators, and truck drivers are paid-for and have a positive ROI for those communities
0:08:17 - Q: You used to be a Republican — trace your political evolution to progressive Democrat
- Thompson says she was raised in a fundamentalist church that taught “Republicans go to heaven, Democrats go to hell”
- She credits running a nonprofit, raising six children close in age, and her eldest daughter introducing her to mutual aid and solidarity (she founded Forward Indiana’s food pantries) with reshaping her politics
- She describes her father’s muted reaction to her 2020 run and says both parents are now committed straight-ticket Democratic voters, partly due to her mother’s cancer diagnosis and experience with UnitedHealthcare
- She shares anecdotes of persuading skeptical Republican voters, including one who donated $1,000 despite disagreeing with her on some issues
0:15:41 - Q (Jeannie Garriott Ford, Facebook): Will Stutzman debate you, and how will you be different from him?
- Thompson says she’s repeatedly asked for a debate and been told local media won’t host one because Stutzman won’t show, which she calls a “breach of contract” with constituents
- She pledges to be available, hold town halls, and bring constituents along in the legislative process rather than operate “behind the curtain”
- She contrasts herself with Marlin Stutzman, whom she accuses of relaying “White House approved rhetoric” and engaging in culture-war distractions
- She lists affordable healthcare, housing, food, and education — and saving family farms (which she says the country is losing at a rate of 61 a day) — as her priorities in Congress
0:19:32 - Q (Kelly in Leesburg): How do you stay focused every day on the crisis, and what’s your first priority in Congress?
- Thompson compares staying focused on the “crisis” to fighting a house fire that’s endangering people you love, and says it’s okay if voters need to look away sometimes while she stays locked in
- She names campaign finance reform — getting big money out of elections — as foundational to everything else Congress needs to fix
- She cites a Yale study on single-payer healthcare, saying it would save “114,000 lives a year and a trillion dollars.”
- She argues lawmakers who take pharmaceutical and insurance industry money are “complicit” in preventable deaths, and frames this as a bipartisan problem
0:25:10 - Q (Tom Snyder): How do we get people disillusioned with government in general to come out and vote?
- Thompson says she can only speak to her own approach: building a direct, ongoing relationship with constituents and publicly naming lawmakers who block popular policies
- She cites having roughly 63,000 Facebook followers as a tool to hold other members of Congress accountable in public
- She argues that voter suppression efforts (citing the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, mid-cycle redistricting, shortened early voting, and the SAVE Act) prove that votes are powerful, not powerless
- She describes a house-party conversation with a group of Republican-leaning voters, including a retired GOP state legislator, that ended with yard signs and donations
0:30:55 - Q: What’s the root of the affordability crisis, and how will you solve it?
- Thompson says the root problem is twofold: wages are too low and costs are too high, which benefits corporations at people’s expense
- She blames tariffs (which she calls disguised taxes) for raising costs on construction materials like lumber, fly ash, and potash imported from Canada, and for hurting the housing market
- She proposes passing the PRO Act to strengthen organized labor, enacting a single-payer healthcare system so unions don’t have to bargain over healthcare, and creating a federal jobs guarantee tied to needs like electrical grid modernization
- She criticizes “record corporate profits” that aren’t matched by “record worker wages” as a sign of a government focused on corporations rather than people
0:34:47 - Q (@TimothyMusic-x9y on YouTube): Will you be in Columbia City again soon, where some voters filter policy through their religious beliefs?
- Thompson confirms she held a town hall in Columbia City about three weeks earlier and lists upcoming stops in Wells County (Bluffton) and Jay County
- She argues the Republican platform doesn’t align with Christian teaching, despite some voters’ belief that it does
- She says her strategy is to keep showing up in person so people can connect her platform with values they recognize from their faith
- Scott adds that he thinks critics are “looking in the wrong books” of the Bible for policy guidance
0:39:50 - Q: What should be in the Democrats’ own roadmap to counter Project 2025?
- Thompson says Democrats are now in the position of having to both undo damage from Project 2025 and build a positive agenda at the same time
- She says Congress needs to recruit back the experienced officials purged from agencies like the military and the CDC
- She frames her campaign as part of a roughly 98-candidate “Take BAC Congress” coalition of first-time candidates aiming to represent working-class America
- She jokes about renaming a future Democratic platform something like “make the country safe again” or simply restoring constitutional government
0:42:01 - Q: Why is a single-payer, Medicare for All system the best healthcare solution?
- Thompson argues that as long as private insurers are involved in healthcare, the system will be wired for profit rather than patient outcomes
- She says insurance companies, which lack medical expertise, shouldn’t have control over treatment decisions that belong to patients and doctors
- She frames healthcare as a basic human right that sits at the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and should not be privatized
0:43:55 - Q: Will you vote for Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker?
- Thompson says she won’t support any Speaker candidate, including Jeffries, who has accepted AIPAC money, given the role’s proximity to the presidential line of succession
- She contrasts this with her opponent, Marlin Stutzman, whom she says is the only U.S. representative ever to receive a personal thank-you letter from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which he then posted publicly
- Scott suggests Summer Lee or Ayanna Pressley as alternative Speaker picks; Thompson agrees either would be strong
0:46:25 - Q (Zeke, @cpnd on YouTube): Would you make college, trade schools, and university free?
- Thompson says yes, and describes her education plan (funded by a Wall Street speculation tax, not general taxpayers) as covering student loan forgiveness, universal no-means-test childcare, and a $10,000 raise for every public school teacher
- She proposes guaranteeing every high school graduate either a livable-wage trade or an associate’s degree, plus free access to public college
- She argues student debt removes young people from the economy by delaying home and car purchases and family formation, and compares it to employer-funded retraining models like GM’s
- Thompson makes a “bread and roses” argument: free post-secondary education should also fund poets, dancers, artists, and singers, not just skills aimed at corporate workforce needs — Scott agrees and adds that the arts and humanities build the critical thinking that job training alone doesn’t
0:49:23 - Q: What’s your view on the U.S.-China relationship after Trump’s meeting with Xi Jinping?
- Thompson says she’s been asking why the two countries are framed as enemies when they share a shrinking, interconnected planet
- She says Trump’s deferential treatment of Xi during their meeting looked “infantile,” driven by Trump’s admiration for authoritarian leaders’ displays of control
- She calls for global cooperation on shared risks like AI and nuclear weapons, drawing an analogy to Indigenous governance traditions that required women’s councils to approve going to war
0:54:17 - Q: Is government investment or nationalization of certain private companies a good idea?
- Thompson says Trump’s own equity stakes in private companies are functionally a form of what he calls “communism,” and argues the label is used as a scare tactic rather than an accurate description of her own policies
- She uses an extended “bank account” analogy to argue that demanding tax dollars be spent in the public’s interest isn’t communism
- On utilities specifically, she criticizes NIPSCO for charging Indiana ratepayers more than other Midwest utilities while passing data-center delivery costs on to customers, and warns about BlackRock and venture capital ownership stakes in utility infrastructure
- She acknowledges that low public trust in government — which she says dropped from nearly universal confidence among the college students she polls to zero in a recent class — makes the case for public ownership a harder sell
1:01:05 - Q: How should Congress regulate AI and the data centers behind it?
- Thompson calls for ending NDAs, redacted public contracts, tax abatements, and environmental exemptions for data center projects, and says companies should have to power and water their facilities without depleting what residents need to live
- She cites being told of a 10% estimated risk of AI leading to human extinction, and argues that warning alone justifies regulation the AI industry itself is requesting
- She separately raises job displacement from AI as a reason to consider something like a universal basic income
- She cites Indiana giving “Google” an $8.2 billion tax abatement, the largest in U.S. history. The $8.2 billion figure and the “largest ever” claim are accurate, but the company is misidentified: that subsidy package is tied to Amazon Data Services, not Google, which separately received a far smaller $170 million Indiana incentive package
1:05:34 - Closing: Final words from Kelly Thompson
- Thompson urges viewers to research candidates’ funding sources at opensecrets.org before voting
- She asks viewers to vote, bring others to vote, and donate to campaigns they believe in given the cost of running for office
- She relays advice from a young voter she met that day: approach the moment with “the perfect balance of rage, hope, and love”
- She closes with an quote attributed to Gilded Age robber baron Jay Gould paying workers to fight each other, arguing the wealthy still use division as a tactic today
1:08:12 - Closing: How to help the campaign
- Thompson directs viewers to kellythompsonforcongress.com to volunteer, donate via ActBlue, or send a check to PO Box 91, Columbia City, Indiana, 46725
- Scott thanks Thompson and the audience, makes his own pitch for support of Progressive Indiana Network, and signs off with just four weeks until the November 3rd election
Thanks again to Kelly for joining us. For more information and to get involved, visit her campaign website at https://www.kellythompsonforcongress.com/. You can also find her on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
