Empathy is one of those words politics loves to borrow and rarely knows what to do with.
It shows up in speeches. It softens campaign literature. It gives a candidate a warm glow without requiring much sacrifice. Too often, empathy becomes decoration, a pleasant word stapled to a policy agenda that still treats people like numbers on a spreadsheet or dots on a district map.
Sharon Wight is trying to make the word heavier than that.
Wight, the Democratic nominee for Indiana House District 81, is running in a district that includes parts of Northwest Fort Wayne, Huntertown, Arcola, and surrounding Allen County communities. It is a district dealing with growth, infrastructure pressure, healthcare concerns, school funding debates, rising costs, water issues, and the familiar question that follows so many Indiana communities: is the Statehouse actually listening?
Wight’s campaign phrase is “leading with empathy.”
That could sound soft if you do not listen closely.
But the way she explains it, empathy is not softness. It is accountability with a pulse. It is the refusal to vote on policy without understanding who will carry the weight. It is the discipline of asking what happens to a family, a school, a senior, a person with a disability, a rural community, or a working parent after the press release is over.
“Every state policy that is made is something that’s going to impact people, whether it’s for positive or negative,” Wight said.
That is the beginning of her argument.
Not every vote is easy. Not every bill that sounds good is good. Not every bill that sounds bad is simple. But if a lawmaker supports something that hurts people, Wight says they should at least understand that harm and be able to explain honestly why they made that choice.
That should not be radical.
In Indiana politics, it often feels close.
The Difference Between a Good Sounding Bill and a Good Bill
State policy is full of pretty wrapping paper.
Property tax relief sounds good. A freeze sounds good. A reduction sounds good. A benefit for veterans sounds good. Transparency sounds good. Choice sounds good. Reform sounds good.
Then people start reading the back of the box.
Wight points to property tax initiatives as an example of how policy can sound helpful up front while carrying consequences behind it. A proposal may appear to lower costs for homeowners, but then local schools may face pressure through referendums or lost revenue. A benefit may sound broad, but then apply only to a narrow group.
She gave the example of a law framed as removing property taxes for veterans.
“That sounds amazing,” she said. “I would be behind that as a Democrat, absolutely.”
But when people dig deeper, she said, they may discover the law affects only a specific group of veterans and does not have the sweeping impact many people first assumed.
That is why Wight’s version of empathy is not just emotional. It is analytical.
It asks voters to look past the headline.
Who benefits?
Who is left out?
Who pays later?
What local service gets squeezed?
What school has to ask for more?
What family thought relief was coming and then found out the fine print had other plans?
Indiana lawmakers have become very good at naming bills in ways that make opposition sound cruel. If you question a tax cut, you must hate taxpayers. If you question a school voucher expansion, you must hate parents. If you question a hospital transparency law, you must oppose transparency. If you question a development project, you must oppose jobs.
That is how policy debate gets flattened into bumper stickers.
Wight is asking for something more honest: judge policy by what it does, not what it calls itself.
Huntertown’s Water Problem Is a Growth Problem
District 81 is growing, and growth has consequences.
Wight says one of the clearest examples is Huntertown, where residents have been talking about water. The issue, as she describes it, is that the town’s utilities rely heavily on a set of wells that are struggling to keep up with growth.
That does not sound like a culture war.
It sounds like governing.
And that may be the point.
For families in Huntertown, infrastructure is not abstract. It is the water bill. It is the water softening system they did not expect to buy. It is the question of whether growth is being planned responsibly or simply allowed to outrun the systems people depend on.
Wight said residents are talking “in droves” about water softening systems they did not have to consider when they first moved in.
That detail matters because it shows how growth can quietly shift costs onto families. A community expands. Development continues. Infrastructure strains. Then residents discover they are the ones buying fixes, paying higher utility bills, or living with the consequences of decisions made before anyone asked whether the system could handle it.
This is not anti-growth.
It is pro-planning.
A growing district needs more than enthusiasm. It needs water, roads, schools, emergency services, healthcare access, transportation, housing, and public systems that can carry the weight of the people being invited to build lives there.
Otherwise, growth becomes a magic trick where officials announce success and residents find the bill tucked under their door.
Affordability Is Also Time
Most political conversations about affordability focus on money.
That makes sense. Money is the obvious part. The grocery bill. The rent. The mortgage. The premiums. The copays. The utility statement. The car payment. The childcare bill. The school supplies. The gas tank. The emergency that turns a tight month into a cliff edge.
But Wight makes a point that does not get nearly enough attention.
Affordability is also time.
Healthcare is a perfect example.
A person may technically have insurance and still lose hours trying to use it. They may spend time on the phone fighting for coverage, tracking down approvals, clarifying billing, navigating networks, or correcting mistakes. They may have to take time off work, find childcare, drive farther, wait longer, and reorganize a day around a service that used to be nearby and simple.
That is still a cost.
“It’s not just about how much things cost,” Wight said. “It’s how much time am I going to have to take away from work or from spending time with my kids or am I going to have to pay babysitter to do this.”
That line belongs in every healthcare debate.
Wight described a local hospital system that once had a robust lab and X-ray framework, one she had used for years, but has since outsourced those services. She said she had blood work she needed to get done and had put it off because she knew it would take more time.
That is how access erodes.
Not always with one dramatic closure. Sometimes access disappears by becoming more inconvenient, more fragmented, more outsourced, more time-consuming, and more expensive in all the little ways that do not show up in a simple price tag.
Healthcare that requires people to sacrifice work hours, childcare money, transportation time, and mental energy is not truly accessible.
It is technically available.
That is not the same thing.
Public Schools Are Where We Learn Each Other
Wight is direct about Indiana education policy.
“They’ve gotten wrong with vouchers,” she said.
Then she went further.
“They’ve gone wrong with putting so many vouchers, well, putting any vouchers out into the system. They’ve gone wrong with effectively defunding our public schools.”
That is not a cautious position, but it is consistent with how she talks about community.
Wight is a strong advocate for public schools because she sees them not just as academic institutions, but as one of the few places where children learn how to live with people whose lives do not look like theirs. She went through public school in Fort Wayne and said she is glad she did.
“You learn about other people in public school,” she said. “And that is a lesson you cannot get any other way.”
That sentence cuts through the sanitized language around education policy.
Public schools are not just buildings where children learn math and grammar. They are democratic infrastructure. They are one of the first places where kids encounter class differences, race differences, disability, religion, culture, family structure, language, and the basic reality that the world is bigger than their own house.
Wight described going to a school with “some of the richest of the rich in Fort Wayne and some of the poorest of the poor in Fort Wayne all together under one roof.”
“And we had to learn how to work together and how to live together and be together,” she said.
That is civic education, whether the state calls it that or not.
Voucher systems threaten that shared space. They drain money, attention, and students from public schools while often holding private systems to different standards. Wight worries about what happens when voucher-funded programs collapse or fail students. Those children still need somewhere to go. Public schools are still expected to catch them.
She is especially concerned about rural communities, where losing students to vouchers can mean fewer teachers, larger classrooms, strained resources, and even school closures. In a rural area, “choice” can become a cruel joke when the public school is weakened and realistic alternatives are limited.
The public school is often the backbone.
You do not strengthen a community by removing vertebrae.
The Accountability Question in District 81
Wight is challenging Republican incumbent Martin Carbaugh, who has represented the district for years. Her critique is not built around a single cheap shot. It is built around the question of whether the district has meaningfully improved under the representation it has had.
“I’ve lived in District 81 my entire life,” she said. “I’ve lived under Martin Carbaugh as my representative his entire time in office. And I don’t feel like things have positively changed for myself, for many people around me.”
Her examples are local and practical: roads, public transportation, healthcare access, outsourcing, infrastructure, and the day-to-day frustration of residents who see problems linger year after year.
Roads remain a major issue. Public transportation has not improved. Healthcare access has become more complicated. A hospital system once known for robust local lab access outsourced services in ways Wight believes create extra burdens for constituents.
She also raised questions about the relationship between hospital transparency efforts and the consequences that followed. Carbaugh had supported efforts aimed at not-for-profit hospitals and pricing transparency, which Wight says sounds positive on the surface. She supports transparency. But she also questions whether the law accounted for hospitals outsourcing services and then being able to say, in effect, those charges are no longer ours.
Again, her concern is not whether transparency sounds good.
It is whether the policy works in real life.
That is the accountability frame she is bringing to the race.
Do the roads work?
Can people get where they need to go?
Can they access healthcare without losing time and money?
Are schools supported?
Is growth being managed?
Are communities consulted before data centers, quarries, or other major land-use decisions move forward?
Are lawmakers listening before they vote, or explaining later after people get hurt?
District 81, in Wight’s argument, does not need a representative who simply knows how to pass bills that sound nice. It needs one who understands the consequences after the bill is signed.
Showing Humanity to Voters Who Do Not Trust the Label
District 81 is not a place where a Democrat can win by talking only to Democrats.
Wight knows that.
She has to reach independents, voters frustrated with both parties, and people who may personally like her but hesitate at the word Democrat. Her answer is not to hide who she is or sand herself down into a beige campaign pamphlet.
Her answer is to show her humanity.
“I show that, again, it goes back to my tagline, leading with empathy,” she said. “I show that I have empathy for their situation, whatever their situation might be.”
That does not mean sentiment without substance. Wight says she wants voters to see that she understands issues at both a personal and academic level. She has spent years learning politics, following how systems work, and caring deeply about the people she hopes to serve.
She also resists the word politician.
“The word that I prefer or the phrase I prefer to use is public servant,” she said, “because that is ultimately really what I should be as someone who’s running for office.”
That distinction matters because voters can smell the difference between someone seeking status and someone seeking service. Not always immediately, and not always perfectly, but over time, in living rooms, house parties, forums, fairs, calls, emails, and conversations, people can tell whether a candidate is performing concern or carrying it.
Wight’s campaign is asking voters to judge her by presence.
Will she listen?
Will she research?
Will she answer?
Will she show up?
Will she still care after the campaign signs come down?
Those are not ideological questions.
They are character questions.
Hope Is Not Naive When It Has Seen the Machinery
Running for office can take a lot from a person.
Time. Sleep. Privacy. Energy. Patience. Normal life. The last three unburnt brain cells rattling around like loose buttons in a dryer.
Wight says the campaign has taken sleep, though she jokes that she was not great at sleeping anyway. It has also shown her parts of the political process that can be disheartening. She has medical issues, and the physical demands of campaigning can make her feel behind.
But the campaign has also given her something she did not have before.
“It’s given me hope,” she said.
That is not a small thing.
Wight said being part of the campaign has shown her that most people are not what we see from Washington, D.C., or from the most powerful voices influencing politics across the country. She sees good people who want to make a difference. She sees candidates in Allen County working together, supporting one another, and building friendships. She sees pieces of the Indiana she grew up with still alive.
“The Indiana where we take care of each other,” she said.
Then she added a very Hoosier measure of social peace: the worst thing people really want to fight about is IU versus Purdue football.
That line lands because it captures what many people miss.
Most people are not hungry for permanent warfare. They want decent lives. They want their kids safe. They want roads that work, schools that function, healthcare they can use, bills they can pay, communities they recognize, and leaders who do not treat cruelty as a personality trait.
Wight’s hope is not built on pretending politics is clean.
It is built on discovering that the people are better than the noise.
Fighting for People Who Do Not Normally Get Fought For
When asked what an undecided voter in Huntertown, Arcola, or Northwest Fort Wayne should know about her, Wight’s answer began with access.
She wants people to know her email address. Her phone number. She wants them to reach out, ask her to meet, tell her what matters most to them.
“I need to know what those things are,” she said.
That is the listening portion of her campaign.
But Wight also names the fights she is ready to take on.
She said she would fight against data centers being placed in Northwest Allen County. She worries that the area has land space developers could target, and she wants stringent requirements before these projects move forward anywhere in the state.
“I will fight like hell to make sure that those do not get put into Allen County or Northwest Allen County,” she said.
She also said she would fight for people who are too often ignored.
“I will fight like hell for people that don’t normally get fought for,” she said.
Then she named them: the disability community, the LGBTQ community, minority communities, and Fort Wayne’s strong immigrant community.
That matters in a political environment where some candidates talk about vulnerable communities only as problems to manage or slogans to exploit. Wight frames them as people she would serve and defend.
This is where empathy becomes spine.
It is one thing to say everyone deserves to be heard.
It is another to say clearly that communities targeted, ignored, or pushed aside will have someone fighting for them at the Statehouse.
The People Can Still Rise Up
Wight says one of the things she understands more clearly now is just how diverse District 81 really is: economically, socially, culturally, and through immigrant communities. People from every walk of life are inside the district.
She also has a clearer sense of who the likely voters are. She had hoped younger voters might be more reachable, but the data she has seen suggests the electorate trends more toward voters over 40. That does not change her message, but it sharpens the issues she plans to emphasize: housing costs, healthcare, seniors, and what an Indiana legislator can actually affect.
Then there is land use.
Wight says she now better understands how quickly data center infrastructure is moving across Indiana and why strong requirements are needed before communities are overtaken by projects they may not want or be prepared for.
But the larger lesson came from a different local fight: a proposed quarry on the southwest side of Fort Wayne.
Wight said she was one of the first candidates to hear about it and helped share the information with a friend running in southwest Allen County. Over six weeks, she watched people organize, petition, show up, and oppose the project. More than a thousand people attended an evening meeting in opposition, alongside more than 12,000 petition signatures.
That experience changed the emotional temperature.
“I saw people rise to power,” she said.
Then she connected that lesson to the broader fights ahead.
“When we rise up together, we can fight,” Wight said. “So we can fight data centers, we can fight land use, we can fight utilities that are skyrocketing to spaces we never thought possible. We just have to rise up together.”
That is the real ending of the article, because it is the real argument of the campaign.
Empathy does not mean waiting quietly for someone in power to care.
It means building enough power that they have to listen.
Listening Before Speaking
Politics gets loud as campaigns move toward November.
The mailers start landing. The ads start sharpening. The national noise machine wakes up hungry and starts chewing through everyone’s patience. Candidates become characters. Issues become slogans. Voters get buried under claims, counterclaims, half-truths, and manufactured panic.
Wight’s campaign is trying to make a quieter but sturdier claim.
Listen first.
Research the issue.
Understand the people affected.
Explain the vote.
Fight for those who are usually ignored.
Do not mistake a good-sounding bill for a good outcome.
Do not call something affordable if it steals people’s time.
Do not call something choice if it weakens the only public institution many families can count on.
Do not call something growth if the community pays the hidden costs.
Do not call something representation if the representative stops listening after Election Day.
Indiana House District 81 is growing and changing. Northwest Fort Wayne, Huntertown, Arcola, and surrounding Allen County communities are facing questions that cannot be solved with campaign gloss. Water, roads, schools, healthcare, housing, data centers, land use, disability rights, immigrant communities, LGBTQ Hoosiers, seniors, working families, and public accountability are not separate little boxes. They are the fabric of whether a place remains livable.
Wight’s argument is that empathy belongs in state policy because people live with state policy.
That does not make empathy weak.
It makes it practical.
A government without empathy will eventually mistake harm for efficiency, neglect for discipline, and silence for consent. A representative without empathy may still vote. They may still speak. They may still send newsletters and stand in photos.
But they will not truly hear the district.
Sharon Wight is betting that District 81 is ready for someone who does.
Someone who sees policy not as a scoreboard, but as a set of consequences.
Someone who believes public service is not a title, but a responsibility.
Someone who thinks the people most affected by decisions should be heard before those decisions are made.
Someone who still believes the Indiana where people take care of each other is not gone.
It has just been drowned out.
And if enough people rise up together, it can be heard again.
