Tritch visits Jay County

Protecting health care, promoting fiscal efficiency and ensuring adequate funding for public schools.

Courtney Tritch focused on those issues Saturday as she spoke to local Democrats at Richards Restaurant in Portland as part of her district-wide listening tour.

Tritch is running for the Democratic nomination of Indiana’s U.S. Senate District 3 seat, which represents the northeast corner of the state including Jay County. She is part of a three-way race against perennial candidates Tommy Schrader, who lost to Republican Jim Banks by a 47-percent margin in 2016, and John Roberson, who finished third in a three-man race in that year’s primary.

Banks currently holds the seat and is uncontested for the Republican nomination.

Tritch, a Fort Wayne resident, encouraged those in attendance to get the word out about her campaign now with a focus of being able to provide a strong challenge to Banks in November.

“We need to show that we have momentum in May to prove that we’re going to have the momentum in November,” she said. “So we need to not just win, we need to win. … That is so important.”

Tritch addressed several key issues during her comments, including Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable care act. She took issue with the fact that the discussion about the bill happened behind closed doors and said it would make no sense to eliminate Indiana’s HIP 2.0 initiative that was made possible by the ACA’s expansion of Medicare.

She also took issue with Banks for being part of the problem of Congress being divided along party lines and unwilling to consider ideas from the other side of the aisle.

“He feels very strongly that the Affordable Care Act was a blue team idea and I’m on the red team and so, oops, I guess I just can’t be for that,” said Tritch. “To me, I don’t know about you all, but I’m tired of those types of politics. There’s so many of us that are somewhere in the middle that are being left behind by these extremists that we keep electing.”

She said she was a lifelong independent before deciding to run as a Democrat this year, adding that she often described herself as fiscally conservative and socially progressive. But, she added, the “fiscal conservative” stance has become problematic in some ways.

“There are issues that we talk about being fiscally conservative, we end up sometimes cutting off our nose to spite our face on that,” she said. “We’re not being fiscally efficient. So we might be saving money in the short run, but we’re losing money in the long run.”

One example she gave is the effort to use public dollars to support private education through programs like vouchers. She said the government should put its financial backing behind one system it believes in — public schools — rather than siphoning off money for other initiatives, especially when opportunities to attend private schools tend to be limited in rural areas.

She also pointed to the Republican-supported tax reform bill passed earlier this year as something that is fiscally conservative in the short-run but problematic long term because it is expected to add to the national deficit.

Tritch, who was in Berne prior to her visit to Jay County and also had campaign events scheduled in Montpelier, Bluffton and Fort Wayne, addressed several other issues during an interview following her comments:

•School safety — She said she is not in favor of arming teachers and has concerns about schools becoming “prison-like.” She feels common-sense gun reform, such as universal background checks, limits on high-capacity magazines and an improved registration/tracking system can help to curb gun violence.

•Foreign relations — Military involvement is sometimes necessary but should not be the first response, she said. She added that she felt the strikes in Syria last weekend were a reasonable move because they were targeted and implemented in partnership with allies.

•Rural economic development — She endorsed a “more diversified approach” that would include investing in quality-of-life initiatives in order to be able to attract and keep talent. “It is about creating a welcoming place for talent to support our businesses,” Tritch said. “Realizing that we need to make those proactive investments that are going to pay off in the long run to me is an important step to how we think about things long term.”