Election 2026 Interview Series: Candidate for U.S. Representative (D9) Floyd Taylor

As the 2026 general election approaches, The Washington County Times is publishing written interviews with candidates in contested races affecting Washington County.

The Times reached out to all candidates for whom we were able to obtain contact information and invited them to participate. If you are a candidate in a contested race and have not received an invitation, please contact us so we can make sure you have an opportunity to participate.

Candidates were provided with questions tailored to their campaign, personal history, and the office they are seeking. We encouraged candidates to answer the questions in their own words and to refrain from using ChatGPT or other artificial intelligence tools when preparing their responses.

All candidate responses have been published as submitted, without editing or alteration by The Washington County Times.

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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: Regarding the use of AI, this candidate's response to us included the following statement —

"This candidate's campaign publicly discloses its use of AI as a strategic and operational tool, including in the drafting of these responses. Every answer below reflects Floyd Taylor's positions, policy portfolio, and voice, and has been reviewed and approved by the candidate before submission. Consistent with the campaign's transparency ethos, we believe voters are better served by candidates who disclose their tools than by candidates who hide them. Full campaign disclosures, drafted legislation, and finances are published at floyd2026.com."

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Q: You are running as a write-in candidate for Indiana's 9th Congressional District. Why did you choose to run as an independent write-in rather than seek a major-party nomination, and what do you believe voters gain from having that choice?

I'm running as a write-in because neither party actually represents the people anymore. They represent special interests of one kind or another. I didn't leave a party. Both parties left this district. The Republicans stopped answering to constituents and started answering to leadership and donors. The Democrats stopped competing here at all.

The honest reason I'm a write-in and not on the ballot as an independent is simpler than any of that. I have a full-time job. Like most people in the 9th, I'll be working until about a week after I die. I didn't have the time to chase the roughly 4,500 signatures Indiana requires for independent ballot access. So I'm doing it the harder way, because the district still deserves the option.

What voters gain is exactly what the question says. An actual choice. Not red versus blue. Party-first versus district-first.

I built a platform called the Congress App. Every bill that comes up for a vote gets posted with a plain-language summary and a published fiscal breakdown. Constituents in the 9th weigh in. My vote is bound to what the district says. Every living resident of the 9th gets equal input, no age gate, no registration gate. That's the accountability structure a party nomination would have compromised on day one.

Every drafted bill and every campaign finance disclosure is public at floyd2026.com. Read it. Audit it. Then decide.

Your campaign's central idea is the "Congress App", through which you say residents of the district would provide verified input on every bill and your congressional vote would follow the majority position. What would you do if you personally believed a bill was harmful, but the majority of verified constituent input supported it?

My personal beliefs are no better than anyone else's in this district. That is the whole point of the Congress App. The job is to represent, not to rule.

If I personally think a bill is a bad idea and the verified majority of the district disagrees with me, I vote the way the district tells me to. That is the deal. I would use the App to make my case beforehand, publish my reasoning, walk through the fiscal breakdown, and let constituents weigh it. But once the input closes and the district has spoken, my opinion stops mattering. Theirs starts.

The one hard limit is the Constitution. If a bill would strip constitutional rights from any American, I will not vote for it regardless of what the input says, because no majority has the authority to take those rights away. That is not me overriding the district. That is the oath of office overriding both of us.

Every other vote, the district decides. Represent, not rule.

How would your Congress App work in practice, from verifying constituents to determining the district's position on a particular piece of legislation?

The Congress App is built around three questions. Who gets to weigh in, how do we know they are who they say they are, and how does their input become my vote.

Who gets to weigh in is the easiest part. Every person living in Indiana's 9th District gets equal input. Not just registered voters. All people living in the district. If you live here and a decision in Congress affects your life, you get a voice. That is the representation standard, and it is broader than the voting standard on purpose.

Verification works in layers. For most users, the App verifies identity against a residential address in the 9th District, cross-checked against public records and, where applicable, the county voter file. For residents without reliable internet or who prefer in-person access, the Hardinsburg district office and its satellite locations will have workstations staffed by local hires whose job is to help constituents log input directly. No one gets locked out because they do not own a smartphone.

For each bill that comes up in Congress, the App posts three things. A plain-language summary written by staff, not lobbyists. A published fiscal breakdown showing what the bill costs, who pays, and who benefits. And the full text of the bill itself, because anyone who wants to read it should be able to. Constituents review, discuss, and register their position before the vote closes.

The district's position is determined by the verified majority of input received within the window before the congressional vote. If input is thin on a particular bill, that is public information too. The App shows how many constituents weighed in, from which parts of the district, and the margin. Nothing is hidden behind an algorithm. The code will be open source and auditable, so anyone in the district or outside it can verify that the system does what I say it does. If I win, one of the first things I will do is hire a professional developer to do a full rewrite of the platform to production standards and release that code publicly. I built the beta myself to prove the concept works. Scaling it to serve the entire district deserves a professional build, and the public deserves to see every line of it.

The beta is live right now at thecongressapp.com. It is not a promise or a mockup. It is a working platform that voters can log into today, before the election, and see the architecture for themselves.

My vote in Congress follows that verified majority. The one hard limit, as I said earlier, is the Constitution. Every other vote, the district decides.

This is not a suggestion box. It is a binding accountability structure, and it is the reason I am running as a write-in and not as a party candidate. A representative bound to a party whip cannot honor this system. A representative bound to the district can.

You have drafted several ideas for bills during your campaign. Which of them do you believe would have the greatest impact on the 9th District, and what problem would it address?

The bill I believe would have the greatest impact on the 9th District is the Main Street Health Compact Act. It is the flagship of the campaign for a reason.

It does three things at once. It repeals the Affordable Care Act, which is a win for Republicans who have wanted that repeal for fifteen years. It guarantees denial-free healthcare with a public option in every county, which is a win for Democrats who have wanted universal coverage for even longer. And it lets you keep your existing insurance if you want to, which I will grudgingly admit is a win for the insurance lobbyists who have spent decades making sure no reform ever touches their business model. Three wins, one bill. The only losers are the middlemen who profit from denying care.

The problem it addresses is not premiums. It is not deductibles. It is not network access. Those are symptoms. The actual problem is death. People in this district die every year because they could not afford care, could not get to care, or were denied care by an insurance company that decided a treatment their doctor recommended was not covered. We can talk about the money the current system wastes on emergency room visits for conditions that should have been treated in a clinic six months earlier. We can talk about the productivity losses and the bankruptcy filings. All of that is real. But the honest word is death. Untimely, preventable, and paid for in family grief that never shows up on a balance sheet.

The Rural Mobile Health Access Act works alongside it. I have had cancer twice. In this part of the district, it is a fifteen-minute drive just to get weighed and measured and a forty-five-minute drive for any meaningful treatment. For someone without a reliable car or a flexible job, that distance is the difference between catching something early and catching it too late. Mobile clinics and specialist access close that distance. The problem it addresses is the same one. Death from care that arrived too far away or too many miles too late.

Both bills are drafted in full, with published fiscal breakdowns, at floyd2026.com. Read them. The math works.

What would you identify as the biggest weakness in the way the federal government currently serves rural communities, and how would you address it as a member of Congress?

The biggest weakness in the way the federal government serves rural communities is that they are rural. That sounds like a joke. It is not.

Almost every federal program in this country is designed around population density. Funding formulas reward it. Staffing models assume it. Service delivery defaults to it. When the private market will not serve rural broadband, the federal government has to create BEAD and ReConnect and RDOF to fill the gap, and even then the rollout is slow and patchy. When rural hospitals close because their patient volume cannot support urban-scale overhead, the federal response is a study, not a fix. The pattern repeats in healthcare, in the postal service, in VA clinics, in USDA field offices. Rural communities are not underserved by accident. They are underserved by design, because the design was built for somewhere else.

The second weakness is representation itself. A rural congressional district gets one representative who spends most of the year 600 miles away in Washington. The traditional model of a few DC staffers and a handful of town halls a year does not close that distance. By the time a rural constituent's concern makes it through a scheduler, a legislative assistant, and a committee calendar, the moment has usually passed.

I address that gap directly. The Congress App and a planned network of satellite offices across the district mean the representative is present every single day. Physically when possible, digitally when Congress is in session. No matter where a constituent lives in the 9th, the distance to their congressman drops to a short drive.

Rural is not a problem to be pitied. It is a design constraint the federal government has refused to design for. I intend to fix that.

Washington County and much of southern Indiana continue to face workforce challenges. Southern Indiana Works recently found that Washington County has a labor force of more than 14,000 people, but more than 5,500 residents leave the county for work. What role, if any, should a member of Congress play in helping rural communities attract better-paying jobs and create more opportunities closer to home?

The Southern Indiana Works number is the whole story. A labor force of 14,000 and more than 5,500 of them driving out of the county every morning to work somewhere else. That is not a commuting statistic. That is a measurement of value leaving Washington County every single day. Wages earned in Louisville or Bloomington or Columbus get spent there too. Lunch money, gas money, retail dollars, the after-work stop at the grocery store. All of it exports. The county keeps the traffic and loses the economy.

A member of Congress cannot personally create a single job. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What Congress can do is set the conditions that make it worth a private employer's while to locate here instead of somewhere with more people and better infrastructure. That is a real role, and it is one this district's representation has not taken seriously in a long time.

I have drafted four bills that address different pieces of the problem.

The Rural Last-Mile Broadband and Workforce Hubs Act does two things at once. It closes the connectivity gap that keeps rural workers locked out of the modern economy, and it stands up local workforce hubs that train, certify, and place residents in high-demand jobs with published outcomes and clawbacks if the money is not spent well. You cannot ask a Washington County resident to compete for a remote job or a skilled trade without giving them the connection and the credential.

The Local Energy Act keeps energy dollars in the district instead of exporting them to distant utilities. When a county produces its own power, the money that used to leave every month for a utility bill circulates locally instead. That is a small business tailwind and a household budget tailwind at the same time.

The Datacenter Development and Community Benefits Act is the high-value employer piece. Datacenters are one of the few industries that will locate in a rural county if the power and the connectivity are there. The bill sets guardrails so the community actually captures the benefit. Local hire requirements, tax revenue that stays in the county, water and grid protections, and a published community benefits agreement before any facility breaks ground. Not a giveaway. A deal.

The Fair Wage for All Act is the floor. None of the above matters if the jobs that get created do not pay enough to make staying worthwhile. A wage floor that reflects the actual cost of living is not a burden on employers. It is the price of a workforce that can afford to live in the community they work in.

The 5,500 number does not have to stay 5,500. But it will not change on its own.

You have described your candidacy as being accountable directly to constituents rather than to a political party, PACs or major donors. If elected, how would you work with congressional Republicans and Democrats to actually pass legislation when neither party is obligated to support your proposals?

The honest answer starts with the bills themselves. Almost every piece of legislation I have drafted is built to have broad bipartisan appeal on the merits, not as a compromise but as a design choice. The Main Street Health Compact repeals the ACA and guarantees denial-free coverage in the same bill. The Datacenter Development and Community Benefits Act pairs pro-growth investment with local hire and community protections. The Second Amendment Due Process Act protects gun rights and closes the loopholes that let dangerous people slip through. When a bill gives both sides something real to vote for, whipping against it gets harder. That is not naive. That is the deliberate architecture of the legislative portfolio.

The second lever is the Congress App itself. It is leverage on other members, not just on me. When a bill is up for a vote and the App shows a strong majority position in the 9th District, that data is public. Any other member of Congress whose own district looks demographically similar to mine can see how their constituents would likely land on the same question. If they vote against it, their voters have a template to ask why. The App does not compel another member's vote. It raises the political cost of ignoring their own district. That is a pressure mechanism no lobbyist and no party whip can match, because it comes from the one source every member is theoretically accountable to.

The third lever is coalition. On any given bill I will find the members whose districts want what my district wants, and I will work with them regardless of the letter after their name. That is the job. If a Republican from a rural district wants the Rural Mobile Health Access Act because his voters need it too, we pass it together. If a Democrat wants the Fair Wage for All Act because her voters need it too, we pass it together. Party discipline is strongest when the alternative is silence. It weakens the moment there is an actual coalition to defect to.

The structural answer is longer. Almost all of my proposed legislation has bipartisan appeal, but the deeper fix is the composition of the chamber itself. Five is the number. Not the number of bills I am carrying. The number of actual independents who need to be elected to Congress before the party leadership loses its automatic majority on procedural votes. Five district-first representatives, in a chamber where the margins are already thin, and the question this interview is asking reverses. Party leaders start asking us how to get their bills passed, instead of the other way around.

Getting to five is not my job alone. But proving the model works in the 9th is step one.

What is the strongest argument you would make to a voter who agrees with your ideas but is concerned about choosing a write-in candidate rather than one whose name appears on the ballot?

Here is the math, and it is not close.

If you vote for the Republican, you are voting for a race that is already decided. The 9th District was drawn to keep that seat safe. The incumbent knows it, the party knows it, and the donors who fund the party know it. Your vote does not persuade anyone in Washington of anything. It confirms a result the map already guaranteed. That is a wasted vote.

If you vote for the Democrat, you are voting for a race that is already decided in the other direction. The party has not seriously contested this district in years, because the same map that protects the Republican tells them not to bother. Your vote is a protest the system is engineered to absorb and ignore. That is also a wasted vote.

There is exactly one scenario in this election where a vote is not wasted. If enough people in the 9th are tired of the party battle, tired of the theater, tired of watching two teams run the same play and call it democracy, and they take the extra ten seconds to write in a name, the write-in takes the day. The map does not account for that. The parties cannot whip against it. The donors cannot buy it back. It is the only outcome on the ballot that the machine did not already decide for you.

So the honest math is this. Two of the three choices on that ballot are pre-counted. Only one of them is live. The write-in is the only vote in this race with any leverage left in it, because it is the only vote the system has not already spent.

Nothing to lose. Everything to gain. And if enough people are done with the drama, everything changes.

If elected, what is the first issue you would take to Congress on behalf of Indiana's 9th District, and what specific result would you want to achieve during your first year in office?

Whatever the people tell me they want.

That is not a dodge. It is the entire premise of this campaign. Every other candidate answers this question by naming their pet issue, the thing they personally care about, the cause that got them into politics. I do not get to do that, because the job is not about me. On day one, the Congress App will show what the district's top priorities actually are, ranked by verified input, and that ranking becomes my legislative calendar. Not my judgment. Not my party's judgment. The district's judgment.

The specific result I want in the first year is harder to measure but more important than any single bill. I want to guilt the rest of Congress into honoring the people they were elected to represent. Every vote I cast under the Congress App is a public demonstration that binding constituent accountability is possible. Every time another member votes against their own district's obvious preference, my vote in the record becomes the contrast. That is the pressure. That is the result. One representative doing the job the way it was supposed to be done, in plain view, until the rest of the chamber has to answer for why they are not.

The people decide the agenda. The record shames the holdouts. That is the first year.