By rejecting a new voting map, Indiana Republicans refused to be bullied by Trump
The Indiana legislature’s rejection of a new map that would have added two Republican seats in Congress marked one of the biggest political defeats for Donald Trump so far in his second term and significantly damaged the Republican effort to reconfigure congressional districts ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
The defeat showed that Trump’s political might is not unlimited. For months, the president waged an aggressive effort to twist the arms of Indiana lawmakers into supporting a new congressional map, sending JD Vance to meet in person with lawmakers. Trump allies also set up outside groups to pressure state lawmakers.
Heritage Action, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation, which has close ties to the Trump administration, issued a dramatic threat this week ahead of the vote: if the new map wasn’t passed, Indiana would lose federal funding. “Roads will not be paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop. These are the stakes and every NO vote will be to blame,” the group posted on X. The state’s Republican lieutenant governor said in a since-deleted X post that Trump administration officials made the same threat.
All of that may have backfired, as Republican state senators publicly said they were turned off by the threats and weathered death threats and swatting attempts as they voted the bill down.
“You wouldn’t change minds by being mean. And the efforts were mean-spirited from the get-go,” Jean Leising, an Indiana Republican state senator who voted against the bill, told CNN. “If you were wanting to change votes, you would probably try to explain why we should be doing this, in a positive way. That never happened, so, you know, I think they get what they get.”
Nationally, the defeat complicates the picture for Republicans as they seek to redraw districts to shore up their majority in an increasingly messy redistricting battle. The effort began earlier this year when Trump pushed Texas Republicans to redraw the state’s congressional map to pick up GOP seats, a highly unusual move since redistricting is usually done once at the start of the decade. [Continue reading…]