The Indiana GOP Just Told Trump Where to Stick His Gerrymander

Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, it’s fair to say one rarely found occasion to lavish praise upon the state of Indiana. It was the place where you’d run across the border to buy fireworks in advance of the Fourth of July, the strip of soot-stained lakefront territory (thanks, Gary) you’d briefly traverse on your way to Michigan. Outside of the Midwest, it’s associated with NASCAR and other major auto-racing competitions, Parks and Recreation, and … Mike Pence, I guess? Surely, to many Indiana would be the epitome of Midwestern flyover territory, a state that has likewise gone from being at least purple in hue (Obama won it in 2008), to among the deepest red in the Midwest in the last 20 years, including Donald Trump prevailing by 19 points in 2024’s presidential election. So with that said, the Indiana GOP does deserve some credit for displaying an unusual sense of backbone in their dealings with Trump this week, when they told him to cram the racial gerrymander he demanded up his ass. Despite powerful majority control over the state legislature, Republican state senators in Indiana rejected Trump’s demands yesterday in a stinging rebuke of the president’s control over state politics.

That said, it was only because of Trump’s prevailing influence that a vote on the mid-decade redistricting effort cleared the Indiana House of Representatives and ended up at the Senate in the first place. Lawmakers in the Hoosier State were seemingly loath to break with the decorum and established constitutional practice of redistricting once per decade, and it took hectoring from the president and his wide-ranging network of influencers and stooges—including Indiana’s own governor, Mike Braun—to bring the gerrymandering scheme to this point. Given the overwhelming Senate majority, where Republicans hold 40 of the 50 available seats, one would have thought this would make the attempted gerrymander a shoo-in, one step away from being signed into law. And yet, a significant chunk of GOP Indiana Senators broke ranks Thursday to join Democratic detractors of the gerrymander, resulting in a final vote of 19 to 31. It’s an embarrassing result for Trump, who immediately vowed vengeance speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, saying that he would support primary opponents against those Republican senators who didn’t fall in line. You know, standard Trump operating procedure.

The goal of the redistricting effort was to gerrymander the two currently existing Democratic U.S. House of Representatives seats (of a total 9 seats in Indiana) out of existence by redrawing its maps, to result in 100% Republican representation for Indiana in the House. Most egregiously, this would have worked by carving Democratic stronghold Indianapolis into four separate districts, using large rural areas to water down the more Democratic-leaning vote of the city’s Black and Hispanic populations, in order to nullify any Democratic advantage. Those Republican members of the legislature who objected pointed out that such a map would stand a chance of being struck down by state courts, given that it would be difficult to argue that they didn’t constitute an illegal, racially focused gerrymander. Also perhaps deserving some credit: Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who asserted that Illinois’ own Democrat-boosting redistricting push/gerrymander would be contingent on if Indiana decided to go through with theirs.

“I believe the bill on its face is unconstitutional,” said State Senator Greg Walker, one of the defecting Republicans. Another, State Senator Spencer Deery, pointed out that the obvious cost of such a move would be even less public faith in the trustworthiness of the state government, saying “I see no justification that outweighs the harms it would inflict upon the people’s faith in the integrity of our elections and our system of government. It’s time to say no to pressure from Washington, D.C. It’s time to say no to outsiders who are trying to run our state.” Even the former Republican governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels (2005-2013), referred to the proposed gerrymander as “grotesque,” saying that the Indiana GOP was rejecting it due to an “innate sense of fair play” and “distaste for being ordered and told what to do by people outside.”

HERITAGE FOUNDATION: “Nice state ya got there. Pity if anything happened to it.”

INDIANA: “Oh, *do* fuck off.”

[image or embed]

— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@mrsbettybowers.bsky.social) Dec 11, 2025 at 8:59 PM

In the lead-up to the vote, Trump had leaned on his influence in order to directly threaten Indiana GOP legislators with primary challenges, in addition to turning his hordes of slavering online supporters against those who would dare refuse direct orders from the President. On Friday, Trump released a list of Republican state senators in Indiana who hadn’t yet made public statements of fealty, saying that they “need encouragement to make the right decision” like he was The Joker telling the citizens of Gotham to bring him The Batman. One of the senators on said list: The aforementioned Greg Walker, whose family was recently hit by a swatting incident. The implication couldn’t be more obvious in its blunt, mob-style intimidation: Surrender your free will to the President, or face the consequences. Walker could see as much, saying that Trump was desperate to hold on to the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterm elections: “It’s the President trying to save his own skin by holding a majority in Congress.”

Particularly craven in the wake of these senators standing up for themselves, meanwhile, was Gov. Braun, a Trump sycophant who responded with new vows of retaliation against these members of his own party. He said in a statement Thursday that he was “very disappointed that a small group of misguided state senators have partnered with Democrats to reject this opportunity to protect Hoosiers with fair maps and to reject the leadership of President Trump,” adding that “ultimately, decisions like this carry political consequences. I Will be working with the president to challenge these people who do not represent the best interests of Hoosiers.”

It seems a low bar to clear, to uphold your state constitution and represent the wills of those who elected you to office, but these Republican members of the Indiana legislature genuinely do deserve some modicum of credit for the publicly defiant stance they’re taking against Donald Trump and his administration, especially given the extremely visible pressure they were facing, with the President taking to the web to individually call some of the senators out by name. State lawmakers being brave enough to stand up to that pressure from a bully with the full weight of the Executive Branch and a crooked Supreme Court in his pocket should be commended.

Moreover, avoiding yet another needless, hopelessly cynical layer of gerrymandering is simply better for the residents of Indiana, as is true for pretty much every other state. People in Texas aren’t being served by ludicrous gerrymandering that makes representatives care that much less about actually advocating for the people of their own district. Neither are the citizens of California, which chose to dismantle its own nonpartisan redistricting apparatus–the system the entire country should probably aspire to employ–in order to intentionally gerrymander itself to counter the unprecedented GOP push for mid-decade redistricting. None of this results in better representation for the actual people who live in these states, be it Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Utah, Florida, Maryland, Virginia or anywhere else that nakedly partisan gerrymandering is on the table.

So good for you, Indiana. Now we’ll remember you for motor sports, and for this as well.