Indiana Republicans Reject Trump, Vote Down Gerrymander
The Trump administration’s Mafia-style effort to force Indiana to gerrymander its congressional maps has gone down to a resounding defeat in the state Senate. Only 19 senators in the 50-seat chamber voted for the mid-cycle redistricting, compared to 31 no votes. Given the 40-10 Republican advantage, this is remarkable: More Republicans voted against the maps than voted for them.
The failure came despite a menacing push by President Trump and his political allies. At least 11 Republican state senators in Indiana were targeted with verbal threats or “swatting” attacks in the weeks leading up to the vote. The president promised primary challenges for any Republicans who defied him, and allied super PACs lined up millions of dollars to support that effort. An outlandish threat from the Heritage Foundation asserted that all federal funding would be stripped from Indiana if Republicans opposed the maps. “Roads will not be paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop,” a tweet from Heritage Action, its political action committee, warned.
In the end, Republicans in Indiana stood up to Trump anyway, a growing trend around the country in the face of a lame-duck, unpopular president. The stories about rejecting the extreme pressure and intimidation are inspiring, and they are not isolated, either. New Hampshire, Kansas, and Nebraska have already rejected Trump’s election-rigging this year, and even if Florida lurches forward, the vaunted effort from Trump could end up completely backfiring on his own party.
Trump even got in the way of the Supreme Court handing him seats when they reversed a lower-court ruling invalidating the five-seat Texas gerrymander. It was already dubious that Republicans would win all five seats that they sought in that redistricting, given the dramatic shift in Republican fortunes among Latino voters. But Trump’s ham-handed attempt to get Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) to switch parties by pardoning his corruption indictment failed spectacularly, as Cuellar opted to run as a Democrat. The Trump seal of approval will almost certainly boost Cuellar (who, to be clear, should have at least faced trial for the corruption allegations) next year; the Cook Political Report shifted the seat in his direction. So Texas may, at best, net Republicans four votes, and perhaps even just two if the other two Latino-heavy districts in the southern part of the state hold for Democrats.
Meanwhile, in Missouri, Republicans managed to redraw maps to net a one-seat gain, but opponents look likely to get a referendum on the ballot that would at least delay the maps until 2028 and possibly nullify them. Referendum proponents submitted nearly three times as many signatures as were needed to qualify the measure for the ballot.
Add in a one-seat gain in North Carolina that has been finalized and changes in Ohio that were mitigated by the threat of a Democratic referendum, downgrading a three-seat gain to somewhere between zero and two, and Republicans have added between three and seven seats to their column for the midterms.
That’s offset by the likely five-seat Democratic gain in California after a voter-approved redistricting, and a one-seat gain in Utah after the courts required new maps. So the best Republicans can hope for as things stand right now is just a one-seat gain, and it could flip to a multi-seat loss. Florida lurks with a possible gerrymander in January, but so does Virginia, which set up a process earlier this year that could rapidly get new maps in place for 2026. Those two states would potentially offset one another. Plus, Maryland, Illinois, and even New Jersey could potentially be activated as needed to respond to Republican gerrymanders; a court battle in New York may net Democrats a seat as well.
The Supreme Court may certainly pop up again to enable racial gerrymandering by eliminating restrictions under the Voting Rights Act, which could put as many as a dozen seats in play. But the experience of Indiana suggests that the appetite for these shenanigans is low and depleting. And Republicans have to be wondering why they would expend so much effort to delay the inevitable loss of Congress, and even put more of their seats at risk in the process.
Here’s an incredible statistic from the fine folks at Bolts: Republicans lost 21 percent of the state legislative seats they held that were up for grabs in 2025. Some may write this off as a matter of low-turnout elections where highly motivated and engaged Democratic voters have a disproportionate impact, but the most recent congressional special election in Tennessee featured high turnout at nearly the level of the 2022 midterms, suggesting that the 13-point Democratic overperformance in that race, which has been replicated across the country, is more likely to be durable for next year.
This translates into a national wave in the high single digits and maybe more in 2026—after all, the party in power tends to disintegrate even more as that midterm approaches. That would create a Democratic House majority even if Trump’s redistricting scheme were relatively successful.
Indiana Republicans abandoning the schemes of their president offers further evidence of the proverbial fleeing from the sinking ship. Trump can continue to try to use his one big dumb gerrymandering trick to rig elections in his favor, but it’s likely to fail.
None of this should suggest that a fight-fire-with-fire approach to gerrymandering, while absolutely correct as a political strategy of the moment, is in any way good for democracy. Political reforms to prevent this from happening again (the most robust version would be proportional representation) are sorely needed, because now that this precedent of endless gerrymandering has been set, it will likely be tried again, even if it failed utterly this time.
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