It is as clear-cut a rebuke as possible from the state’s Republicans to Donald Trump and his national concerns.
Big news this afternoon out of Indiana, where the Indiana State Senate just voted to reject a mid-decade Republican gerrymandering map that would have made the state’s current 7–2 Republican majority into a theoretical 9–0 clean sweep. This is, of course, part of Trump’s broader nationwide push for red states to gerrymander their districts, panicked as he is about the near-certitude of the GOP losing its already-narrow majority in what looks likely to be a Democratic tsunami next year. Now, despite immense public and private pressure over the last month from the Trump administration and its allies, it’s official: The domino cascade ends in the Hoosier State.
This is not entirely unexpected news — the map was tipped to fail in the state senate as far back as a month ago — but the utterly lopsided margin of its defeat most certainly is. Indiana’s senate has 50 members. Republicans hold an overwhelming supermajority in the chamber, outnumbering their Democratic counterparts 40–10. The Republican-sponsored bill failed by a 31–19 vote. In other words, over half of the GOP caucus voted against their own bill. It is as clear-cut a rebuke as possible from the state’s Republicans to Donald Trump and his national concerns. (When GOP state senate leader Rodric Bray announced in November that “there are not enough votes to move that idea forward,” it turns out he was politely understating the level of opposition.)
Whence this show of rebellion? Context matters here: The state of Texas kicked off this entire nationwide redistricting circus back in August by bending to Trump’s demands to alter the state’s congressional lines in response to his surging performance among Latinos in the Rio Grande Valley. California responded in a tit-for-tat, stripping five Republicans of their safe seats via a statewide vote in November. Other red states in the Deep South are purportedly prepared to act once the Supreme Court, as expected, strikes down racial gerrymandering sometime early next year.
But the November elections have provided the entire political world — and elected Republicans especially — with an electrical shock of voter feedback. After ten months of the economic chaos of The Trump Show (and three months of the redistricting circus), the lopsided Democratic margins in every race hit a bit like an uppercut from reality, knocking Republicans out of their confident daze and forcing them to reckon with both the massive unpopularity of Trump’s economic agenda as well as their own political mortality. If the pro-Democratic shift in November 2026 tracks with that of November 2025 in any way, the GOP is going to lose its House majority by a margin well beyond the ability of redistricting to save.
For a pundit, the significance of today’s vote obviously comes in its open show of defiance: Where other Republican legislatures are eager to bend the knee to Trump’s demands, Indiana’s Republicans did not. As I wrote a month ago, Republicans are now contemplating a post-Trump world, and beginning to act accordingly.
And as a conservative of the older school, I also want to salute the men and women of the Indiana state senate for finding the steel in their spines today. The vote to reject redistricting will be interpreted (and sold) by many as an “act of principle,” but it was something more important than that: It was an act of wisdom. A blue tide is rushing in next November, and circumstances are conspiring to make it a potential Perfect Storm, reaching deep into territory the GOP has begun to take for granted. By declining — in numbers — to sign on to Trump’s demands, Indiana’s GOP has provided an alternate example for those who have yet to act: considering their state and party’s longer-term interests instead.
Have you seen the proposed map Trump wanted the state to approve? It is an obscenity, dividing Indiana up into nonsensically irregular shapes that converge centrally upon Indianapolis (the state’s one truly safe Democratic region) and distribute its votes cynically among five separate districts. It made the idea of regional representation or “communities of interest” into a joke. It compared unfavorably to the current congressional map of Illinois. (Realize what kind of judgment I am delivering with that statement.)
It is important to understand the pressure Republican lawmakers were under. For months, GOP state senators who were on the record with their opposition have been plagued by harrassment from angry MAGA activists enraged at their unwillingness to dance to Trump’s tune. We are not talking about social media invective, mind you, but true threats and a sickening number of actual swattings. (Nine GOP senators left their positions vague or undeclared until the final vote. Six of them voted against the map, and now you understand why they declined to state their position.)
The Trump administration turned the screws as well. Donald Trump Jr. announced on Twitter that he would be campaigning against disloyal Indiana legislators in their primaries next year. (We will see.) Mere minutes before the final vote in the Indiana senate was taken, Heritage Action — the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation — tweeted the following: “President Trump has made it clear to Indiana leaders: if the Indiana Senate fails to pass the map, all federal funding will be stripped from the state. 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.”
When you interpret the 31–19 vote in light of that sort of odious, outrageously unconstitutional threat, it makes a world of sense. (Donald Trump did not say any of this, incidentally, at least not in public. But it boggles the mind to see such crude thuggery from Heritage, of all places.) Why should the Indiana GOP bow to such obvious intimidation?
And all for what, exactly? Why should Indiana Republicans fritter away a well-balanced map to gain, in theory, two House seats — and in so doing deny the state any sort of seat at the table in an upcoming Democratic administration? What kind of sense does it make, in an era when Congress does less than ever? To fight a hopeless rearguard action for one election cycle for the sole benefit of Donald Trump, a man who has already proudly demonstrated through the executive-action-driven first year of his presidency that he has no need for a legislative agenda, or even a legislature for that matter?
It’s a sucker’s bargain, and all done for the ephemeral political needs of an ingrate president whose power will inevitably be broken after the midterms regardless. I credit the Indiana GOP for having more wisdom and foresight than that, and for looking after their state’s interests — and the likely shape of the political world a mere few years from now — rather than the panicked desires of a president whose sole need for a Republican Congress is as armor-plating to protect him from pushback to his executive overreach.