‘It’s a well-developed culture that we are resistant to being told by outsiders how to run our state,’ state senator Spencer Deery tells NR.
Last Thursday, MAGA world was on the edge of its seat. The president’s allies had spent months lobbying Indiana state legislators to support a new congressional map eliminating every Democratic seat in the state as part of the administration’s nationwide mid-decade redistricting push ahead of the 2026 midterms. Indiana’s Republican Governor Mike Braun pressured state legislators to get in line. Vice President JD Vance had made multiple trips to the state to make the administration’s case in person. Even House Speaker Mike Johnson got involved.
In the end, more Republicans opposed the effort than supported it. Twenty-one Republicans joined all ten state legislative Democrats in voting against the new map, leaving the final tally at 31 opposed and only 19 Republicans in favor. The final margin was a stunning rebuke to the second-term president, who has grown accustomed to bending the GOP to his will over the past decade and who dreads the political consequences that will emerge under a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives during his final two years in office.
For Spencer Deery, a special assistant for Purdue University Global and Purdue President Emeritus Mitch Daniels who represents Indiana’s 23rd senate district, last Thursday’s vote margin came as no surprise. “We had been counting since August” and “had seen some fluctuations,” here and there, “but I think everybody in the caucus knew exactly where everybody stood within a margin of one or two votes,” says Deery, a married father of three who was the target in a swatting attempt a few weeks before the redistricting vote. “We kept those counts to ourselves.”
Deery credited Rodric Bray, President Pro Tempore of the Indiana State Senate who has become public enemy No. 1 in MAGA circles for standing firm in his opposition to mid-cycle redistricting. “Senator Bray kept saying the votes aren’t there, and there were some people that tried to challenge him on that, but those of us that had been there when the votes were counted knew he was absolutely telling the truth,” he said.
Out-of-state MAGA critics have attacked Bray for leading the anti-redistricting effort and whipping votes against the Trump-preferred map — but his colleague tells NR that “nothing could be further from the truth.”
In fact, Deery says, Bray remains popular within the state legislative caucus because he lets members dictate the direction people want to go. “From the very beginning, it was put to a discussion and a vote among the members, and he got his marching orders from them,” and “he’s followed the caucus in terms of what we wanted to do and not the other way around.”
Those same out-of-state MAGA critics have tarred Deery and his anti-redistricting colleagues as RINOs — slang for “Republicans in Name Only,” but their opposition to redistricting was based on the values that made them Republicans in the first place.
As Deery said in his floor speech ahead of the vote, the anti-redistricting state legislators identify as religious, constitutional, and fiscal conservatives. “What that means to me is that I believe in conserving the values, the culture, and the institutions that created American exceptionalism,” Deery said in his floor remarks. He tells National Review that in the paper copy of the speech he brought to the Senate last week, he underlined the word “institutions” to underscore how his opposition to the Trump-preferred map was driven by his conservative principles.
“For me, it absolutely is an issue that speaks to what kind of institutions do we want, and what kind of sacrifices are we willing to make in terms of their deterioration and for short-term partisan gains,” he tells NR. “For me, the math didn’t work out.”
This is the crux of the problem for the map’s opponents. As Deery said in his floor speech, “normalizing mid-cycle gerrymandering would create a culture in which a political party could select new voters not once a decade, but any time it feared the consequences of an approaching election.”
For Deery, the Trump allies in D.C. who are raging at him and his colleagues completely misunderstand GOP voter sentiment on the ground in many state legislative districts.
“For a long time, there was a real mismatch between what we were hearing on the ground at the grocery store, at county fairs or festivals, or what we were getting in our inboxes from constituents, and what we were reading online,” he insists.
Instead of impassioned constituent complaints about redistricting, he heard impassioned constituent complaints about affordability. “What a good chunk of us were hearing from our constituents was they care about the economy,” Deery says. “They care about their rising electric bills. They’ve got concerns about data centers. They’ve got concerns that our farmers are going through some issues. That’s what we were hearing about, and that’s where the passion was.”
The various swatting incidents didn’t help matters. Nor did the robocalls, primary threats, or the bizarre and apparently unfounded threat from the Heritage Foundation’s political arm that a redistricting failure would prompt the Trump administration to strip federal funding from Indiana.
Sometimes it was “almost comical” the kind of out-of-state pressure tactics that loud pro-redistricting social media accounts engaged in, Deery says, from claims that former Vice President and Indiana Governor Mike Pence was secretly pulling the strings behind the scenes, to the insistence from at least one MAGA-aligned influencer that all GOP redistricting opponents were letting down “Indianans” — apparently unaware that those who call Indiana home refer to themselves as “Hoosiers.”
These dynamics fed into many state legislators’ instinctive resistance to heeding out-of-state calls from Washington bureaucrats on how to run state-level affairs. “It’s a well-developed culture that we are resistant to being told by outsiders how to run our state,” Deery says.
The Republicans who voted against the Trump-preferred maps know that those votes could cost them their careers. Trump allies and a handful of conservative groups including Heritage Action, Club for Growth, and Turning Point Action have all pledged to spend a hefty sum funding primary challengers to every Republican state legislator who voted against the Trump-preferred map.
Anti-redistricting Indiana legislators believe this is a fool’s errand. “As Republicans, our focus should be on maintaining a Republican majority in Congress,” and “any kind of a revenge tour is a distraction from that,” he says. “This is probably naïve, but my hope would be that any donor, even any candidate, that is interested in using resources on something that would be a distraction from that, would rethink that in the name of the greater good of maintaining Republican majorities.”
Naïve or not, many high-profile figures in the MAGA movement are genuinely convinced that opposition to Trump’s redistricting push should be considered a treasonous act for a Republican. These anti-redistricting Republicans, critics argue, are unilaterally disarming after Democrats maximized their advantage by gerrymandering blue states across the country, including California.
Deery and his allies are also accused of having personally betrayed Trump, who is wary of the political consequences that will result from a Democratic House in 2026: impeachments and investigations galore.
Indiana anti-redistricting Republicans’ arguments are reminiscent of the arguments that many institutionalist-minded Senate Republicans continue to make in defense of the filibuster, the upper chamber’s 60 vote threshold for passing legislation that old-guard conservatives view as a bulwark against liberal legislative excess. Unsurprisingly, the filibuster is once again on Trump’s chopping-block wish list, testing Washington Republicans’ backbones as MAGA-aligned pundits, administration officials, and even some lawmakers continue to insist that thwarting Trump’s desires should come at a cost.
Trump is quickly approaching the one-year mark in his second term. In this final year before the midterms, his closest allies have every incentive to preserve Trump’s kingmaker status before he becomes a lame duck. Not that his closest advisers put it in those terms.
Ahead of last week’s vote, Trump’s 2024 campaign manager Chris LaCivita described the dynamic to Politico as follows: “If you don’t defend a political movement from those that stand in the way — then it’s not a movement at all — a handful of politicians in Indiana will now know what standing in the way really means.”