Indy-pendence

Local Power, Long Traditions, and the Limits of Trumpism

Something rather extraordinary happened last week: The Republican-dominated Indiana state senate rejected, by a vote of 31-19, a plan heavily backed by the White House to redistrict the state map to give Republicans more House seats in the 2026 Congressional election.

That was not what was expected. The Texas legislature had eagerly embraced the demands of the Trump White House to attempt to flip more congressional districts to Republicans, and that was then countered by California passing a proposition to allocate more seats to Democrats. Indiana, whose state senate is dominated by Republicans by a margin of 21-10, has voted for a Democrat in a presidential election only two times since 1936 — once in 1964, then in 2008. In short, it is one of the most Republican states in the country. Yet it roundly rejected the pressure of a Republican president and clear leader of the party.

The reasons are simple and straightforward: Indiana’s Republican state senators resented the strong-arm tactics of the White House and others around the country, and they were deeply troubled by a demand to violate decades of tradition and law just to tilt today’s political balance.

One senator, a 76-year-old grandmother named Jean Leising who has been in the job since 1988 and voted for Trump three times, said that after speaking at her eighth grade grandson’s school, his entire middle school basketball team received a slew of angry text messages railing against her for not supporting the redistricting bill. “I was angry,” she explained, “So the next day, I said, ‘I’ve got to talk about this.’ Because this is over the top. This shouldn’t be the way it was.”

Sensing support wavering, the White House threatened the state of Indiana with funding cuts if it failed to pass the plan: “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.” Such threats have been par for the course for this administration with Democratic-controlled states it deems recalcitrant, and indeed, presidents before Trump have tried to cut funding to states that oppose their administration. But it is rare for that to happen within a particular party, or for a president to so explicitly break with state leaders of his own party.

Not only did Trump officials threaten funding; they used the same doxxing and public flaming tactics that they’ve used to varying success against political opponents. This time, though, it backfired spectacularly.

Said another Republican senator, Sue Glock, who opposed the plan in the end, “Hoosiers are a hardy lot, and they don’t like to be threatened. They don’t like to be intimidated. They don’t like to be bullied in any fashion. And I think a lot of them responded with, ‘That isn’t going to work.’ And it didn’t.” State senators reported that, in their districts, sentiment turned sharply against the proposed redistricting as pressure mounted. Their constituents resented being bullied into changing local systems that had evolved over decades and into redrawing districts that were already firmly Republican. Greg Goode, another Republican senator who voted against the bill, announced that he was dismayed and repelled by the way the proponents had handled themselves: “Misinformation, cruel social media posts, over-the-top pressure from within the state house and outside, threats of primaries, threats of violence, acts of violence — friends, we’re better than this.”

There were also legitimate political concerns, that carving up two currently reliable Democratic districts would actually make several newly conceived Republican seats more competitive. Rather than increasing the Republican majority, then, a new map would open up the possibility of reducing it.

The result was a reminder that the narrative of a supine Republican party blindly supporting King Trump is more a media and Trumplandia fiction and less an actual truth. Of course, MAGA in Indiana still has its strong defenders, including the governor, who in the wake of the failed vote vowed that he would “be working with the President to challenge these people who do not represent the best interests of Hoosiers.” The White House was vehement that senators who voted against the proposal would pay a political price. Still, none of them have expressed the slightest regret about their stance. And all of them, too, remain staunch Republicans.

The result in Indiana should highlight that the United States remains a complicated and vibrant democratic system, which means it is contested, often virulent, and never complacent. The dominant public narrative of a triumphant MAGA and an untouchable Trump definitely serves both the most passionate anti-Trump voices and the most passionate pro-Trump ones, because it makes Trumplandia the only meaningful actor on the American political scene. That is not the case. Not at all. It never has been, and it never will be. And it would help us all to remember that.