In an extraordinary rebuke to Donald Trump on Thursday, the Indiana state Senate rejected a gerrymandered congressional map relentlessly pushed by the president and his allies that would have given Republicans a lopsided 9-0 advantage in the state’s House delegation by eliminating the seats of two Democratic members of Congress. The final vote was 31-19 in the state Senate, where Republicans have a supermajority: Twenty-one Republicans joined 10 Democrats to defeat the legislation.
Republican state senators who opposed the gerrymandered map sharply criticized the months-long pressure campaign by Trump and his allies, which led to threats of violence and intimidation against at least 11 state lawmakers.
“I fear for this institution,” Republican state Sen. Greg Walker, chair of the Senate Committee on Elections, said during an emotional speech this week. “I fear for the state of Indiana and I fear for all states if we allow intimidation and threats to become the norm.”
Ultimately, the heavy-handed tactics employed by Trump backfired on the president and his allies.
Republican state Sen. Greg Goode, a key swing vote whom Trump called out by name and who was a victim of a swatting attack, cited the climate of fear and intimidation as a reason why he was opposing the bill.
“Misinformation. Cruel social media posts. Over the top pressure from inside and outside the statehouse. Threats of primaries. Threats of violence. Acts of violence,” Goode said on the Indiana Senate floor on Thursday. “Friends, we’re better than this, are we not?”
Trump reprised the playbook he used to attempt to overturn the 2020 election, attacking, bullying, and harassing Republican state officials in Indiana who would not automatically bend to his will.
The president summoned Republican state legislators to the White House and sent Vice President JD Vance to Indiana twice to lobby the state legislature. He vowed to support primary campaigns against Republicans who opposed the redistricting plan, calling out individual state legislators by name, and attacking the leader of the state Senate, Rodric Bray, as a “weak and pathetic RINO” after Bray said the senate didn’t have the votes to pass the measure.
Trump posted another rant on Truth Social against Bray on the eve of the state Senate vote, calling the Senate leader “either a bad guy, or a very stupid one!” and once again threatening “a MAGA Primary” against “anybody that votes against Redistricting.” That same night, a Republican member of the state House who voted against the redistricting bill was the victim of a bomb threat at his home.
Another GOP state senator opposed to gerrymandering who received a pipe bomb threat at her home posted on X that it was the “result of the D.C. political pundits for redistricting.”
Trump’s allies, including Turning Point USA and another dark money group led by former Trump campaign officials, escalated the pressure campaign by vowing to spend seven figures supporting primary challengers to Republican opponents of the map. Indiana Republican Gov. Mike Braun, who eventually fell in line, suggested the state could lose resources if it didn’t comply with Trump’s dictates.
“If we try to drag our feet as a state on it, probably, we’ll have consequences of not working with the Trump administration as tightly as we should,” Braun said.
Heritage Action, the dark money arm of the Heritage Foundation, claimed that Trump threatened to strip all federal funding from the state if redistricting failed, a new low in his authoritarian playbook if true.
“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,” the group wrote on X. “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.”
Other top Republicans went so far as to invoke the death of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk as a reason why the legislature should pass the new gerrymandered map. “They killed Charlie Kirk—the least that we can do is go through a legal process and redistrict Indiana into a nine to zero map,” US Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) said a few days after Kirk’s murder.
Mid-decade gerrymandering is bad enough on its own. It’s even worse when accompanied by economic and political terrorism. The intimidation against Indiana state legislators, which included warnings of a pipe bomb and fake threats against lawmakers designed to produce a law enforcement response, called to mind the ire Trump and his supporters directed at former Indiana Gov. Mike Pence when insurrectionists broke into the Capitol on January 6 and said they wanted to “hang” the vice president because he refused to go along with the president’s unconstitutional plan to overturn the 2020 election.
But now, instead of overturning an election, Trump is trying to rig and predetermine the next one so that his party doesn’t lose power next November.
The 9-0 map was designed to eliminate all traces of Democratic representation at the congressional level in the state, giving Republicans 100 percent of seats in a state where Trump won 58 percent of the vote in 2024. Under the proposal, Trump would have carried every one of the new districts by at least 12 points. Indiana’s current map received an A from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. The new one got an F.
To oust Democratic Rep. André Carson, the city of Indianapolis, which he largely represents, would be split four ways, creating districts that border three different states in the process. Carson’s new district would have shifted from favoring Kamala Harris by 40 points to Trump by nearly 20 points, one of the most outlandish examples of gerrymandering anywhere in the country. It would go from a compact urban district that is roughly 50 percent non-white to a sprawling rural district that is 80 percent white, dramatically diluting the power of minority voters in Indianapolis.
“Splicing our state’s largest city—and its biggest economic driver—into four parts is ridiculous,” Carson said in a statement. “It’s clear these orders are coming from Washington, and they clearly don’t know the first thing about our community.” (Republicans confirmed the map was drawn by a DC-based group, the National Republican Redistricting Trust, that has drawn pro-Republican gerrymanderers in other states, including Texas, this year.)
The targeting of Carson, who is Black, continued the trend of Republicans drawing new maps in 2025 that seek to dismantle districts held by Black Democrats, which has also occurred in Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina.
The Trump-backed map also attempted to oust Democratic Rep. Frank Mrvan, who represents a district in northwest Indiana alongside Lake Michigan that Trump narrowly lost. Mrvan’s district would sprawl from two counties to eight, with the Democratic cities of East Chicago and Gary outnumbered by the red countryside, in another example of how the map disenfranchises Black and urban voters.
The egregious nature of this gerrymander was too much for even the Republican supermajority in the Indiana state Senate to ignore. The map’s defeat is further evidence of how, despite the Supreme Court reinstating Texas’ gerrymander last week, Trump’s gerrymandering arms race hasn’t become the lopsided victory he initially envisioned. The parties may break mostly even in the end.
Voting rights supporters in Missouri submitted more than 300,000 signatures this week to hold a ballot referendum that could ultimately block the gerrymandered map passed by Republicans in September, although Missouri’s Republican Secretary of State is now absurdly claiming he can unilaterally declare the new referendum unconstitutional, which is sure to provoke another court battle. New Democratic districts in California, Utah, and potentially Virginia could also minimize Trump’s advantage heading into the midterms.
Trump is doing everything he can to break American democracy. For one day, at least, he failed.
