Indiana spurns Trump’s attempt to rig 2026 elections
Republicans in the Indiana state Senate on Thursday defied President Donald Trump’s orders to gerrymander their congressional map in order to help rig the 2026 midterms for the GOP, a major rebuke of their party’s leader.
The new congressional map—which would have rigged the districts so that Republicans would hold all nine of the state’s U.S. House seats—failed, with 31 lawmakers voting against it and 19 voting in the affirmative. That means a majority of the Republicans in the state Senate voted against it, a massive F-U to Trump.
They did so despite a massive pressure campaign from Trump and other Republicans leaders, including Vice President JD Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Trump’s douchebag son Donald Trump Jr.—who vowed to embark on a retributive campaign to oust any lawmaker who voted against the gerrymandering scheme.
That pressure campaign led the lawmakers to receive violent threats, which Indiana Republicans said actually hardened them against the new map.
“I will not let Indiana or any state become subject to the threat of political violence in order to influence a legislative product,” GOP state Sen. Greg Walker, who voted against the map, said on Thursday.
In the wake of his embarrassing loss, Trump and his minions tried to rewrite history, claiming Trump didn’t actually work that hard to get the state to redraw their maps—even though he absolutely did.
“I wasn’t working on it very hard. I wasn’t very much involved,” Trump told reporters after the vote.
“He is not a lame-duck. He’s the most powerful person of this generation,” Johnson told CNN. “He did not put a major pressure campaign.”
However, Trump did wage a major pressure campaign, firing off multiple threatening Truth Social posts, deputizing Vance to travel to Indiana to twist arms, and even resorting to extortion by saying he’d withhold federal funds to the state if the new map didn’t pass—the same kind of quid pro quo demand that got him impeached in his first term.
Following the embarrassing loss, Republicans said that Trump is losing his grip on his party, as GOP lawmakers realize that Trump is a lame duck after the massive losses they’ve faced in recent elections.
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“The shift in mood really happened because of the November elections. Every Republican politician saw a vision of their own mortality—and Trump’s ultimate ephemerality—in those numbers, and now people are telling him no,” Republican pundit Jeff Blehar wrote in a post on X.
Ultimately, the fact that Indiana refused to redraw their map means the 2026 gerrymandering wars that Trump launched will basically be a draw.
“Republicans’ mid-decade redistricting war on track to yield minimal (if any) gains. Biggest remaining variables: FL, LA, VA – which could cancel out,” Cook Political Report editor Dave Wasserman wrote in a post on X.
