“What happened is simple,” we might say. “Trump has become a lame duck, and Hoosiers reacted accordingly.” Well, yes, the president is more of a lame duck than he was a few months ago: Republicans have gotten drubbed in one off-year election after another lately, and his job approval on the economy is in the toilet. But he still has enough juice on the right to have scared a populist as beloved as Marjorie Taylor Greene into retirement by declaring his intent to find a primary challenger to her. Every Republican in Indiana who voted against the new map did so knowing they’d have considerably less job security as a result. The lame duck ain’t that lame.
“Maybe Indiana Republicans feared their gerrymander would become a ‘dummymander,’” you might speculate. “Dummymander” alludes to the fact that, by redrawing House maps to dilute the Democratic vote in blue districts, Republicans would also necessarily be diluting the GOP vote in red ones. If a state has, say, five R+10 seats and a single D+10 seat and it carves up the latter by redrawing liberal voters there into the five Republican districts, the new map might end up with five R+6 seats and a single R+1 one. In a midterm election in which the electorate shifted to the left by 7 points, Democrats would win only one seat under the old map—but all six seats under the new dummymandered one.
In theory, Dernulc and his colleagues recognized that possibility, worried the blue wave that appears inbound might be truly gargantuan, and resolved to protect the GOP’s House advantage in Indiana from our dummy president. But no, it seems that’s unlikely: Lakshya Jain, the head of political data at The Argument, estimates that Democrats would have won only one seat in Indiana under the new map even in a best-case scenario for the party next fall.
There’s no way to explain what happened in the state Senate yesterday in terms of the usual selfish or nihilistic motives that have driven cynical right-wing lawmakers during the Trump era, I think. The solution to this mystery begins with the sighting of a political unicorn—honest-to-God principled conservative leadership on the American right.
A good example.
Despite the paranoia of populist influencers, there’s no evidence that MAGA black sheep Mike Pence was involved in tanking the redistricting push. It was another former Indiana governor, Mitch Daniels, who ended up fielding calls from state senators and urging them to vote no.
But I don’t blame Trumpists for suspecting Pence’s influence. For one thing, he, Daniels, and the Republican majority leader of the state Senate, Rodric Bray, are politically simpatico. “I’m for small government, personal accountability, and liberty, and I work toward that every day,” Bray told Politico last month. When asked about his hesitancy to redistrict on an irregular timetable, in the middle of the decade, he replied that he wanted his state’s residents “to have trust in the institution” of the Senate.
He’s a Reaganite refugee in a dystopian autocratic party. Like Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence.
More than that, I find it impossible to believe that Pence’s example on January 6 didn’t affect the calculations of Bray and his caucus to some degree. “Imagine how different recent history would look if elected Republicans in D.C. had taken this very simple approach,” our own Steve Hayes said of Dernulc’s point about doing the right thing and letting the chips fall where they may. But we don’t need to imagine it: That was Pence’s ethos precisely when he refused to carry out Trump’s coup plot.
Some Republicans who voted against redistricting yesterday surely know the former VP personally from his time as governor. Those who don’t will nonetheless know him as the most prominent politician to come out of Indiana since Benjamin Harrison. (No offense, Dan Quayle.) Five years ago, they watched him pass a test of civic principle similar to the one they’ve been taking but with the difficulty dialed up by an order of magnitude—Pence was Trump’s right-hand man, the presidency itself was on the line, and responsibility for the outcome fell squarely on him instead of being spread among a caucus of 40.
He did the right thing anyway, and my guess is that many traditional Republicans in Indiana’s political circles admire him for it and resent those who don’t. So when the same creep who allegedly thought Pence deserved to be hanged came banging on their door, making demands about a new House map, what were conservatives who are uncomfortable with ruthless mid-decade redistricting supposed to do? Cower, despite their friend Mike Pence having faced everything they’ve faced and then some? Or follow his example?
The simple explanation for yesterday’s result is that it was a product of strong, principled leadership, a species gone almost entirely extinct among Republicans since 2015. By Bray, first and foremost, in refusing to strong-arm his caucus into approving the new map after being demagogued by the president; by Daniels, in lobbying against redistricting despite knowing that doing so will make him a target of White House “retribution”; and by Pence, in showing Hoosier lawmakers on January 6 that “no” is always an option when the illiberal right demands some appalling new power grab that will make American democracy more embittered and dysfunctional than it already is.
Leadership matters. And yet, that doesn’t explain everything.
“Indiana so decisively failing to pass a 9-0 gerrymander despite full pressure from Trump is something that was genuinely unthinkable even six months ago,” Jain alleged yesterday. It’s hard to disagree. If the president had leaned on Indiana lawmakers earlier this year to pass a new map, back when he was steamrolling every opponent in sight, I doubt that the courage Pence showed at the Capitol would have been as contagious as it was in Thursday’s vote. Certainly, there’s no way a majority of Senate Republicans would have voted to reject the new map.
Something has changed between then and now, but it’s not Trump’s growing lame-duck status or his polling on the economy. I think it’s the two S’s—statism and scumbaggery.
Statism.
The Indiana redistricting vote strikes me as a sort of political gag reflex. The president’s first year back in office has been so much more civically and ideologically disgusting than even I expected that conservatives with a modicum of self-respect are beginning to vomit it up.
That’s why the usual thunderstorm of primary threats against anti-redistricting lawmakers didn’t work this time. Why would any Reaganite care at this point about being drummed out of a position of authority in this garbage party, particularly a position as minor and unglamorous as state legislator? If you’re a Republican in the Pence or Daniels mold who believes in “small government, personal accountability, and liberty,” as Bray put it, all you have to look forward to as a GOP official in 2025 is watching your leader betray every value you cherish and potentially trying to get you killed if you don’t help him do it.
The White House campaign to pressure Indiana’s legislators is the problem in microcosm, with Trump once again imperiously imposing his will on a part of society that the president has no business meddling with. “It’s time to say no to pressure from Washington, D.C.,” GOP state Sen. Spencer Deery complained during Thursday’s floor debate. “It’s time to say no to outsiders who are trying to run our state.” Being a Republican nowadays means having to look the other way when Trump seizes control of trade, partly nationalizes corporations, engineers bailouts for favored constituencies hurt by his moronic agenda, and abuses antitrust law to try to remake the media in his image. His tariffs have delivered the biggest tax increase as a percentage of GDP in more than 30 years, and his spending has produced the fastest accumulation of $1 trillion in new debt outside of the pandemic.
Big government has rarely been so big. Now Trump wants red-state Republicans to ditch federalism and take dictation from him on redistricting, too.
On Thursday, as the state Senate prepared to vote, the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation shocked political media when it claimed that “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.” Despite what MAGA shoeshiners will tell you, the White House has no constitutional power to withhold funding that Congress has approved and no civic right to deprive a state of public services because it declined to put a thumb on the electoral scale for the president’s party—but never mind that. Did Trump really make this threat to Hoosier lawmakers or was Heritage full of hot air?
It appears that he did. Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith seemed to confirm it last night, tweeting that “the Indiana Senate made it clear to the Trump Admin today that they do not want to be partners with the WH. The WH made it clear to them that they’d oblige.” As far back as mid-November, Politico reported that Gov. Mike Braun had begun “insinuating that Indiana could lose out on federal funding for key projects if the Senate doesn’t deliver a gerrymander.” That doesn’t sound to me like a scenario Braun came up with on his own; it sounds like one that had been communicated to him and which he was relaying.
The more statist and domineering the White House gets, the more reluctant to cooperate with it we should expect Pence-style conservatives to become. Yesterday was perhaps the logical result of 11 months of Trump trying to or-else Reaganites into embracing banana-republicanism. “You wouldn’t change minds by being mean. And the efforts were mean-spirited from the get-go,” Republican state Sen. Jean Leising told CNN of the president’s pressure campaign. “If you were wanting to change votes, you would probably try to explain why we should be doing this, in a positive way. That never happened, so, you know, I think they get what they get.”
Scumbaggery.
Which brings us to the other factor. Trump, his deputies, and much of his base are amoral scumbags, and as their amorality has gotten more repulsive over time, it stands to reason that the gag reflex among decent conservatives would grow stronger.
The barrage of threats Indiana lawmakers received during the White House’s pressure campaign was a major subplot of the state’s redistricting push. A number of Republican lawmakers were swatted; Leising’s grandson, an eighth-grader, and a number of his classmates received “bad” text messages about her. “I fear for this institution,” GOP state Sen. Greg Walker said yesterday during a hearing about the risk of giving into coercion. “I fear for the state of Indiana. And I fear for all states if we allow threats and intimidation to become the norm.”
Despite extensive media coverage of the harassment campaign as this drama played out over months, Trump said not a word to deter it, as far as I’m aware. As noted earlier, he seemed to wink at it when he posted on Truth Social that certain Republicans needed more “encouragement to make the right decision.” I’d bet every dollar I have that he privately believes figures like Walker, Leising, and Dernulc deserved what they got for opposing him, the same way Mike Pence did. In an era in which even Marjorie Taylor Greene now has to fear for her life from the MAGA mob, the urge to vomit is irrepressible.
It’s one of many signs that the president and his movement are coming off the rails morally as his political strength slips. The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser pointed to one of his increasingly dark tirades about immigrants from the third world recently as evidence of the trajectory: “Trump is still Trump, but what a difference it is, nonetheless, to go from a President who felt it necessary to deny that he had said ‘sh-thole countries’ to one who, eight years later, is celebrating the fact that he said it.”
Corruption takes place in plain sight. Indictments are sought against political enemies, are rejected by grand juries, and then quickly sought again. Predators are let loose on society for no better reason than that they support the president. The administration’s immigration policy—and not just its immigration policy—seems to be following an ethic of “whites only.” Meanwhile, the most influential figures in populist media are eating each other alive with insane, accusatory conspiracy theories, to the point where even people known for pushing insane, accusatory conspiracy theories are alarmed.
The American right is a moral disaster. Day by day we’re witnessing its utter civic ruination. Everyone knew going in that reelecting a coup-plotting felon bent on “retribution” would lead to an ethical nightmare, but even I’m surprised by how quickly Trump 2.0 has descended into brazen, unapologetic depravity. We live under a government that’s nihilistic on good days and deliberately immoral on bad ones, in many cases barely pretending to rationalize its behavior as motivated by some virtuous public purpose.
Go figure that a person of character like Rodric Bray would be less enthusiastic about further empowering the person who presides over that disaster than he might have been six months ago, or that he might even feel morally obliged to course-correct. “I hope that this is the beginning of the country stepping back from the brink,” Republican state Sen. Eric Bassler said after the new map failed yesterday in Indiana. He was talking about the partisan redistricting wars, but the larger subtext of his point was clear enough.
And so here’s where we land on why conservatives did what they did on Thursday: Why not?
Those two Democratic seats in Indiana are unlikely to decide the next House majority, but even if they do, it’s easy to believe that conservatism would benefit more from divided government in the last two years of Trump’s term than by letting him plow ahead with his statist, scumbag authoritarian project unchecked by an obedient GOP Congress. It’s not like he’s teeing up a Reaganite policy revival if his party retains the House. “He needs to be more positive about what he needs to address for ’27 and ’28,” Leising said to CNN of the president. “Why does he need to have a Republican majority in ’27 and ’28? What is he going to do next?”
Her guess is as good as mine, but “more bad than good” is a safe bet.
And if Trump, his son, the governor, and other White House lickspittles make good on their threats to help primary Bray and his accomplices, who cares? They might not succeed—Americans tend to dislike partisan redistricting—but even if they do, the worst-case scenario for Indiana’s Senate Republicans is that it’ll be some other group of chumps who have to deal with it the next time the president instigates a wave of death threats. Frankly, I think it’d be terrific if the Trump GOP wasted resources in a midterm year trying to primary obscure Midwestern lawmakers from within the party while a huge blue wave gathers force and bears down on them. That would show other Reaganite voters whose gag reflex has been tested lately where their leader’s priorities lie.
It’s long past time for conservatives to climb out of this fetid moral sewer. If they need to be chased out by a wave of primaries aimed at the latest poor slobs to fail a litmus test of autocratic ruthlessness, bring it on.
