Trump Gets His Way in Indiana
· The Atlantic
Why don’t more Republicans defy President Trump? The president’s poll numbers are bad. The war in Iran is raising gasoline prices. The president’s family is pocketing billions. The president seems to care only about building glitzy monuments to himself. With the impending midterms looking pretty bad for Republicans, you’d think that Trump’s co-partisans would be taking a cue from Meat Loaf: “I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that.” But no. Breaches of discipline remain rare and containable.
To better understand Trump’s power over his party—its limits and potential—study yesterday’s Indiana Republican primary.
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You may remember that late last year the Indiana Senate rejected a Trump-backed plan to gerrymander the state to eliminate Democratic control over two seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Twenty-one Republicans joined 10 Democrats to defeat the measure, 31–19. The Republican naysayers cited the gerrymander’s unpopularity with voters. The plan would have denied the city of Indianapolis representation in Congress by chopping it into pieces swallowed by surrounding suburbs and exurbs, among other defects.
[Mark Leibovich: Democrats could use a cold shower before the midterms]
Trump and Vice President Vance promptly threatened Republican dissenters with retribution. Eight Indiana state senators were targeted for primary challenges. The Trump White House and its allies—including the formerly anti-Trump free-market group Club for Growth, which now supports him—poured serious (for Indiana) money into those challenges, at least five of which went their way. (Counting continues as I write.) These victories clear the way for Trump’s ultimate plan to topple Indiana’s Senate President Rodric Bray, who failed to push through the president’s gerrymander scheme. Only candidates who had promised to oppose Bray’s reelection earned Trump’s endorsement and campaign support.
Nervous Republicans throughout the country have heard the message: Stick with Trump, and you may be politically finished; break with him, and you’re finished for sure.
Republicans launched the latest gerrymander battle last year with a bid to squeeze five more U.S. House seats out of Texas. Democrats, after striking back in California and Virginia, had seemed the winners of the push and counterpush. The Texas gerrymander had been premised on the assumption that Trump’s gains with Texas Latinos in 2024 would prove enduring, but Latino support for the GOP is plunging. Republican hopes for Texas are going awry. Some experts estimate that the party’s creative new Texas maps will net only two more GOP seats for the state.
But all is not lost for Republicans, thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision last week to undermine the Voting Rights Act by granting states new permission to eliminate Black- and Latino-held congressional seats. Because the Supreme Court also approved partisan gerrymandering in 2019, the practical effect will be to allow the Republicans of Mississippi and South Carolina to eliminate seats so long as they take care to use the word Democrat in their internal documents and never the word Black.
[Ben Ritz: Democrats learned the wrong lesson from 2024]
Any Republican who may have hesitated to use this new permission to eliminate Democratic seats now understands—thanks to Indiana—the penalty of noncompliance with Trump’s wishes.
Yet Democrats are hardly helping their own case, having caught a chronic Republican disease: candidate-quality syndrome. In the political cycles of 2010 and 2012, the Republican Tea Party movement won primaries against mainstream, pro-business Republicans with extremist and oddball candidates. (One recorded a TV ad denying she was a witch. Another suggested that women did not need access to abortion after rape, because women rarely become pregnant when a rape is “legitimate.”) These candidates threw away otherwise-winnable races in Delaware, Indiana, Missouri, and Nevada—and postponed the GOP takeover of the U.S. Senate from 2010, when it was within reach, to 2014.
Something like that may be befalling Democrats now.
It has become an article of faith among progressives that Kamala Harris lost in 2024 because she did not talk enough about Palestinians and Gaza. The actual data available confirm that Harris lost because she was seen as too far to the left of where most voters placed themselves. But beliefs do not have to be based on truth to motivate action.
In the 2026 cycle, Democrats are elevating candidates who have taken positions that would have once seemed politically suicidal: a U.S. House candidate in New Jersey who served as a character witness for “the blind sheikh” behind the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center; a U.S. Senate candidate in Michigan who campaigned with Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer who has said that America deserved 9/11; and a candidate for U.S. Senate in Maine who unconvincingly claimed not to know that the skull-and-crossbones tattoo he had worn for almost 20 years was associated with the Nazi SS.
[Read: The House of Representatives is turning into the Electoral College]
Most commentary about these candidates focuses on whether they are doing harm to their own races. But as the Tea Party experience underscores, all politics is national. Nominating an extremist in New Jersey could hurt Democratic candidates all over the country. As unpopular as Trump is, the Democratic brand remains fragile, an April CNN poll indicates. Even now, despite tariffs, the Iran war, and the Trump ballroom, more Americans hold a favorable view of the Republican Party (32 percent) than those do of the Democratic Party (28 percent). Progressives want to bet that “Gaza First” can beat “America First.” To nonprogressives, that betting strategy seems a fast track to political failure.
And if, come summer and fall, Trump finds an exit from Iran, gasoline prices trend down, and the election race tightens, Republican gerrymanders may yield dividends after all. Gerrymanders work best when the vote is close. Trump’s misgovernment should make the gap too big to rig, but the “Gaza First” Democrats are doing their utmost to shrink it. If they succeed, the brave Indiana state senators who resisted Trump may have sacrificed their career for nothing.