Indiana’s Redistricting Fail Is More Complicated Than You Think

The corporate press has consistently depicted the Indiana Senate’s Thursday vote against creating more pro-Republican congressional maps as a sign of “loyalty” or “betrayal” of President Trump. But the reality is a lot more complicated, and it has a lot to say about the current distraction and incompetence of the Republican Party.

“Indiana lawmakers defy Trump’s redistricting push,” headlined The New York Times.

“Indiana Republicans defy Trump,” headlined the Associated Press.

Politico described the Thursday vote as “Indiana GOP’s Trump rebuke.”

To be sure, there’s definitely an anti-Trump factor to the fact that 21 of 40 Republican state senators — a majority! — voted against redistricting. Former Gov. Mitch Daniels, who with his donors remains quite influential in the state Republican Party, very publicly opposed the plan.

Daniels, a frequent Trump critic, is credited with winning Indiana Republicans the legislative supermajority status they’ve maintained since he left the governorship in 2013. After the redistricting effort failed, he again took to the anti-conservative smear machine Washington Post to celebrate his party’s very public display of incompetence.

Politics is fueled by patronage. And what patronage system has the Trump administration offered Indiana Republicans to compete with the in-state one currently making them quite comfortable doing as little as possible? None. Heritage Action and Lt. Gov. Micah Bechwith claimed Trump threatened federal funds to the state, but that’s not a replacement for reliable campaign funds that politicians require to get elected.

Another key problem with the fact that Indiana’s GOP is financially fueled by anti-Trump special interests is that they control the pool of potential candidates for the promised primary challenges to those who voted against redistricting. President Trump’s record of endorsing primary challengers has been spotty, to say the least. Very often, he endorses swamp creatures to replace swamp creatures. Chalk it up to terrible advisers if you want, but this phenomenon is real, and really terrible. It would be amazing if this spectacular and very public failure fixed that glaring, longstanding issue.

If it doesn’t, it’s quite likely Trump’s promised primary challenges replace low performers with more low performers who know all they have to do is back Trump on redistricting while freely mimicking those they’re replacing in every other way. That threatens the success of every other Trump administration priority in the Indiana legislature besides redistricting and does nothing to improve the general MAGA level of the Indiana Republican Party.

This, not incidentally, is reflected in senators’ concerns the new maps would make the Indiana GOP even more Indianapolis-centric, which is to say more establishment-centric. The party’s biggest divisions on policy are also geographic, with more conservative representatives coming from more rural areas and more anti-Trump establishment types coming from the cities. This top concern among the no and undecided votes, as explained by IndyStar conservative columnist Jacob Stewart, was never discussed nor dealt with, a fundamental failure of communication and leadership.

It would be wasteful and short-sighted from a Trump administration perspective to replace Senate Pro-Tem Rod Bray with a clone on every matter except redistricting. That’s because this issue is a general Rorschach test of senators’ overall politics. Those who get this wrong also tend to get other MAGA priorities wrong, and the party needs a housecleaning on far more than redistricting.

The numerous murder attempts against Republicans in Indiana leading up to the redistricting vote via SWAT and bomb threats were powerful subliminal messages that the Trump administration cannot protect its foot soldiers. It’s important to note that Gov. Mike Braun, an early redistricting supporter, and St. Joseph County Councilwoman Amy Drake, a Federalist contributor who has no authority over redistricting, also faced such attacks. So these threats not only targeted Republican senators perceived as weak on redistricting. This was a broad set of attacks to sow political terror, and it worked.

It’s not Trump’s fault that Democrats have decided to treat his very normal, moderate governance as if preserving America’s massive welfare state is the second coming of the Third Reich. But this is the political situation he and his party are dealt. That means it would behoove his administration to keep showing the people out in flyover country that the Trump administration has their back. They protect their people, not just in standard patronage, but also in law enforcement protections against domestic terrorist attacks.

The SWAT hits should get a federal counterterrorism probe (not run by Democrat fixers like the last one) that finds and tries those perpetrating them for attempted murder. The fundamentally normie Hoosier representative should not have to fear that his children will be needlessly dragged out of bed by police in riot gear simply because their dad is a Republican. This would also directly undermine the vicious corporate press implication that the SWAT attacks were part of a terror campaign on behalf of the Trump administration.

Even putting the terrifying SWAT attacks aside, it’s indisputable that the amount of leftist vitriol against redistricting was much more pronounced on the ground in Indiana, and that couldn’t fail to affect votes. A key Republican Party problem is motivating voters via a strong ground game, and that persistent failure strongly affected this vote. How many more times does this factor have to bite Republicans in the butt before they fix it?

Although Indiana is a supermajority Republican and three-time Trump-solid state, the small minority of leftist activists were far more vocal and present on the issue than the large majority of Republican voters. Republican senators who voted no cited this repeatedly, and again, nobody dealt with their concerns.

The most important thing missing from the Indiana redistricting effort was a positive explanation of the crucial benefits of this change, beyond the very basic “more Republican seats in Congress.” Most people do not care which party controls Congress so much as they care about what Congress will do for them. Party affiliation is a mere proxy for “what is tangibly better for my life.”

Trump’s presidency reflects that a large number of American voters believe the American political system is broken, perhaps beyond repair. That political system includes Congress, which has for years had rock-bottom approval ratings.

Voters do not believe the current Republican Congress has done us many favors. Inflation has not reversed, housing prices are through the roof, layoffs are increasing, Congress can’t even pass regular budgets, and Republicans are planning to keep health care impossibly expensive by increasing Obamacare subsidies. Why would we activate to get more of the same ineptitude?

There are a lot of good reasons that make sense to ordinary Americans to support redistricting: we don’t want to see another Trump impeachment circus, we don’t trust Democrats to improve the economy, we don’t want federal funds for child murder, we want Trump’s amazing executive actions on “equity,” immigration, and other 80-20 issues codified. But Republicans in Congress are not doing much about these concerns now, and nobody made these kitchen-table issues a part of the redistricting debate.

Americans can’t afford to have the Republican Party focused on its own struggles instead of ours. That’s what redistricting always should have been about. But it wasn’t, and that’s why it failed.