Indiana Republicans who defied Donald Trump’s gerrymandering push paid for it Tuesday, as primary voters ousted five of the seven state senators the president targeted with primary challenges after they voted against his redistricting push — a decisive show of force that suggests his hold on the GOP base remains firm even as his approval rating has hit a new low.
The contests, for state Senate seats in Indiana’s part-time legislature, would ordinarily draw little national attention. But after a December vote in which a bloc of Indiana Republicans resisted the White House’s pressure campaign and voted against gerrymandering the state’s two Democratic-held congressional districts out of existence, Trump set out to make examples of them — and largely succeeded.
The results carry implications well beyond Indianapolis. Republican lawmakers in other states facing similar redistricting pressure now have a fresh example of what defying the White House costs, and Trump’s allies are likely to read the night as proof that his endorsement still moves voters down to the most local rungs of GOP politics. For a president constitutionally barred from running again, Tuesday offered the strongest evidence yet that his power within the GOP is still strong.
On social media, Trump endorsed challengers against seven of the eight sitting GOP state senators who voted against the gerrymandering push: Jim Buck, Spencer Deery, Dan Dernulc, Greg Goode, Travis Holdman, Linda Rogers and Greg Walker.
“There are eight Great Patriots running against long seated RINOS — Let’s see how those RINOS do tonight!” Trump said in a Truth Social post Tuesday before polls closed, deploying a label — Republican In Name Only — that has become his standard brand for those who defy him regardless of their conservative bonafides.
For Trump, who has carried Indiana in each of his three presidential campaigns and faces no meaningful threat to his standing in the state, the primaries amount to a test of whether he can punish defectors inside his own party over an issue many voters have barely registered, in races usually decided by yard signs and county chairs rather than national politics.
Beneath that is a larger question, one that will only sharpen as his second term wears on: whether a president who is constitutionally barred from running again and whose approval ratings are the lowest of his tenure still commands the fear that built his hold on the GOP in the first place.
Trump has a track record of endorsing primary challengers in races around the country to enforce and reward loyalty — most prominently against the House Republicans who voted to impeach him after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Nearly all were driven from office.
Wading into something as relatively small scale as state Senate primaries, however — especially over an issue that may be more esoteric for many voters — has provided a clash between national politics and the kind of grassroots approach that typically looms large in these kinds of races. It is one thing for Trump to be furious about the December vote in Indianapolis; it is another for Republican primary voters in Terre Haute or West Lafayette to be.
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Photos: Courtesy of the campaigns
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