Trump forces Indiana GOP into redistricting reversal in race to draw new MAGA map
The Republican-controlled Indiana House returns to session on Monday to take action on congressional redistricting pushed by President Donald Trump.
And the GOP-dominated state Senate, in a major reversal, will reconvene in one week to “make a final decision on any redistricting proposal sent from the House.”
The proposed new map would create another GOP-leaning congressional district in the solidly Republican Midwestern state.
Indiana is the latest battlefield in the high-stakes redistricting showdown pitting Trump and Republicans versus Democrats to shape the 2026 midterm landscape as the GOP defends its razor-thin House majority.
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State House Speaker Todd Huston announced last week that “House Republicans will gavel in on Monday, Dec. 1, reconvening the 2026 regular session. All legislative business will be considered beginning next week, including redrawing the state’s congressional map.”
Despite pressure from Trump and his political team, Rodric Bray, the Republican leader in the Indiana Senate, announced two weeks ago that there wasn’t enough support in the chamber to move forward with redistricting.
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Trump, in response, repeatedly threatened to back primary challenges against state Republican lawmakers who didn’t support his congressional redistricting push.
“A RINO State Senator, Rodric Bray, who doesn’t care about keeping the Majority in the House in D.C., is the primary problem. Soon, he will have a Primary Problem, as will any other politician who supports him in this stupidity,” Trump warned in a recent social media post.
Bray confirmed in a statement last week that the state Senate would return into session to take action on whatever redistricting proposal passes the House.
“The issue of redrawing Indiana’s congressional maps mid-cycle has received a lot of attention and is causing strife here in our state. To resolve this issue, the Senate intends to reconvene as part of the regular 2026 session on Dec. 8,” Bray wrote.
Republicans currently control seven of Indiana’s nine congressional districts, and any new map passed by the GOP supermajority in the legislature would likely shift the state’s 1st Congressional District from blue-leaning to a red-leaning seat.
Trump has been twisting elbows in his attempt to make Indiana the latest Republican-controlled state to change their congressional maps. The president has called state lawmakers and Vice President JD Vance visited the state twice earlier this autumn to discuss redistricting.
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Trump has also taken some jabs at Republican Gov. Mike Braun of Indiana, arguing that the governor “perhaps, is not working the way he should to get the necessary Votes.”
While Trump has called Braun “a good man,” he has warned he “must produce on this, or he will be the only Governor, Republican or Democrat, who didn’t.”
But Braun, pointing to the president, has touted that he is “committed to standing with him on the critical issue of passing fair maps in Indiana to ensure the MAGA agenda is successful in Congress.”
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The push by the president in Indiana is part of a broad effort by Trump’s political team and the GOP to pad the party’s razor-thin House majority ahead of the midterms, when the party in power traditionally faces political headwinds and loses seats.
Trump is aiming to prevent what happened during his first term in the White House when Democrats reclaimed the House majority in the 2018 midterm elections.
Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio have drawn new maps as part of the president’s push. And Florida and Kansas are also mulling redrawing their maps.
“We must keep the Majority at all costs,” Trump wrote recently.
But two federal judges in Texas delivered a blow to Trump and Republicans, by ruling that the state can’t use the newly drawn map in next year’s elections. The Supreme Court put in place a temporary stay on the ruling, ahead of weighing in on the dispute.
Meanwhile, Democrats are fighting back.
California voters a month ago overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50, a ballot initiative which will temporarily sidetrack the left-leaning state’s nonpartisan redistricting commission and return the power to draw the congressional maps to the Democrat-dominated legislature.
That is expected to result in five more Democratic-leaning congressional districts in California, which would counter the passage earlier this year in Texas of a new map that aims to create up to five right-leaning House seats.
Illinois and Maryland, two blue states, and Virginia, where Democrats control the legislature, are also taking steps or seriously considering redistricting.
And in a blow to Republicans, a Utah district judge last month rejected a congressional district map drawn up by the state’s GOP-dominated legislature and instead approved an alternate that will create a Democratic-leaning district ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
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