Indiana lawmakers have made a bold show of Republican defiance against President Trump, rejecting his push for a newly gerrymandered congressional map that would have helped the party defend its majority in the U.S. House.
Their vote on Thursday — 19 to 31 overall, with 21 Republicans voting “no” — came after intense pressure from Mr. Trump and his allies to redraw the state’s map and give the party two more House seats. He met with Indiana lawmakers in meetings at the White House and spoke to them by phone, and later raged against holdouts on social media. Vice President JD Vance made two trips to the state to try to persuade reluctant Republicans.
Now, the failure of Mr. Trump’s gambit in deep-red Indiana is likely to reverberate around the country as the parties head into the 2026 midterm elections.
Here are six takeaways from the vote, its national implications and what comes next:
More Republicans are daring to cross Trump.
Defections have been rare for much of Mr. Trump’s decadelong reign over the Republican Party. When they occurred, retribution came swiftly: public condemnations, often a primary challenge, then party exile.
Some Republicans are feeling a bit braver these days.
In Congress and across the conservative media sphere, cracks within the president’s MAGA movement have appeared on issue after issue, including the Epstein files, military action in Venezuela, health care, tariffs — and redistricting.
In Indiana, Mr. Trump unloaded his full arsenal of persuasion tactics on Republicans. When his charm offensive failed, he turned to his familiar methods, unleashing bombastic attacks on lawmakers and threatening to support primary challengers.
Several Republican legislators also faced anonymous bomb threats and swatting of their homes. Through it all, they held firm.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office after the vote, Mr. Trump downplayed the result, saying that “we won every other state,” and added that he hoped Rodric Bray, the Senate president pro tem, who opposed the redistricting push, would lose his next primary race.
Of course, Mr. Trump remains the undisputed leader of the Republican Party and continues to hold enormous sway. But Indiana was the latest sign that he can no longer count on absolute fealty.
Trump’s midterm strategy hit a speed bump.
Indiana was just one small part of Mr. Trump’s plan to keep the House in Republican hands.
The president set off this year’s gerrymandering war over the summer, pushing Republicans in Texas to draw a map that would flip five Democratic districts.
At the time, he seemed to have the upper hand. Republicans controlled the redistricting process in far more states than Democrats. Missouri and North Carolina drew new Republican-friendly maps, and other states seemed poised to follow. Democrats made a successful push in California to cancel out Texas’s map, but the party seemed to be at a national disadvantage.
Then Republican resistance grew in the Midwest. Republicans in Nebraska and Kansas never garnered support to even begin the process, and Indiana Republicans showed hesitancy from the start.
At the same time, Democrats found new opportunities, and began moving toward redrawing maps to gain extra seats in Virginia and Maryland. The outcome of those efforts remains unclear.
While the battle over maps will continue well into 2026 — some legislatures have yet to act and litigation is still pending in many states — Mr. Trump’s redistricting strategy may not be able to hold off Democrats if their electoral fortunes continue to improve.
Republicans had clashing visions of the country.
Some Republicans who wanted to redraw Indiana’s map described Democrats in grave terms, warning of potentially dire consequences if Indiana did not do everything possible to stop the U.S. House from flipping.
Republican opponents of the map instead focused on the intentions of the country’s founders, or described the importance of preserving confidence in elections.
“The power to draw election maps is a sacred responsibility directly tied to the integrity of our elections and the people’s faith in our constitutional system,” said State Senator Spencer Deery, a Republican opponent of the redrawn map.
On the other side of the caucus, conservatives echoed Mr. Trump’s language about Democrats pursuing extreme policies that threatened the fabric of the country.
State Senator Chris Garten, a Republican who supported redistricting, described the trajectory of the country under Mr. Trump as “a story of a nation being pulled back from the brink of disaster.”
“It’s not just about lines on a map,” Mr. Garten said. “It’s a vote of critical, epic proportion that will define Indiana’s role in the recovery of this republic.”
Lots of lawmakers are wary of scorched-earth gerrymandering.
Even before Indiana Republicans made their stand, some state legislators in both parties across the country had shown deep unease about this year’s unusual, highly partisan push to rip up maps. Normally, they noted, redistricting occurs at the start of each decade, after the census.
One such objector is Bill Ferguson, the Democratic president of the State Senate in Maryland, where his party is moving to try to eliminate the state’s sole Republican House district. He has broken with his party and effectively blocked its early efforts.
“The legal risks are too high, the timeline for action is dangerous, the downside risk to Democrats is catastrophic,” Mr. Ferguson wrote in a letter to his colleagues in October.
In Kansas, several Republican legislators refused to support a special session to draw new maps and eliminate the state’s only Democratic district.
“I would rather just stand on principle and stand on my morals and ethics,” State Representative Brett Fairchild, a conservative Republican, told The New York Times last month. He said he believed that redistricting went against the intent of the country’s founders and could backfire on his party in future elections.
“That way I can actually look at myself in the mirror and sleep at night,” he said. “It’s not all just about getting re-elected.”
Republicans who redraw maps need to be careful.
Drawing a new map requires a tricky political calculus — and it can create dangers for a party.
This year, Republicans have generally tried to ensure that Mr. Trump won by at least 10 percentage points in 2024 in every district they draw to be theoretically safe for them.
But that margin might not be so safe.
Democrats have had an especially strong year of election results, with unexpected margins of victory in the New Jersey and Virginia governor’s races last month and strong showings in special elections all year. In New Jersey, Hispanic voters who had drifted toward Mr. Trump in 2024 appeared to snap back toward Democrats.
Eyeing those signs that Hispanic voters could be shifting, Democrats in Texas now believe they could hold on to as many as three of the state’s redrawn seats, two in the Rio Grande Valley and possibly a third in the San Antonio area.
In Indiana, Mr. Bray, the Senate president pro tem, has echoed those concerns as part of his opposition to redistricting, fearing both the narrower margins in new districts and a drop-off in Trump voters without the president on the midterm ballot.
While Trump-allied Republicans in Indiana had hoped to end up with a 9-0 advantage in House seats, “if you really got too cute, you could find yourself at 6-3,” Mr. Bray told Politico.
The Supreme Court could scramble the map again.
Hanging over the national redistricting arms race is a pending decision from the Supreme Court on the fate of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.
During oral arguments in October, the court’s conservative justices appeared poised to weaken the provision, which effectively bars racial discrimination through legislative lines or voting practices.
Such a decision could lead to an expansive round of redistricting that would significantly benefit Republicans; an analysis by The Times found that Democrats would be in danger of losing around a dozen majority-minority districts across the South.
But the impact of any decision for the 2026 midterms will probably come down to the timing. Many states, including Texas, have primary elections in March and April, and the Supreme Court often issues its landmark rulings toward the end of its term, in June or July.
If the court rules late, it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for states that have already held their primaries to redraw their lines.
Nick Corasaniti is a Times reporter covering national politics, with a focus on voting and elections.
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