House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Maryland Governor Wes Moore, and a long list of other powerful figures in the party spent last winter and spring begging Maryland’s state legislature to further gerrymander the state to make up for Republican moves in Texas and other GOP strongholds. But Maryland state Senate President Bill Ferguson, a Democrat, not only balked at moving forward on the gerrymandering but refused to even hold a vote. By March, the redistricting proposal was dead, and party leaders huffed and puffed but moved on. Last night, we saw the opposite of that docile approach—and, unfortunately, it worked for Republicans.
President Trump pushed super hard for Indiana Republicans to redistrict. Party leaders there felt compelled to hold a vote on redistricting, but surprisingly a slew of Republican state senators joined their Democratic colleagues to block it. That vote provided Trump names. Eight of the Republican state senators who opposed the redistricting were up for reelection this year. Trump endorsed primary challengers to seven of them. And on Tuesday, five of the seven lost to their Trump-backed rivals; some of the incumbents were resoundingly defeated. Another primary is currently too close to call. Just one has been declared the winner of his race.
The good news is that the results of Indiana show that the Republican Party is really a cult of Trump—so Republican candidates will be reluctant to distance themselves from an increasingly unpopular president and therefore might lose winnable races this November and in two years.
The bad news, though, is that the results in Indiana show that the Republican Party is a cult of Trump—so Supreme Court justices, governors, state legislatures, congresspeople, and even rank-and-file GOP voters will keep falling in line with the whims of our wannabe dictator.
America’s conflicts today pit a pro-democracy party against one that is antidemocratic. The Democrats are the morally superior entity. But I worry that today’s conflicts also pit a party that will do anything to win against one that doesn’t fully understand that it’s in a zero-sum, existential fight over what kind of country the United States will be. Over the last week, Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, Florida Republicans rapidly gerrymandered their districts to potentially win four more seats, Republican governors and legislatures quickly mobilized to implement the VRA ruling and eliminate Democratic-leaning districts in their states, and the Republicans on the Supreme Court blessed one of those hurried redistricting moves after ruling for years that states couldn’t change their electoral procedures when an election is near.
And now in Indiana, Trump and Republican voters have again forced dissidents out of the party, as they did to Liz Cheney and others over the last decade who broke with the president.
April 21, when Virginia Democrats pushed through their own redistricting referendum, seems a distant memory right now. Even more so because the Virginia Supreme Court so far has refused to overturn an injunction that declared the referendum invalid. There is growing concern that the court will ultimately rule against the referendum. That would give Republicans a seven-seat advantage gained through redistricting, according to Ballotpedia. And more seats could come if the GOP further gerrymanders Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee, which seems entirely possible.
This is an abomination. House elections are often a check on incumbent presidents. But Trump, instead of taking the democratic course of either pushing a more popular agenda or accepting defeat, insisted on his party redrawing congressional districts to ensure a GOP majority. This is straight out of the authoritarian playbook.
Unfortunately, it may work, because the entire party has joined him in this effort. Meanwhile, Democrats have struggled to catch up. In some states, the party pushed independent redistricting commissions that seemed like good democratic behavior at the time but now resemble unilateral disarmament. And in states like Illinois and the aforementioned Maryland, Democratic officials simply refused to gerrymander, either not understanding the huge stakes of this year’s House elections or not having the nerve to do anything about it.
Indiana isn’t a story of successful gerrymandering. But it is a story of successful partisanship and party leadership. Trump just ended the careers of five politicians he probably hadn’t heard of a year ago. I don’t like the idea of party bosses. But what makes me really discouraged is being on the side of a party that doesn’t have effective bosses against one that does.
There is a silver lining though. Trump will be emboldened by the results in Indiana. He will keep making Republicans defend whatever he does, such as stuffing funding for the White House ballroom into a budget bill moving through Congress this week. And Trump’s approval rating continues to sink, potentially plunging to the post-Katrina lows of George W. Bush at the end of his second term. Even if Republicans are super-effective at gerrymandering, a very unpopular president creates the possibility of a big House majority and a slim Democratic Senate majority this November and a Democratic landslide in the 2028 presidential election.
So Tuesday was a short-term victory for Trump. But it might be a long-term defeat for the Republican Party.