On paper, at least, Indiana seems an unlikely place for an all-out battle between Republicans over President Trump’s redistricting campaign. The president carried Indiana in a 19-point rout last year, and his party has huge majorities in the state legislature.
But as Republicans in other states have redrawn political maps to gain congressional seats and please the president, a critical mass of Indiana lawmakers has resisted. The fate of Mr. Trump’s preferred map, which passed the Indiana House of Representatives on Friday, remains in doubt ahead of key votes this week in the State Senate, where Republicans hold 40 of the 50 seats.
Opposition by some Republicans has lingered even after Mr. Trump called out individual senators on social media, branding some as RINOs, or Republicans in Name Only, and promising to endorse primary challengers against those who buck him.
As the fight over a new map in Indiana intensified in recent weeks, it took on significance beyond the fate of a couple of congressional seats. It has also become a high-pressure test of the president’s ability to bend Republican politicians to his will.
Indiana’s unique political evolution helps explain this showdown among Republicans. Over the last 15 years, as Republicans turned Indiana from a swing state to a stronghold, the party’s growing power often papered over stylistic and ideological differences among its leaders.
The push to draw new maps outside the usual once-a-decade cycle has forced those divisions into the open, a rare example of intraparty dissent being aired in full public view with uncertain outcomes.
On one side are institutional-minded Republicans, some of them active for decades in Indiana politics, who see the new map as a politically risky and morally dubious power grab. On the other side, an ascendant, Trump-aligned contingent speaks of the 2026 midterm elections in near-existential terms, describing redistricting as a patriotic imperative.
“You have a lot of legislators, reps and senators, who have Rs next to their name, but they really are not Rs,” said Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, a conservative Republican who supports redistricting and who won the nomination for his post over a candidate favored by many in the party establishment. In his estimation, “the government of Indiana is very purple” even though the electorate is quite conservative.
Other Republican leaders, some of whom held office before the emergence of Mr. Trump as a political force, see the landscape differently. Mitch Daniels, the governor from 2005 to 2013, whom many credit with ushering in Indiana’s era of Republican dominance, described the proposed map as “grotesque.” He attributed pushback from Republicans to an “innate sense of fair play” and “a distaste for being ordered and told what to do by people outside.”
‘The Tent Keeps Getting Smaller’
Not that long ago, Democrats actually won major elections in Indiana. Barack Obama carried the state in 2008. Democrats had a majority in the State House until 2010. And a Democrat, Joe Donnelly, won a U.S. Senate race in 2012.
Since then, Democrats have struggled.
Republicans have won voters’ trust, dominated statewide races and rewritten laws to reflect their priorities. They expanded charter schools, passed so-called right to work legislation and imposed restrictions on transgender rights. After the fall of Roe v. Wade, Indiana became the first state to pass a new, near-total ban on abortion.
All of Indiana’s U.S. senators and seven of its nine U.S. House members are Republicans.
Within the party, though, dissent has sometimes flared. Moderate and socially conservative Republicans were at odds in 2014 over a proposal to amend the State Constitution to define marriage as between a man and woman. A year later, Mike Pence, who was governor then, backtracked on a law that he said was intended to protect religious freedom but that critics, including business-minded Republicans, argued would have legalized discrimination against gay people.
More recently, Republicans have been split over measures to have local school board candidates run on partisan tickets, to restrict instruction on critical race theory and to prevent transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams at school. When Eric Holcomb vetoed the transgender sports limit as governor in 2022, fellow Republicans in the legislature overrode him.
Disagreements within a governing party are not unusual, of course. But especially in the Trump era, in which Mr. Trump carried Indiana in three consecutive elections, the rifts have forced the questions of what the Indiana Republican Party represents and how closely it should hew to the president’s style and demands.
Sue Ellspermann, a Republican who served as lieutenant governor under Mr. Pence, linked some of the resistance to redistricting to Indiana Republicans who came of political age in a much different era, with role models like Governor Daniels or Senator Richard G. Lugar.
“I think we are still benefiting from a time when, many would say, there was more bipartisan behavior and really thoughtful policy development,” said Ms. Ellspermann, who testified against the new map in the House and urged members not to succumb to political pressure.
Over the years, many on the party’s right flank have grown frustrated with Republicans who they see as Democrats in disguise. John Jacob, who served in the State House before losing a Republican primary to an establishment-backed candidate, clashed with legislative leaders on issues like abortion. Mr. Jacob wanted a total ban on the procedure, not the law that passed, which included exceptions for rape or incest.
“We’ve just got a lot of RINOs in Indiana,” Mr. Jacob said. “I mean, they’re Republican in name, but in some respects, they’re OK with just keeping the status quo.”
On the other side, Republicans who sometimes buck the conservative line see an effort to push them out of a party that they helped bring to power. State Representative Ed Clere, a nine-term Republican from southern Indiana who voted against redistricting, described his dismay a few years ago when he saw “RINO Hunter” T-shirts at a state Republican Party event.
“The tent keeps getting smaller and smaller,” said Mr. Clere, who supports L.G.B.T.Q. rights and opposed Republican-led efforts to make school board races partisan. “And that’s bad for Indiana.”
‘Going to Find Out Together’
The Indiana Statehouse is tense this week. Republicans on both sides of the redistricting debate have faced threats and swatting attempts. Most senators never wanted to vote on this.
When Gov. Mike Braun, a Republican, called a special session on redistricting, lawmakers did not show up on the date he set. Senate leadership later said they did not have the votes to pass a new map.
But after furious pushback from the White House and the governor’s office, Senate leaders said they would return to Indianapolis. Asked on Monday whether the votes for the bill were there, Rodric Bray, the Senate president pro tem who previously came out against redistricting, said, “we’re all going to find out together on Thursday.”
Redistricting supporters have not tried to disguise their goals. They have described the new proposed map, which jigsaws the Democratic stronghold of Indianapolis into four districts, as “political performance” meant to maximize Republicans’ political sway and sweep the congressional delegation. Some have justified their efforts by noting that Democratic-led states also gerrymander and by describing the possibility of a Democratic congressional majority as dangerous for America.
But opponents of the plan, both Republicans and Democrats, have described it as brazen political gamesmanship that upends norms, splices communities with similar economic and cultural interests into different districts and threatens to undermine public trust in government. Some Democrats have suggested the decision to crack Indianapolis, which has a large Black and Hispanic population, might be an illegal racial gerrymander.
While many key Republican senators have said little publicly, a handful have been unusually blunt in their critiques of Mr. Trump.
Senator Greg Walker, an anti-redistricting Indiana Republican, said in The Republic, a newspaper in Columbus, Ind., that “it’s the president trying to save his own skin by holding a majority in Congress.”
Another anti-redistricting Republican, Senator Mike Bohacek, who has a daughter with Down syndrome, took issue with the president describing the Democratic governor of Minnesota with a slur for disabled people.
“I will be voting NO on redistricting,” Mr. Bohacek wrote on Facebook, adding that “perhaps he can use the next 10 months to convince voters that his policies and behavior deserve a congressional majority.”
Mr. Beckwith, the pro-redistricting lieutenant governor, suggested that some of the opponents had long held private reservations about the president.
“Are they resisting Trump now? Yes, they are,” Mr. Beckwith said. “But I think that’s probably where they’ve always really been. They just couldn’t do it last year, or else they would have gotten shellacked themselves in an election.”
After months of mostly pitching redistricting behind closed doors, the president and his allies have turned to highly public, highly personal outreach in recent weeks, praising those who have fallen in line and threatening to end the political careers of those who do not with well-funded primary challengers.
David McIntosh, the president of Club for Growth, a conservative advocacy group, said in a public message to Mr. Bray last week that “failure to get this done means you and any other opposition will be defeated and removed from office in your next election.” On Friday, Mr. Trump released a list of Republican senators, saying he had heard that they “need encouragement to make the right decision.”
Still, some see signs that the president’s grip on Republicans might be weakening. Mr. Clere, the anti-redistricting House Republican, said, “I think it’s fair to view this debate and its ultimate outcome in that larger context of Trump’s waning influence and the growing pushback against him.”
But the main reason the Indiana legislature is voting on a map after months of resistance, Mr. Clere acknowledged, is that the White House extended so much political capital making that happen. And “if this legislation makes it across the finish line,” he said, “it will be entirely because of the pressure campaign.”
Mitch Smith is a Chicago-based national correspondent for The Times, covering the Midwest and Great Plains.
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