WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Spencer Deery whizzed down the road on his electric scooter, looking more like a Purdue University student than a Republican state senator. He bought the Volpam scooter in March so he could knock on more voters’ doors and, he hoped, outrun the ire of President Donald Trump.
Deery is one of 21 Republican state senators who defied Trump in December by refusing the president’s demand to redraw Indiana’s congressional districts as part of a national plan to help the GOP retain power. The lawmakers knew they were taking a risk because so many other Republicans have faced blowback after bucking the president.
The threats weren’t just political. Leading up to the vote, state senators faced bomb scares. Police drew guns on one state senator in his home based on a false report. Days later, an officer showed up at Deery’s door after receiving a similar bogus report.
Now, Deery hustled through his district to talk to voters as he and six of his peers faced primary challenges from Trump-endorsed opponents bolstered by millions of dollars from MAGA-aligned groups.
The primaries would test how much dissent Republican voters would tolerate. A victory by Trump’s side would send one of the strongest messages yet that even Republicans in the lower rungs of politics could face career-ending blows if they disobey a president who long ago remade their party.
Deery checked an app on his phone to see whose home to approach next in a suburban stretch of West Lafayette. Tom Rifner, 75, opened his door and listened to Deery make his pitch for giving him a second term. Deery asked the retired salesman if he’d paid attention to the debate over drawing the state’s political boundaries to give Republicans all nine of the state’s congressional districts.
“I’m a conservative and I voted for Trump, but I’m not sure that was the right thing to do,” Rifner said of redrawing Indiana’s map.
Deery said he shared that skepticism, and that’s why he voted against the measure. “I work for you, not for him,” he said before heading to the next house.
On Tuesday, Deery was counting on support from voters like Rifner to carry him through in a razor-tight race, even as five of six other GOP state senators who resisted redistricting fell to opponents backed by Trump. Deery led his challenger, Paula Copenhaver, by three votes late Tuesday, according to unofficial results, leaving the race too close to call.
The near-wipeout of Deery’s colleagues offered a fresh reminder of the power Trump holds over his party — and the danger to Republicans who go against him.
Trump’s push to redraw districts
Starting last summer, Trump pressed GOP-led states to embrace the unusual and aggressive tactic of redrawing their congressional districts to blunt the chances of Democrats taking control of the House and, as he has worried aloud, impeaching him. Republicans delivered more favorable districts for their party in five states, and last week the Supreme Court issued a decision that weakens the Voting Rights Act and allows Republicans to pursue even more seats. Democrats responded in recent months by giving themselves more districts in California and Virginia.
In Indiana, Republicans resisted the redistricting push, even after Trump held a conference call with them, hosted some of them at the White House and dispatched Vice President JD Vance to the state twice. After months of pressure, the state Senate rejected the map in December, with 21 of 40 GOP state senators joining all 10 Democrats to vote it down.
In a floor speech ahead of the vote, Deery justified his opposition in traditional conservative terms — as generic resistance to Washington, rather than a personal rebuke of the president. “Giving the federal government more power is not conservative,” he told his colleagues.
Even before the vote was held, Turning Point USA announced it was teaming up with other Trump allies to challenge Republicans who opposed redistricting. Turning Point, the Club for Growth and other conservative organizations poured huge sums into state Senate primaries to help candidates like Copenhaver.
Voters in recent weeks could scarcely open their mailboxes or turn on their televisions without seeing unflattering portrayals of the candidates or hearing nasty comments about them. Both sides bombarded the airwaves with more than $7 million in television ads — 18 times what was spent four years ago on state Senate primaries in Indiana, according to ad-tracking firm AdImpact.
Those backing the challengers hoped to reshape the Senate so it would draw new maps for 2028, said David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth and a former congressman from Indiana. The effort was also meant “to send a signal to Republican leaders that this really, really matters,” he said in an interview before Tuesday’s primaries.
U.S. Sen. Jim Banks (R-Indiana), whose political organization ran ads supporting the challengers, said on “The Powers That Be” podcast that he wanted to remake the state Senate so it’s more aligned with the president. “We’re a stronger party when we’re rooted in the Trump agenda,” he said.
A fight with the president
As he made his way around the district, Deery, 43, called himself a constitutional, fiscal and religious conservative and highlighted his high rankings from Americans for Prosperity and other groups on the right. In addition to being a state senator, he serves as an aide to Mitch Daniels, the former governor and president emeritus of Purdue.
Deery — who said he voted three times for Trump — didn’t set out to pick a fight with the White House, even though he knew he could draw a primary opponent when he became one of the first Republicans to speak out against redistricting in August.
But when Deery said no to redistricting, the wrath came quickly. In November, Trump criticized him and other holdout senators by name, and they began receiving anonymous threats. That month, police officers kicked in the door of one of Deery’s GOP colleagues and pointed guns at him after receiving a false report claiming he had killed his wife.
Deery was shaken, especially knowing that a gunman impersonating a police officer had killed a Minnesota lawmaker in her home five months earlier. Over dinner, Deery and his wife talked to their three children about what might happen and told them to stay still if police raided their house. The children, ages 12, 14 and 16, took in the information stoically, and within days an officer made a polite visit to their house based on a false report. Deery’s wife came to the door to show the officer she was unharmed.
Deery said his resistance to redistricting was instant and shared by his constituents, despite a texting campaign aimed at firing them up. He heard from some proponents, but they sounded less inspired than those who thought, like Deery, that the idea was ill-conceived, he said.
Failed map ignites primary challenge
Copenhaver, 53, ran for the state Senate four years ago, finishing behind Deery and another candidate. She’d been skeptical of Deery since he was elected, she said, but tried to keep an open mind and sent him text messages urging him to back redistricting. When he refused, she decided to run against him on a campaign focused on cutting taxes and promoting Trump.
Within months, she had the president’s endorsement — a feat in a state legislative race — and joined him at the White House for a meeting with other candidates taking on redistricting opponents. Trump was talking to the president of France when the group entered the office, Copenhaver said. The group met Secretary of State Marco Rubio and chatted with Trump for 20 minutes about the importance of redistricting, she said.
It was a capstone moment for Copenhaver, who had previously seen Trump from afar when she traveled to Washington in 2021 to cheer on his false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.
Copenhaver, who was a county clerk at the time and now serves as a government affairs director for Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith (R), marched with other Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021. She left before arriving at the U.S. Capitol, which was being attacked by those trying to stop the certification of the election, she said.
A wave of disappointment shot through her that day when Vice President Mike Pence announced he would not go along with Trump’s plan to reject electoral votes because he had determined the Constitution didn’t give him that power. The feeling was similar to the one she felt nearly five years later when Deery declined to go along with redistricting, she said.
Dueling Lincoln Day dinners
As the Fountain County Republican Party chairwoman, Copenhaver emceed the party’s Lincoln Day dinner in March at the Beef House in Covington, Indiana. There, local activists, lawmakers and candidates for sheriff sipped drinks, promoted the Make America Great Again movement and touted their Hoosier pride.
“Make America like Indiana,” state Comptroller Elise Nieshalla (R) urged the crowd.
Attendee Leroy Brown, 60, said he supported Copenhaver because he has long known her and considers her a fighter. Brown, a computer contractor, said Republicans need to take the same tack as Democrats in neighboring Illinois and other states who have drawn districts in their favor.
“They’ve been doing it for years and years and getting away with it and now it’s got to be balanced out,” he said.
Candidates at all levels took a minute or two each to address the crowd. Deery talked about containing utility costs and preserving farmland. Copenhaver talked about the president.
“I am the Trump-endorsed candidate in this race,” Copenhaver said. “And I’m in it to fight and push back against the government overreach that we have had.”
Twenty-four hours earlier, the two appeared at the Lincoln Day dinner in neighboring Parke County. About 50 Republicans chatted in an Elks Lodge dining hall that included life-size cardboard cutouts of Vance and Abraham Lincoln.
Many there decried the redistricting effort as unfair. They said they hated the proposed map because it would have carved up the Indianapolis area and spread its Democratic-leaning voters across four districts anchored in rural, conservative regions. That might lead to more Republican members of Congress, but it could also mean they would come from the state’s urban hub, they said.
“What’s good for Washington isn’t necessarily good for Parke County, Indiana,” said Cameron Martin, a Deery supporter running for local office. “We have nothing in common with Indianapolis.”
At the start of the night, attendees mingled with Deery, the keynote speaker. Copenhaver didn’t buy a ticket to the dinner because she felt snubbed by the Parke County GOP chairman, she said. Instead, she showed up with the caterers to help serve dinner.
“Would you like some salad?” she asked Deery.
Deery had never seen a campaign move like that, but accepted the salad and moved down the buffet line. He wanted to focus on winning over voters.
So did Copenhaver. She slipped out before Deery gave his speech to put campaign fliers on vehicles in the parking lot. They featured a large photo of the president with his hands clasped and his face beaming.
Hannah Knowles contributed to this report.
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