On Monday I spoke with a Republican member of Indiana’s legislature who opposes President Donald Trump’s push for the state to redraw its congressional map to gain two GOP seats and help the party hold its House majority in next year’s midterm elections. Trump, with support from Indiana’s Republican governor, Mike Braun, has vowed to back primary challengers against members of the GOP who are, for now, blocking the redistricting plan. The lawmaker I spoke with asked that I not publish his name. He isn’t worried about Trump’s political wrath; he doesn’t plan to run for reelection. His fear of speaking out is much more personal: “I’d rather my house not get firebombed,” he told me by phone.
Such a worry is not as far-fetched as it might sound—not in an America that has seen an eruption of political violence over the past few years, and not in Indiana over the past few weeks. Republicans in the state have faced a wave of “swatting” incidents, in which a false call to emergency services draws a police response, for not endorsing the redistricting plan. (Braun said he and his family have also received threats.)
Indiana lawmakers have reported other apparent attempts at intimidation, including at least one bomb threat, as well as subtler forms of harassment. Not all of them have been made public. Earlier this month, the Republican I interviewed was returning home from an evening walk and saw a Domino’s Pizza car parked out front. The delivery was under his name, with his home address, but he had not ordered it. The phone number that was given to the delivery driver was not his. The confirmation that no one in his family ordered it came when he asked the driver what was on the pizza: sausage and pepperoni. “We don’t eat meat,” he told me with a laugh, “so none of us ordered that pizza.” When the lawmaker later called the number affiliated with the order, it went to the state police in Indianapolis. Hoax pizza deliveries have been a favored tactic of MAGA supporters who have tried to enforce loyalty to Trump and his agenda. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia reported a similar incident before she abruptly announced her resignation from Congress. “The whole idea is, We know who you are. We know where you live,” the Indiana lawmaker said. “They’re trying to intimidate us.”
So far, Trump’s heavy-handed pressure campaign and the anonymous harassment directed toward Indiana Republicans have not worked. The White House wants the state legislature to adopt a new congressional map that would make Republicans the favorites to win the two House seats currently held by Democrats. (Republicans already have the other seven.) Although a majority of the GOP-controlled general assembly reportedly backs the idea, the state Senate has balked. The senate initially flouted Braun’s move to call a special session of the legislature next month to consider redistricting. Its president pro tempore, Rodric Bray, opposes redistricting and has said the proposal lacks the votes to pass, but he announced on Tuesday that the senate would return next month to render “a final decision” on the idea.
Indiana is only the latest red state to resist Trump’s demand that it join a gerrymandering arms race against Democratic-led states like California. The administration launched this campaign over the summer by leaning on Republicans in the Texas legislature to approve a map that could wipe out as many as five Democratic-held seats in the state’s House delegation. GOP lawmakers in Missouri and North Carolina soon followed, but the redistricting effort has stalled elsewhere. Kansas Republicans announced earlier this month that they lacked the votes to enact a map that would eliminate a Democratic-leaning House seat in and around Kansas City.
In Ohio, Republicans struck a deal with Democrats that only marginally improves the GOP’s chances of picking up two additional seats. Meanwhile, California voters earlier this month overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to redraw the state’s House map and hand Democrats as many as five new seats. Democrats in Virginia launched their own redistricting push that could yield the party multiple GOP-held seats. And last week, a federal judge ruled that the GOP’s new Texas map was unconstitutional, throwing the party’s biggest redistricting win into doubt. (The Supreme Court has paused the ruling while it considers whether to take the case.)
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Trump’s drive to padlock the Republicans’ House majority may be backfiring, and it could be Democrats who emerge from the gerrymandering war with more seats. As the administration’s bravado has turned to desperation and anger, Trump has put even more pressure on Indiana Republicans to deliver. Vice President J. D. Vance traveled to the state last month to lobby lawmakers, and the president has been calling out individual legislators by name in his Truth Social feed.
Republicans hold a 40–10 supermajority in the Indiana Senate, so the aversion to Trump’s push is not limited to a few renegade members. Several opponents have criticized the plan on the grounds that Indiana should not redraw its maps in the middle of the decade; the Constitution calls for reapportionment of representatives among the states to be done after the decennial Census. “I’m not inclined to ever redistrict mid-decade,” the lawmaker told me. He said he voted with other Republicans to enact the state’s current congressional map after the 2020 Census. “What has changed from the Census five years ago that would lead us to redistrict today?” the legislator asked. “Nothing has changed.”
The president’s purely political argument—“they could be depriving Republicans of a majority in the House,” he wrote of the idea’s GOP critics in Indiana—isn’t persuasive to this legislator. “Other states need to do what they want to do, but I don’t think it makes sense for them to do it either.” The lawmaker said Republicans should be trying to win elections on the merits, not through gerrymandering: “If you’re not confident enough in your policies that you think that it’s going to have a negative impact on your politics, then maybe you need to be doing something different.”
This lawmaker was hardly alone among Republican opponents of Trump’s redistricting push in Indiana who were reluctant to speak publicly. None of the critics I contacted over the past week would agree to an on-the-record interview. Supporters of the president’s plan, by contrast, were less reticent. “It’s not unconstitutional, it’s not illegal, and it’s not immoral,” Beau Baird, a GOP state representative, said of redistricting. Baird is also the Republican Party chair of Putnam County; his father, Jim Baird, has represented the area in Congress since 2019. The younger Baird told me that he wanted Republicans to draw a maximally favorable House map after the 2020 Census but that the party ended up favoring a less aggressive approach. He was initially hesitant to revisit the district lines in the middle of the decade, but he told me he came around to the idea pretty quickly. “I believe that it is important that we do it, and we do it now,” Baird said.
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Indiana’s entire GOP House delegation is publicly backing the redistricting effort, as is Senator Jim Banks. (The state’s senior senator, Republican Todd Young, has said only that he “supports our state legislators and trusts their judgment” on the issue.) Representative Marlin Stutzman, a Republican in his second stint in Congress, justified the proposal to sweep Democrats entirely out of the state’s delegation by pointing to New England, where not a single Republican across six states is serving in the House. “I would argue that the Democrats have been doing this much longer than Republicans have, and President Trump has just finally shown the Republican Party how to fight back and play the same game,” Stutzman told me.
Baird told me that when he recently spoke to a group of about 100 Republican constituents, the crowd initially seemed opposed to redistricting but emerged supportive after he made his argument in favor. Stutzman predicted that if redistricting were put before the voters—as Democrats in California did earlier this month—Hoosiers would endorse the idea. Other Republicans, however, say public opinion is running in the opposite direction.
In a statement earlier this month, State Senator Kyle Walker said he informally surveyed his constituents and found that 93 percent were against redistricting, leading him to oppose the plan. The lawmaker I spoke with asked an aide to tally up the emails and voicemails his office had received from constituents expressing a view on redistricting over the past few months. (The office did not actively solicit opinions on the issue.) The results floored him. Out of a total of nearly 400 constituents who called and wrote, just eight voiced support for redistricting; the rest were opposed.
It might seem that such strong public backing would embolden a politician to take a more forthright stand against their own party—especially one who does not plan to be on the ballot again. But police are still patrolling the streets around his house and neighborhood. The threat has not yet passed, and an elected state legislator still does not feel safe in publicly crossing the president. “It’s a sad testament to our politics right now,” he told me.
The post ‘I’d Rather My House Not Get Firebombed’ appeared first on The Atlantic.
