OUT OF LINE

Republicans Turn on Trump Over Desperate Power Grab

The president wanted to lock in GOP control of the House next year, but he keeps suffering setbacks.

President Donald Trump’s push for red states to redraw their congressional maps to give Republicans a greater advantage in the 2026 midterms has suffered a new blow.

Republicans in Indiana have defied pressure from the White House and shut the door on any plan to alter the state’s voting boundaries.

Indiana Senate President pro tempore Rodric Bray announced on Friday that the plan lacked sufficient support, so the state Senate would not reconvene next month to address it.

The setback in a state Trump won last year by nearly 19 points was the latest in a series for the president, who has been pressuring Republicans across the country to expand the number of red districts as the party faces strong headwinds ahead of next year’s election.

GOP Governor Mike Braun called a special session to redraw the state’s map amid pressure from the Trump administration. Vice President JD Vance met with state Republicans twice in the last few months.

However, even as Braun pushed to move forward with the plan, Republican members were already bucking Washington. At least eight state Senate Republicans had come out against it.

“Over the last several months, Senate Republicans have given very serious and thoughtful consideration to the concept of redrawing our state’s congressional maps. Today, I’m announcing there are not enough votes to move that idea forward,” Bray said in a statement provided to the Daily Beast.

Soon after Bray’s announcement, Trump allies turned their wrath on him for state Republicans snubbing the pressure campaign.

The president’s former campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita wrote in an X post that Bray was announcing his “retirement.”

Another Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz blasted a “monumental betrayal” in Indiana and wrote that “spineless RINO ‘legislators’ have sabotaged and buried Republicans’ vital redistricting push.”

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It comes after Trump’s gerrymandering push ahead of the midterms hit another snag in Utah. State Judge Dianna Gibson this week struck down the Republican attempt to draw an all-red congressional map.

Instead, Democrats are expected to gain one new House seat in Salt Lake City, which voted for Kamala Harris last year after the judge ruled the new maps violated the state’s anti-gerrymandering rules.

Last week, California voters overwhelmingly backed Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to redraw districts in the deep blue state in an effort to help Democrats in response to Trump’s demand for gerrymandering in red states.

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Proposition 50 would allow the state to temporarily redraw its congressional maps for 2026 and 2030 in response to the mid-decade redistricting carried out by Texas Republicans at Trump’s behest earlier this year.

Newsom argued it was the only way for blue states to fight back against the efforts in red states and Trump’s agenda, after Texas added as many as five red seats, Ohio added two and Missouri and North Carolina each added one ahead of next year’s midterms.

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit in response to California voters passing Prop 50. Attorney General Pam Bondi called Newsom’s move “immoral and illegal.”

Newsom’s office fired back at the administration, saying, “these losers lost at the ballot box and soon they will also lose in court.”

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Ahead of Indiana announcing it would not move forward with the plan to redraw maps, Cook Political Report’s Election Analyst Dave Wasserman noted that Democrats had been quietly stringing together victories that had “pushed the mid-decade redistricting war closer to a draw.”

Two states where the effort to redraw maps remains to be seen as the midterm year approaches are Virginia and Florida. Leaders in both the blue state and red state have been preparing to make moves in response to Trump’s demand.

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Sarah Ewall-WicePolitical Reporter

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