Hoosier Daddy?
Though I'm from Illinois, I grew up with a great many relatives in Indiana. Including ten, among them my grandmother, within about a three block walk in Miller Beach, outside Gary. We even had a family department store in Gary, H. Gordon & Sons. (Harry Gordon was my mother's grandfather.) I'd spend vacations there with my grandmother. One of those cousins who I mentioned periodically here -- when we go out sailing on his small craft -- Jim Kaplan, is from that Indiana contingent. So, although there's always a bit of a rivalry between the states, I've always felt a certain affinity with Indiana. (In fact, I even was accepted at Indiana University for college, though as readers here long ago figured out, I leapt at attending the beloved Northwestern. A good decision.) Indiana is very conservative, and was a birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, but then it's also the home of Orville Redenbacher popcorn and the Indiana Dunes National Seashore. And a lot of my family. The Indiana state high school basketball tournament (yes, the foundation of the movie Hoosiers) was broadcast for years to the Chicago area, and I grew up watching it. So, I pay a lot of attention to the state.
No more so than yesterday.
Yesterday, the Indiana Senate voted 31-19 to reject a bill to gerrymander districts for the 2026 Mid-term elections. This was something Trump had been heavily pushing. He not only personally called lawmakers, he even sent “JD Vance” to Indiana to campaign for the bill – and wrote a long social media post the night before the vote. Yet it was a crushing landslide defeat. As the expression goes, Trump got owned.
The more important part of the story, though, is to note that MAGOPs have a 40-10 majority in the state's Senate. Yet only 19 of those 40 members voted for the measure. More than half went against Trump’s wishes – which were less like wishes and more like furious threats.
And what’s more important than even that is the vote result is almost certainly because MAGOP senators in the state see how disastrously Special Elections have gone for the party (losing 16 points on average – and, in fact, having two elections just this week flip from Deep Red to Democratic, the Miami mayoral race, electing its first Democrat in 28 years, a Georgia state Senate race where the district had gone for Trump by 12 points). And seeing these results – including last week’s Special Election in Tennessee where a Deep Red district that had voted for Trump by 23 points lost 14 points – MAGOPs members don't want to put their Leans Red (or even Safe Red) seats in play.
The thing is, as important as this all is, it’s most important on a separate level than an electoral one, since (as I’ve written – and now have heard people far more expert than me) I think Democrats will pick up 30-40 seats in the Mid-Terms. And even if MAGOPs did pick up two seats in Indiana, that would barely cut into that margin and wouldn’t stop Democrats from flipping control of the House.
The additional factor to consider, though, is what this overwhelming rebuke of Trump by his own party means for Trump’s ability to govern. Without question, he still has a great deal of powerful authority in his job and within his party. However, polls show that Trump’s support among MAGOPs has dropped by upwards of 15 points. An AP-NORC poll showed that Trump’s support in his party dropped from 81% down to 68%. And Indiana isn't the first Red state to refuse to gerrymander early -- it's the third. Deep Red Kansas has already decided not to, and so has New Hampshire. As a result, one would think that since MAGOPs clearly do see how disastrously the Mid-Terms are shaping up for their party, that might impact how some of them (or eventually, perhaps many of them) deal with Trump – not just after the Mid-Terms when he is officially a lame duck, but already, just a year into his term.
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