The Indiana State Senate voted to reject the adoption of a new congressional map for the state on Thursday, 11 December. 21 out of the 40 Republican Senators joined the ten Democrats in voting against the measure, thus it failed in a 31–19 vote against it.
Indiana is a GOP stronghold. It last voted for a Democrat on the presidential level in 2008, when Barack Obama narrowly carried the state. President Trump won there by 19 points in the 2024 presidential election. Evidently, both Senators in the US Senate from the Hoosier State are Republicans, Todd Young and Jim Banks. In the lower chamber of Congress, however, Democrats hold two out of the nine seats apportioned to Indiana.
This is what the new proposed Congressional map was set out to change.
The Indiana General Assembly, where both houses are held by a Republican supermajority, drew the Congressional lines in a way that all nine districts would have a Republican-majority population, based on the 2024 election results.
The redistricting plan passed the Indiana State House earlier this month, but it had some Republican defectors even then. 57 out of the 70 GOP state lawmakers voted in favour.
Previously, some additional controversy had emerged as well. Republican State Senator Mike Bohacek of Indiana has declared that he would not be voting for the proposed new map, in protest of President Donald Trump calling Minnesota Governor Tim Walz ‘seriously retarded’ in a post on Truth Social. The Senator has a mentally disabled daughter; while President Trump has been aggressively pushing for gerrymandering in his state.
However, those GOP lawmakers in the Indiana Legislature who rejected his calls did not cite the President’s words as their reasons for it—rather, their conservative values, which call for a check on federal power over the states.
‘My opposition to mid-cycle gerrymandering is not in contrast to my conservative principles, my opposition is driven by them. As long as I have breath, I will use my voice to resist a federal government that attempts to bully, direct, and control this state or any state. Giving the federal government more power is not conservative,’ State Senator Spencer Deery told the press ahead of the vote on redistricting, as quoted by an article on BBC.com.
However, Governor Mike Braun of Indiana, evidently another Republican, has expressed his disappointment in the failure to adopt a new map ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. ‘I will be working with the President to challenge these people who do not represent the best interests of Hoosiers,’ he wrote in a post on X.
Democrats are currently leading the House generic ballot vote by 3.7 points in the RealClearPolitics polling aggregate. This is a lot closer than at this point into President Trump’s first term, when the Democrats were ahead by 10 points. They ended up winning by 8.6 points nationally in 2018. That is why many Republicans, politicians and voters alike, feel that if some conservative states were to redraw their congressional districts in a way more favourable to their party, they could hold onto their narrow majority in the House.
Or, in a more realistic scenario, keep the Democratic majority so narrow that it would only take the convincing of a couple of opposition lawmakers to vote for things like appropriation bills that keep the federal government running smoothly.
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