President Donald Trump suffered yet more bad news on Friday in his bid to redraw congressional maps in Republican states to give himself extra seats, as Indiana — a state he has spent months trying to pressure into his plan — still appears to be a no-go.
According to Politico's Adam Wren, Indiana Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray reiterated the same thing he said weeks earlier: that there aren't enough voters in the state Senate to move forward with the plan.
"Over the last several months, Senate Republicans have given very serious and thoughtful consideration to the concept of redrawing our state's congressional maps," Bray said in a statement. "Today, I'm announcing there are not enough votes to move that idea forward, and the Senate will not reconvene in December."
So far, Trump has succeeded in pressuring Republicans in Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina to enact mid-decade gerrymanders that delete Democratic seats from the map, although all these moves are under litigation, and Missouri activists are collecting signatures for a ballot referendum that would suspend the new map there.
But moving forward has been trickier in Indiana, where Republicans could potentially carve up Democratic seats in Indianapolis and Gary to give all nine of the state's districts to themselves. While Trump and Vice President JD Vance have made multiple trips to Indiana to sell redistricting, and while the entire GOP congressional delegation and Gov. Mike Braun are behind it, there are just enough GOP state senators against the plan to deny it the votes to proceed.
This comes as a number of other problems have cropped up for Republicans in a congressional redistricting war they were initially confident they could win.
This month, California voters passed Proposition 50, which temporarily suspends that state's redistricting commission and passes a map that seeks to draw out five GOP seats to offset the new Texas map. In Ohio, where state law required a mid-decade redistricting because its initial map didn't pass on a bipartisan basis, Democrats cut a deal with the GOP that preserves most of the current Democratic seats. Kansas and New Hampshire Republicans backed off their plans to redistrict, at least for the time being. And a state judge in Utah adopted a map that is expected to create a new Democratic district in Salt Lake City.
