President Donald Trump’s escalating pressure campaign to get Indiana Republicans to gerrymander their state appeared to have some success Tuesday.
Vice President JD Vance urged more than 55 Indiana Republicans to push forward with redistricting during a long-planned meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, according to three people familiar with the matter and, like others in this article, was given anonymity to discuss a politically sensitive meeting.
Trump then met privately in the Oval Office with Indiana House Speaker President Todd Huston and Senate President Rodric Bray, according to a White House official familiar with the meeting.
“It feels like the tide is starting to turn as Indiana Republican legislators are starting to understand they can deliver a huge win that Trump and his team will not forget,” said one Hoosier Republican who was in the larger meeting.
Vance spoke to the lawmakers specifically about redistricting, telling them they have an opportunity to “fight and support Republicans and be real Republicans,” the White House official said.
“You could see the room coming around to the idea hearing from the vice president,” the official told POLITICO. “Some real movement from it.”
The person said some of those lawmakers who have publicly registered their disapproval asked Vance questions, and eventually they committed to reconsider.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Spokespeople for Huston and Bray did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
As the meeting unfolded, Indiana Republican Attorney General Todd Rokita came out in favor of the plan to redraw the state’s congressional districts, which the White House considered a win, because Rokita has previously opposed the use of political data in redistricting.
The shifting views of Indiana Republicans came at a pivotal moment in Trump’s larger redistricting effort, as the battle turned to red states like Indiana and Ohio following moves in Texas and California.
Trump and his allies have escalated their pressure campaign on Indiana, with Republicans close to the White House threatening primaries for resistant Republicans and telling POLITICO that Trump is “playing for keeps.”
Going into Tuesday’s meeting, state GOP lawmakers who backed redistricting were becoming more vocal on social media, even as they dodged broadcast reporters before departing for Washington.
But Trump’s efforts aren’t a slam dunk. Nearly a dozen part-time Indiana Republican state lawmakers are — for now — opposing aggressive attempts by the professionalized MAGA political machine to force them to take up mid-decade redistricting.
In an interview, Republican State Rep. Ed Clere, who overperformed Trump in his Southern Indiana district near the Ohio River by 2 percentage points, is among those opposing a special session for redistricting, calling it “disturbing.”
Clere — who was shuttling between National Conference of State Legislatures meetings in Colorado and legislative meetings back in Indianapolis this week — was among those who turned down the White House’s invitation.
Multiple Indiana Republicans have said they are unlikely to get ahead of their Midwestern neighbor Ohio, where lawmakers face a September 30 deadline to pass a new congressional map. If Indiana agreed to follow, that could mean a pre-Thanksgiving timeline for drawing a new map.
Lawmakers’ opposition to redistricting runs the ideological spectrum, from Clere, a Burkean conservative to state Rep. Jim Lucas, a hard-right politician who traveled to Springfield, Ohio, last year amid unfounded claims that Haitian immigrants were eating domestic animals, an echo of Trump’s unsubstantiated claims on the campaign trail.
Days ago, Lucas called the mid-redistricting “highly unusual and politically optically horrible.” But emerging from the meeting today, a White House official described him as “open minded.” Lucas did not return a request for comment.
For his part, Clere says he hasn’t yet been contacted by the White House to ask him to reconsider his position. He remains skeptical of the urgency.
“How could the congressional map be in need of an emergency mid-cycle redraw, while the state legislative district maps are still fine?” he said. “I don’t think those two things are reconcilable.”
Clere compared the redistricting arms race to the Cold War deterrence doctrine of “mutually assured destruction.”
“This is the political version,” he told POLITICO. “And there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle,” he added. “And, and in this case, it’s an evil genie.”
