Succumbing to mounting pressure from the Trump administration and the president’s allies, Indiana Republican Gov. Mike Braun announced on Monday that a special session focused on redistricting will convene on November 3.
The announcement significantly bolsters the Trump administration’s pressure campaign to strongarm Republicans in red states across the country to redraw their congressional maps as a way to help ensure Republicans keep the U.S. House in the midterm elections. It has been unclear for weeks whether Republicans in the Indiana Senate had enough votes to pass redrawn maps.
“I am calling a special legislative session to protect Hoosiers from efforts in other states that seek to diminish their voice in Washington and ensure their representation in Congress is fair,” Braun said in a statement on Monday.
The announcement comes only days after Indiana Senate Republicans said they did not have the votes needed to approve a revised congressional map. Following that announcement, Indiana MAGA Republicans began bullying their colleagues online to try to get them to back Trump’s political interests.
President Trump, Vice President JD Vance and MAGA allies have been working hard to coerce Indiana Republicans to get on board with redistricting. Earlier this month, per Politico, Trump called into a private Senate GOP caucus meeting and Vance visited the state twice to pressure Republicans into redistricting. Republican members of the state Senate have also reportedly been flooded with emails in recent weeks from right-wing groups, such as Turning Point USA, according to The New York Times.
Trump’s allies have been threatening to fund primary challengers against those opposed to engaging in the once-unprecedented practice of mid-cycle redistricting. Before he was killed last month, Turning Point USA co-founder and MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk was leading this effort.
A handful of Republicans, including state Sens. Scott Alexander, Ron Alting, Justin Busch, and Daryl Schmitt, all publicly announced their support for a revised congressional map on Friday, prompting Braun to call for a special session, the Indiana Capitol Chronicle reported.
Democrats currently only have two of the state’s nine seats in the U.S. House. A redrawn Indiana map may help Republicans gain two additional seats.
So far, red states like Texas, Missouri and North Carolina have all caved to pressure from the Trump administration to approve revised congressional maps.
The approved maps are all expected to flip seats currently held by Democrats for Republicans. It is typical for redistricting to take place once a decade after the Census has been taken — and not mid-cycle as a way for Republicans to try to predetermine the results of the midterm elections.
I hope it bites them in the ass.
Blatantly rigging the game, and it’s going to happen with the SCOTUS complicit in this power grab. This is the Fourth Reich, people. We need to stop thinking that’s bombast or hyperbole. Fascists will hold power for a generation with this rigging.
I just heard a stat that shows why they’re so so desperate to get all these structural barriers to non-right-wing voting in place…
The percentages of Americans who are White CHhistians (the general source of the pro-Trump, pro-White Christian Nationalist voting/behaving) and of those who are White Conservative Evangelicals (the main and the really fervent source of White Christian Nationalist sentiments) both continue to drop significantly. The percentage of White self-identified Christians in the U.S. is now 41 percent, as I understand it, while the percent of White Conservative Evangelical Protestant – which was 25 percent of the country not very long ago-- is now down to just 13 percent.
And that fact is diluting right-wing power as far as raw numbers go, according to PRRI’s Robbie Jones, who I just heard talking about the new PRRI/Brookings American Values Survey on Michael Podhoretz’s Substack. And that’s a good thing, of course, for rational voting and a rational government.
However, he noted that, by now, between the geographic distributions of White Christians across the nation and across each state, the amount of gerrymandering and Supreme Court demolition of the Voting Rights Act and so on, plus the Federal system in general as the Constitution lays it out, the structural advantages that the White Christian vote has is not dropping along with their overall proportion of the population and in some ways may eve be getting boosted.
Jones’ view is that, therefore, this right-wing horror that we have right now isn’t actually a Democratic messaging problem, as we all keep saying, but in fact is primarily a very complicated interwoven structural advantage for the right-wing vote – i.e., for White Protestants – which Republicans are putting all their efforts into trying to bolster.
On the bright side, he also noted that the Latino shift toward Protestantism-- especially conservative Evangelicalism --seems to be dropping off fairly significantly, with Catholicism (which does tend to vote more Democratic) holiding its own, and “unaffiliated” rising substantially among Latinos while Evangelical Protestantism simultaneously drops off (after a period when it was pretty significantly rising.)
Just FYI, here’s who Michael Podhoretz is –
Wait until they start rigging business operations, for the good of America, of course, but mostly for the good of their subscribers.
I live in one of the 2 Dem districts – both very urban– and this is just infuriating. I think there will be protests at the statehouse. Not sure it will do any good, but if Braun thinks slavish support of Trump’s racist disenfranchising of the city he currently lives in will go over well, he should be faced with some opposition.