Indiana Senate rejects new House map, defying Trump

The Indiana Senate failed to pass a new GOP-favored House map on Thursday, dealing a major blow to President Trump after he had publicly pressured state lawmakers to approve the new lines.

The upper chamber voted against the map on a 19-31 vote, drawing applause from some within the chamber. [The GOP holds 39 of the 50 seats.]

Trump’s allies immediately slammed the vote, saying they would follow through on that threat to challenge GOP holdouts.

Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz: “We’ll be launching primary challenges against every last traitor who voted no, effective immediately! Pack your bags, your time is up!”

The deeply personal reasons why many Indiana Senate Republicans said no to Trump​

Jean Leising spoke at a breakfast this fall at her 8th grade grandson’s school. Hours later, when she was set to give him a ride home from basketball practice, he bashfully told her that his entire team had received text messages about her that day — “and they were all bad.”

“Boy, when I got home that night, that’s when I decided,” said Leising, a 76-year-old grandmother of eight, first elected to the Senate in 1988. “I was angry. So the next day, I said, ‘I’ve got to talk about this.’ Because this is over the top. This shouldn’t be the way it was.”

“But that was the beginning,” she added. “It only got worse from there.”

It was clear on Thursday that a pressure campaign waged by the White House and its allies had backfired.

“You wouldn’t change minds by being mean. And the efforts were mean-spirited from the get-go,” she said. “If you were wanting to change votes, you would probably try to explain why we should be doing this, in a positive way. That never happened, so, you know, I think they get what they get.”

“Hoosiers are a hardy lot, and they don’t like to be threatened. They don’t like to be intimidated. They don’t like to be bullied in any fashion. And I think a lot of them responded with, ‘That isn’t going to work,’” [another senator] Glick said. “And it didn’t.”

Indiana governor says he’ll help primary Republicans who defied Trump on redistricting​

“I am very disappointed that a small group of misguided State Senators have partnered with Democrats to reject this opportunity to protect Hoosiers with fair maps and to reject the leadership of President Trump. Ultimately, decisions like this carry political consequences,” Braun wrote in a post on the social platform X.