How Trump Is Influencing the Indiana Primary – David M. Drucker

“I voted for RINO Greg Walker—RINO Greg Walker’s who I voted for.” 

“RINO,” of course, stands for “Republican in name only,” an epithet that predates Trump’s rise to the top of the GOP. Before and since, the insult has been deployed by committed conservatives to undercut, in no particular order: moderate Republicans, Republicans willing to work with Democrats, and so-called establishment Republicans who serve in leadership positions and are tasked with negotiating intraparty compromises that disappoint far-right activists. In the Trump era, RINO also describes any Republican who defies the 45^th and 47^th president.

That is the most succinct way to explain why Trump, joined by allies like Gov. Mike Braun, Sen. Jim Banks, the Club for Growth, and various allied political organizations, is waging a multimillion-dollar campaign to remake the Indiana Senate in his MAGA image. Republicans control a supermajority of the chamber’s 50 seats, but the body has been dominated by traditional conservatives who prioritize pragmatic governing over populist culture combat. In that way, the disagreement over redistricting is just another battle in a long-simmering war between Reagan-era lawmakers who prefer the former and up-and-coming Trump-era legislators who crave the latter. 

The eight state senators being challenged by Trump-backed candidates represent ruby-red districts across Indiana—seats that include pristine farmland and small towns with historic county seats; growing bedroom communities and entrenched blue-collar manufacturing hubs. 

In December, they opposed a redistricting measure on the Indiana Senate floor, bucking direct orders from Trump and his lieutenants in Washington, D.C. and Indianapolis. The vote wasn’t even close: The bill failed 31-19, with 21 Republicans joining 10 Democrats in the nay column. This was despite Braun calling a special session of the General Assembly just so Republicans could greenlight the new map—and even though the Indiana House of Representatives approved the redistricting bill by the wide margin of 57-41.

To be clear: The eight incumbents facing forced retirement aren’t being targeted because they went wobbly on key conservative issues (even if true in certain instances). They’re under fire because they ignored Trump’s demand for an unorthodox middecade redistricting that, theoretically, would have drawn Indiana’s two Democratic-leaning House seats out of existence, put Republicans in control of the Hoosier State’s nine congressional districts, and given a slight boost to GOP efforts to preserve its slim majority on Capitol Hill. 

Guess what voters angry about their recalcitrance are saying about offending lawmakers?

“I’m not happy with Walker,” retiree Al Collier told The Dispatch after voting early for Davis in Franklin, a shiny exurban community with a thriving downtown square that is south of Indianapolis and just up the road from Columbus. “He’s a flip-flop; he’s a RINO; he doesn’t support the president and his agenda.” 

Collier, an Army veteran who fought in the Vietnam War and is “pushing 80,” said Walker’s December vote against redistricting on the floor of the Indiana Senate sealed his decision to back Davis and abandon the longtime incumbent. “I love this country, but I don’t like the direction these liberals and Democrats are taking it,” he said. “I wish I wouldn’t have voted for” Walker in the past. Of Trump, Collier added: “President Trump’s not perfect, nobody is—okay? But he’s putting America first, just like I would.”

Driving south into Columbus, your arrival is marked by a big blue sign declaring the community of 50,000-plus along the Flatrock River the “Hometown of Michael R. Pence; United States Vice President, 2017 – 2021.” Columbus native Tony Stewart, the championship NASCAR driver, also gets a big blue sign, but Pence gets top billing. 

Given Trump’s overhaul of a Republican Party that now reflects the populist president’s penchant for wielding federal power at the expense of states’ rights and the market economy, it seems fitting that one of the eight Indiana Senate districts with a competitive GOP primary sparked by the redistricting dispute would be anchored in Pence’s hometown. The 48^th vice president, a traditional conservative and Ronald Reagan disciple, spent four years dutifully extolling Trump’s “broad-shouldered” leadership. When Pence declined to facilitate attempts to overturn the 2020 election, the president and his Make America Great Again movement promptly excommunicated him. 

Yet Davis, 56, is not the prototypical MAGA flamethrower—think Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia—that has proliferated in Congress in the age of Trump. In an interview with The Dispatch outside the early voting site in Columbus, the former Ball State University standout basketball player was affable and thoughtful, and she avoided the kind of vulgar personal attacks on Walker that Trump and many of his most loyal acolytes are known for. (Davis would make a similarly civil case for sacking Walker later that evening during a fundraiser with local business owners and party officials at Columbus’ Upland Brewing Company restaurant.)

Davis doesn’t downplay Trump’s participation in her contest and the other GOP state Senate primaries in Indiana, nor his reason for jumping in. 

But she told The Dispatch that, in her experience, last fall’s redistricting fight in Indianapolis isn’t the defining issue of the campaign. Red meat issues guaranteed to motivate almost any Republican voter who bothers to vote in a primary for a state legislative seat are what’s converting voters who have been supporting Walker for years. They include taxes, gun rights, concerns about transgender women playing women’s sports, and anxiety about China supposedly buying up Indiana farmland. 

“I don’t know that it’s ever really been done before, where a president gets involved in a state office seat,” Davis said in the interview. “Redistricting, though—when I talk to my primary voters where I’m door-knocking—redistricting doesn’t come up. So if you’re not really involved in politics, I don’t know that you really, fully understood redistricting—unless you just really followed it. So that has not been a discussion point or a game changer when I talk to people.”

There is another factor to consider when gaming out Davis’ challenge of Walker, 62. She jumped into the primary last year prior to Trump’s redistricting push, and only after the incumbent assured Indiana Republicans that he planned to retire at the end of his current term and leave the 41^st Indiana Senate District open. But incensed by Trump’s strong-arm tactics to redraw the Hoosier State’s congressional map, he reversed course and filed for the 2026 ballot. None of that has stopped the ensuing primary from becoming a referendum on the president.

The seat encompasses Bartholomew County and a portion of Johnson County, both within an hour south and just slightly east of Indianapolis, the state capital. In the 2024 presidential election, Trump won both counties by an average of 31 percentage points. Outside Indiana, Walker’s renomination would undoubtedly be interpreted as proof that Trump’s influence over the GOP has limits; Davis winning would be trumpeted as the exact opposite. Talk to Republican voters in Indiana, a state Trump won overwhelmingly three times, and the conventional wisdom is hardly without merit.

The Trump endorsement “was important to me because it gave me an idea of where [Davis] stands,” Republican voter Donna Hacker explained to The Dispatch. And did redistricting play a role in Hacker’s vote? “No, it was mostly just—conservative vote,” the retiree, who recently went back to work at Lowe’s, said, after submitting an early ballot for Davis in Franklin. 

Davis acknowledges Trump’s stamp on her race. But harkening back to her interactions with voters, she offered a nuanced theory of what’s driving her bid to unseat Walker.

“You have both sides. Some of [the voters] are very excited that President Trump is supporting me and that I was in the Oval Office, because we have a MAGA crowd in Johnson County and Bartholomew County, where people love Trump. Then you have people who don’t like Trump who are Republicans as well,” Davis said. “So, I’m going to say the majority of the time people love Trump, and when they open their door they’re like: ‘Oh my god, I just saw you with the president.’” 

“I’ve had a few say: ‘I’m not really a Trump fan,’” Davis added. “Then once I tell them a little bit about who I am they say: ‘Well, we’ve got to think about it.’ But at least I got you to think about it.” 

Reached by telephone, Walker declined to be interviewed for this story but texted The Dispatch with records of his having voted for legislation opposing the participation of transgender women in women’s sports and barring China from owning Indiana farmland. Elected to the state Senate in 2006, Walker acknowledged voting to raise the gas tax—nine years ago—to help rebuild Indiana’s crumbling roads.

Trump’s campaign to eject the eight redistricting apostates from the Indiana Senate is, to borrow an apt phrase for this basketball-obsessed state, a full-court press.

Braun is spending via a $500,000 transfer from his HOPE super PAC to American Leadership PAC, a Jim Banks super PAC. Banks is active, to the tune of roughly $3 million to $4 million, through American Leadership PAC and Hoosier Leadership for America, a 501(c)4 organization affiliated with his political operation. Andy Surabian, a GOP operative who advises Donald Trump Jr. and Vice President J.D. Vance, is overseeing the activities of both groups. Marty Obst, based in Indiana and a senior Pence political aide back during Trump’s first term, is coordinating the fundraising. (Pence, a former congressman and ex-governor, is not active in this fight.)

Club for Growth, run by Republican former Rep. David McIntosh, is spending close to $2 million on direct mail and phone banks through two groups it controls. Turning Point USA, the sprawling Trump-aligned youth activist group, is also involved. Republican sources in Indiana tell The Dispatch the pro-Trump forces are on track, collectively, to spend up to $6 million or more. That’s more than the incumbents will likely muster. Still, veteran GOP operatives in the state say it’s unclear whether Trump emerges from this effort a kingmaker, a naked emperor, or somewhere in between.

“The amount of money spent is unprecedented, certainly here in Indiana,” said a Republican strategist here who is advising incumbent candidates. 

“What’s new here is federal money working so efficiently into the state-level races.” In one approximate comparison of recent advertising expenditures provided to The Dispatch, a pro-Trump challenger was outspending the incumbent more than 5 to 1. Incumbents are not supported by a similar constellation of flush outside groups, although they are backed by the Indiana Senate Majority Campaign Committee. 

State Sen. Travis Holdman, 75, who, as the Republican caucus chairman, is No. 3 in leadership behind the president pro tempore and the majority floor leader, is among the eight in the line of fire. The Dispatch caught up with him on an early weekday morning this month in Fort Wayne, anchor of the 19^th Senate District he represents and where he maintains a law office. Holdman, in office since 2008, didn’t pull any punches—on redistricting, his primary prospects, or Trump, whom he supported in three presidential elections and to whose campaigns he has contributed to. 

Holdman calmly detailed the charges against him by the attack ads aimed at elevating his primary opponent, real estate broker and Bluffton City Councilman Blake Fiechter, 36. 

The ads, many run by Hoosier Leadership for America, claim Holdman (and the rest of the incumbents) supports policies that allow transgender girls to use women’s locker rooms and bathrooms; that he has supported legislation enabling Beijing to purchase Indiana farmland (a charge he believes is creating more challenges for his reelection than running against a Trump-endorsed candidate); that Holdman voted to raise taxes; and that “I don’t support Donald Trump’s policies.” Only the claim related to taxes is true, Holdman said. 

He explained that, at the behest of voters in his district and a favorable statewide poll, he voted nine years ago for the same gas tax hike Walker is getting dinged for. (Holdman, chairman of the Senate Tax and Fiscal Policy Committee, estimates that he has voted for roughly 20 tax cuts over the years.) “The only policy of Donald Trump’s [I] did not support was a redistricting issue—and that’s what’s brought all this about,” the senator said during a lengthy conversation.

Holdman’s beef with middecade redistricting? To begin with, he’s convinced his constituents are against it. The senator said his statehouse office received more than 3,000 calls on the topic, and 90 percent voiced opposition. “There’s been close calls in the past with controversial issues. But I’ve always voted with what my constituents wanted,” he said. “I thought I got elected to do what my constituents wanted me to do.”

Holdman had other complaints. He said the White House was asking Republican legislators to rush through legislation enacting new maps in less than two months, even though custom was to spend up to five months on redistricting. Furthermore, Holdman said the proposed new congressional boundaries weren’t even released to lawmakers until just prior to the floor vote, which ultimately failed by a wide margin. “We were being asked to vote for something we hadn’t seen,” the senator said. 

He addressed that concern directly with Vance during a closed-door meeting in Indiana on October 10 that his caucus held. “I said: ‘You’re asking us to vote for something we haven’t seen. Can you get us the maps so we can see what the maps look like?’ He looked at me and said: ‘You’ll have the maps tomorrow,’” Holdman recalled. “I didn’t see the maps until December 1. The maps were released on Saturday, the 29^th of November—before [the] session began on the 1^st of December.”

After finally reviewing the proposed gerrymander, Holdman was unimpressed, arguing safe Republican seats would have been vulnerable to a Democratic flip. But as the interview progressed, what became apparent was that the senator’s various misgivings were a sideshow. What rankled Holdman was the Washington, D.C., arm-twisting and accusations of disloyalty from party leaders to whom he insists he’s supported nearly every step of the way.

“We’re kind of stubborn people in Indiana. It was the D.C. machine telling us what to do, and typically we don’t like that,” he said, while noting the irony of his situation. “It’s a sign of this day and age where the president wants me taken out over here, but on this side of the issue, I’m one of the best Americans in the world because I’ve contributed to his campaign.”

“The president doesn’t even know me. I’ve never met the man. He wouldn’t know me if he saw me on the street, which is okay. That’s politics,” Holdman added. Still, he mourned the effect that the “scorched-earth” battle over redistricting is having on Indiana politics broadly and the GOP specifically.

“We have lost our ever-loving mind over this issue,” Holdman said. “The divisiveness of the language that’s being used—the name-calling. And if you’re not 100 percent loyal, you’re disloyal and therefore you’re an enemy—we’re coming after you. It will take decades to get the parties settled down to [get] to a spot where we can be unified again, because there’s been so much damage done.” 

Indiana was just one front in an unexpected middecade struggle for congressional seats that has gripped the Democratic and Republican parties nationally since last summer.

In July, Trump ordered GOP allies in Texas to squeeze more red seats out of its House map. That effort triggered Democrats in California to follow suit. North Carolina and Missouri joined the fray (for Republicans), and voters in Virginia head to the polls on April 21 to decide on a redraw proposed by Democrats that could turn a 6-5 Democratic map into a 10-1 deep blue gerrymander. Middecade redistricting is also on tap in GOP-controlled Florida.

By the numbers, Republicans may yet lose this conflict, further jeopardizing their House majority in upcoming midterm elections. That is among the factors spurring recriminations by the pro-redistricting Republicans in Indiana, which, along with Democratic-run Maryland, was one of two states to outright reject party leaders’ demands for new congressional maps. But conversations with Republican operatives and lawmakers here revealed that disagreements over middecade gerrymandering were just one issue in a larger struggle for control of the party. 

That was the theme of the discussion during the aforementioned Davis fundraiser at the Upland Brewing Company in Columbus, where local business owners, Republican legislators, and U.S. Rep. Erin Houchin rallied in support of Walker’s challenger. Davis made her issues-based pitch, without paying much attention to the incumbent or the larger stakes in her campaign. But Davis’ supporters didn’t hesitate to frame the Trump-instigated challenges in those broader terms. 

“Republicans have a supermajority in the statehouse,” state Rep. Jim Lucas said in extemporaneous remarks to the crowd of about two dozen. “There’s a lot of RINOs. Michelle Davis is a conservative.” Houchin, 49, a former state senator elected to Indiana’s 9^th Congressional District in 2022, represents a mixture of rural and suburban communities south of Indianapolis. Her thoughts on what the fight over redistricting represents to Indiana Republicans were similar to Lucas’.

But the congresswoman expressed herself more eloquently, while offering more context from her tenure in the General Assembly.

“For several years, in my experience, a lot of conservative bills would run into roadblocks for the inability to gain, for example, 26 votes in the Senate. But you might have someone who would be allowed to bring a bill to the floor with 15 Republicans and 11 Democrats,” she told The Dispatch, in an interview on the sidelines of the Davis fundraiser after appealing for donations. In other words, Houchin grumbled, conservative legislation was often subject to a higher threshold for floor consideration by party leaders, than centrist bills that enjoyed bipartisan support.

Houchin said this sort of thing happens way too often in a chamber in which Republicans hold a 40-seat supermajority. It happened to her, the congresswoman said, including in response to legislation she proposed to enable Indianans to carry concealed firearms.

“Redistricting, I think, may have been the tipping point on that, where it did get national attention. It got the attention of the president of the United States,” Houchin said. “It’s something we typically don’t see Democrats do—they usually will stick together no matter what. And we do have, unfortunately, some representation that doesn’t support the red jersey.”