In December 2025, eight Indiana state senators voted against a congressional redistricting map that would have added two right-leaning U.S. House seats to Indiana’s delegation.
They had a Republican supermajority. They had the governor’s mansion. They had every piece of the puzzle. They blocked it anyway.
Five months later, Trump endorsed their challengers. Last Tuesday, five of those incumbents lost their seats.
A supermajority means you don’t need the other side’s permission. With a supermajority you can override a governor’s veto. You can pass a state constitutional amendment. You can rename every highway in Indiana after a different species of corn. The eight senators who voted against that map in December weren’t facing a math problem. They were facing a choice. They chose wrong, and $8 million in outside money showed up five months later to show them how wrong they were to go against a party leader as strong as Donald Trump.
If you search through the campaign materials of the five senators who lost Tuesday, you will not find “I will block redistricting maps that add Republican House seats” listed as a campaign promise anywhere. They ran on the MAGA platform. They won on the MAGA platform. American Leadership PAC, Hoosier Leadership for America, Turning Point USA, Club for Growth — none of them spent a dime getting those senators elected. They spent $8 million getting them unelected.
That is a subtle but important distinction.
“The resources that he can bring to a state Senate race are overwhelming,” said Marc Short, a veteran of the Trump administration. He meant it as an observation. The five incumbents who lost Tuesday would probably use a different word.
Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) put it plainly: “President Trump is the single most popular Republican among Hoosier voters.” The senators who voted against redistricting in December apparently did not find this information relevant to their December vote. They found it extremely relevant by about 10 PM Tuesday.
One of the eight survived. One race was still undecided Wednesday morning. Five are gone — state Senate careers that took years to build, ended in a single primary night in Indiana, which is not a state that normally makes national political news for any reason other than basketball.
Club for Growth President David McIntosh called it “a big win for Trump.” He’s right. It’s also a big win for a fairly simple idea: that winning an election on someone else’s agenda and then ignoring that agenda is a strategy with a known failure mode.
The redistricting map those senators blocked would have added two Republican-leaning House seats. It still hasn’t passed. But the senators who killed it spent last Tuesday watching their replacements get elected, which is its own kind of civics lesson.
You can do a lot with a Republican supermajority in Indiana.
Turns out, it also comes with terms and conditions.
