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With President Trump’s deep unpopularity and the traditional backlash against the president’s party, Republicans seem destined to lose the House. So last summer, Trump started insisting that state-level Republicans further gerrymander their states’ congressional districts to protect the GOP House majority as much as possible. This was a huge break with precedent, since congressional districts are normally drawn every 10 years. Most states just redrew their districts in 2021. Texas, under huge pressure from Trump, made the first move. Now Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio are among the Republican states that have redrawn districts in ways that would hurt Democrats. To fight back, Democratic leaders in California and Virginia are now poised to redraw their maps. It seemed for a while that Indiana would not redraw its lines. The state’s legislature is overwhelmingly Republican, but at first many in the GOP balked. But under intense pressure from Trump, Indiana House Republicans last week adopted a map that would likely result in nine Republican U.S. House seats and zero for Democrats, compared to the state’s current 7–2 mix. Andrea Huntley, the assistant minority leader of Indiana Senate Democrats, says there is still a chance that enough Republicans in her chamber balk that the redistricting doesn’t pass. But it would require a big bloc of Republicans to break with Trump, since 40 of the chamber’s 50 members are Republicans.
