Team Trump Puts Revenge Ahead of Midterms Prize in Indiana |
Unprecedented as it was, Donald Trump’s decision to launch a nationwide mid-decade gerrymandering campaign last year made some raw political sense. He clearly thinks it’s important that his party hang on to its governing trifecta in Washington and knows the odds for continued GOP control of the House are low on both historical and public-opinion grounds. At the same time, the midterm House battleground is small enough that rigging a relative handful of elections might make a big difference. Trump’s remarkable power over Republicans everywhere made it feasible for him to order sudden gerrymanders in states where the GOP is all-powerful, particularly since the U.S. Supreme Court has removed most judicial limitations on partisan gerrymandering. His exercise of brute power over congressional mapmaking spurred surprisingly effective Democratic countermeasures in California and Virginia, making the whole proposition iffy, but you can understand why Republicans tried it.
What’s less rational is the obsession Trump and his MAGA allies are exhibiting over the setback they experienced in Indiana, where last December the GOP-controlled state Senate rejected a new congressional map that would have extinguished the state’s Democratic representation entirely, netting two new House seats. It was a galling defeat, to be sure, which involved defiance of direct orders issued by Trump, J.D. Vance, Governor Mike Braun, and U.S. senator Jim Banks. And it was an emotional........