Hoosiers Hate Cheaters, and Other Reasons a Trump Revenge Campaign Might Fail |
Hoosiers Hate Cheaters, and Other Reasons a Trump Revenge Campaign Might Fail
Ms. Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion.
There was a while late last year when the Republican lawmakers in Indiana who were resisting President Trump’s push to redraw the state’s congressional map lived with the pervasive risk of physical violence. “We had firebomb threats,” State Senator Jim Buck told me in a recent interview. “All kinds of threats!”
Several anti-redistricting Republicans were swatted — armed police swarmed their homes in response to fraudulent emergency calls. “I had to have a conversation with my kids about what happens if police kick down our door and why that’s happening and what to do,” recalled State Senator Spencer Deery.
More than three months after 21 Republicans helped vote down Mr. Trump’s redistricting scheme in the Indiana Senate, the danger of physical attacks appears to have dimmed. But for the eight members of that group pursuing re-election this year — Mr. Buck, Mr. Deery, Greg Goode, Travis Holdman, Greg Walker, Linda Rogers, Dan Dernulc and Rick Niemeyer — the political peril remains. And these senators’ fortunes in the state’s May 5 primary, in which early voting starts next week, have national implications.
Indiana was not the only red state where Mr. Trump, desperate to retain his party’s control of the U.S. House in the coming midterms, pressed state legislators to rig the game by pursuing mid-decade redistricting aimed at juicing the G.O.P.’s electoral odds. It was, however, the rare case where state Republicans thwarted him.
Now hellbent on unseating the holdouts, the president and a collection of allies have encouraged primary challengers and are expected to pour millions of dollars into these down-ballot races. Mr. Trump’s minions are candid, even boastful, about their retributive goal. “I want this to be talked about in political science textbooks for decades to come as a cautionary tale of deviating away from the conservative platform,” Brett Galaszewski, a leader with Turning Point Action, a conservative activist group, told Politico.
The Indiana senators are on the front lines of the MAGA movement’s fight to establish itself as a force that will endure beyond Mr. Trump’s reign, a process that involves stamping out competing power centers and glimmers of independent thinking in the Republican Party. Small-d democratic fundamentals, such as the idea that state lawmakers are autonomous operators with priorities distinct from the White House’s, have no place in the loyalty-based system Mr. Trump has built.
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Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion. She has covered Washington and politics since the Clinton administration. @mcottle