Indiana Republicans don’t have votes for new congressional map Trump wants

The Indiana legislature lacks the votes to pass a congressional redistricting plan ahead of the 2026 midterms, a senior aide said Wednesday, marking a setback in President Donald Trump’s unprecedented push for Republican-led states to change their maps to help maintain or expand a historically small GOP majority in the U.S. House next year.

“The votes aren’t there for redistricting,” said Molly Swigart, communications director for the Indiana Senate Majority Caucus.

While Republican-led legislatures in Texas and North Carolina have redrawn their congressional maps to favor Republicans — and other states are still considering it — the announcement from Indiana signals continuing resistance among GOP lawmakers there. For months, Trump and other administration officials have pressured lawmakers in the Hoosier state to produce a new map — a process normally undertaken every 10 years after the census maps population changes.

The resistance also marks Trump’s first major setback amid his nationwide redistricting push. It also comes despite Indiana’s Republican supermajority — the party holds 40 of the state Senate’s 50 seats.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A person close to the White House said they are still in discussion with Indiana state senators. But the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they were confident they would have the votes once they talked to each Republican lawmaker.

Republicans hold seven of Indiana’s nine seats in the U.S. House, and a new map would aim to increase that number or even give the party a clean sweep of the seats. The state’s lawmakers, however, have appeared far less enthusiastic to redraw the state’s congressional boundaries than other Republican-led states such as Texas, where Republicans swiftly passed a map with five new Republican-leaning districts in August.

Earlier this month, when Vice President JD Vance visited the Hoosier state to rally support from top Republican legislators, state House Speaker Todd Huston (R) had signed on to support the plan, but Senate President Rodric Bray (R) at the time was not firmly committed, The Washington Post previously reported. Trump on Friday also called into a meeting with Indiana Senate Republicans to appeal to them on the topic of congressional redistricting, where Bray was also present, Swigart told The Post.

Indiana Gov. Mike Braun (R), who has publicly said he supports redrawing the congressional map, sought to downplay potential indifference from Republican members of the legislature.

“I am still having positive conversations with members of the legislature,” he wrote in a social media post on Wednesday. “I am confident the majority of Indiana Statehouse Republicans will support efforts to ensure fair representation in Congress for every Hoosier.”

Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith (R), who serves as president of the state Senate and also supports Trump’s plan for a new map, said Republican holdouts were choosing “the path of weakness and political convenience.”

“I am calling on my Republican colleagues in the Indiana Senate to find your backbone, to remember who sent you here, and to reclaim Indiana’s rightful voice in Congress by drawing a 9-0 map,” he said in a statement.

Pete Seat, an Indiana Republican strategist and former White House spokesman, suggested Republican lawmakers could be hesitant to deviate from redistricting norms and weigh another new map, which was redrawn in 2021 and based on 2020 census data.

“From my sense, those who are opposed are coming at it from a principled perspective rather than making a political calculation,” Seat said.

The impasse in Indiana has remained as Republicans in North Carolina approved a new map that could give them another congressional seat in their state. The GOP-led state House signed off on the new map on Wednesday, a day after the state Senate passed it. The map does not need further approval and under the state constitution, Gov. Josh Stein (D) does not have the power to veto it.

Republicans now hold 10 of the state’s 14 congressional seats, and the new map would give them a better shot at winning another. It moves the district represented by Rep. Don Davis (D) from having a GOP advantage of three percentage points to an 11-point one.

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• Dylan Wells and Patrick Marley contributed.