“Midwest Nice” is no match for presidential petty

In Indiana, Donald Trump takes his revenge

“You have to be mindful if there are breaks in the ranks. You have to be vigilant.” So says Marty Obst, a Republican operative in Indiana and enforcer for the president. Last summer Mr Obst was tasked with pushing a gerrymandered congressional map through Indiana’s Republican-held statehouse. Had it passed, it would have drawn Democrats out of existence in the state congressional delegation. But unlike in Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas and, most recently, Tennessee, where lawmakers dutifully complied, Republicans in Indiana balked. Naturally Donald Trump turned to retribution.

What followed was a scorched-earth effort to punish seven obscure Republican lawmakers who voted against the map. In the primary on May 5th, at least five lost to challengers backed by the president. He may be more unpopular than ever but, among the MAGA base, his endorsement matters. Success in Indiana will only deepen his appetite for fealty pledges and intraparty purges. Mr Trump’s next targets include Bill Cassidy, a senator from Louisiana, and Thomas Massie, a congressman from Kentucky. Both face Trump-endorsed opponents later this month.

What differentiates Indiana was the small-potatoes-ness of it. These are part-time lawmakers who make $33,000 a year and handle campaign business from their Gmails. Yet Mr Trump was aggrieved enough to deploy Chris LaCivita, an adviser to his presidential campaign, and involve Club for Growth, a conservative Super PAC that normally plays at the national level. Mr Trump’s intervention initiated an arms race—in total, $13.5m was spent on ads, up from a few hundred thousand dollars in years past.

Dan Dernulc, an incumbent who lost his primary, had always been “Trump, Trump, Trump”. But he took umbrage at the idea that he should support a gerrymandering scheme cooked up in Washington outside the normal once-a-decade redistricting process. “The problem was, I never had any input into this,” he says. Not that Republicans in Indiana oppose gerrymandering in the abstract. In fact, they are experts at it: 20 years ago Democrats held five of the state’s nine congressional seats. Today they hold two even as their vote share is 38%. Patrick Munsey, a journalist in Kokomo, describes the general M.O. like this: “We’ll gerrymander the crap out of our districts when it’s time.”

Having seen their colleagues’ fate, lawmakers in Indianapolis may decide that the time is next year, not 2030. Certainly other red states will plough ahead, aided by the Supreme Court’s gutting on April 29th of the Voting Rights Act, which had kept gerrymandering in check. Republicans in Alabama and South Carolina want to eliminate Democratic districts before the midterms. Louisiana and Tennessee are already doing that. Until the court set off this most recent scramble, the gerrymandering wars had looked like a draw. Now Republicans might have the edge.

In Indiana, their willingness to buck the president was a win for institutionalists. Randy Niemeyer, a Republican county chair, says MAGA operatives in Washington had assumed redistricting would be a slam dunk. He told them no: Indiana may be full of Republicans, but it is not full of ideologues. Good sense, fair play and independence matter. “Indiana is Midwest Nice,” he says. In the end that was no match for presidential petty. ■