Wimping the vote in Indiana
President Trump's social media army sees a specter blocking their path to total Hoosier domination
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There’s a powerful spirit at work, quietly driving the decisions of Indiana Republicans who are reticent about redrawing their Congressional map all the sudden to give President Donald Trump some extra protection in the Midterms, according to some online pundits.
It’s not the sour poll numbers, showing Hoosiers of all ideologies opposing the political power play. But it does have a shock-white visage, enough to scare the most stalwart Trump loyalist this Halloween: Mike Pence.
“Is former Indiana Governor Mike Pence trying to get revenge on the MAGA movement that he backstabbed on J6 and telling Rodric Bray (n)ot to redistrict? Hmmm. That’s what we’re hearing!” wrote Rogan O’Handley, a 40-year-old former lawyer turned Trump social media influencer, last Wednesday on X.com.
A top staffer to Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, who could be a tie-breaking vote as the head of the Senate, screenshotted the post and put it on Facebook calling Pence a “disciple of Satan!”
Which is the opposite of what Donald Trump predicted on January 6th, five years ago, when he told Pence on the phone he would go down in history as a “wimp”, according to important new reporting by veteran newsman Jonathan Karl in his book out tomorrow, “Retribution”.
Indiana’s governor, Mike Braun, announced Monday that he would call state lawmakers back to the capital next Monday to begin work on a surprise redo of the state’s Congressional maps that President Trump has been pushing for for months now.
It’s the latest step in the White House’s broad push to engineer new maps in Republican-led states, from Texas to Missouri and beyond, in an effort to stave off expected wins by Democrats — and subsequent impeachments and nonstop investigations into the last nine months in American history.
It’s touched off a national arms race, where law allows, with plenty of Democrat-led states attempting their own redrawn maps, from California to possibly Virginia.
But Indiana’s dominant state Republicans — they control 67 of 100 seats in the state House and 40 of 50 seats state Senate — have been rebuffing the effort for months.
Interviews and exchanges with longtime Indiana operatives across the spectrum Monday revealed a sense that redistricting is far from guaranteed and could even be a move by Braun simply to assuage the White House. But statehouse veterans also cautioned that reticence and handwringing often foreshadows decisive wins, and a new Indiana map that attempts to eliminate one or both Democratic-held U.S. House seats could easily be approved.
Nobody tracking the redistricting fight, however, raised Pence as a deciding factor.
So is the former vice president, governor and longtime House member a veritable LBJ-style master of Indiana’s state senate?
Pence was never good at whipping votes when he was governor, and even less so now that he has one foot out the door of Republican politics, with second stint in academia.
The real reticence, and why the Trump White House has had to spend so much time twisting arms in Indiana — dispatching Vice President J.D. Vance two times in person, inviting them to the White House and having Trump hop on the phone recently with state senators — is because the idea is broadly unpopular and Democrats, independents and even some big name Hoosier Republicans have easily outflanked the White House in their public campaign against redistricting.
Writing in his longtime column in The Washington Post last week, former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels tore apart the arguments in favor of redistricting, hitting back against “puffed-up White House apparatchik’s” threats and said it was on Indiana’s elected officials to “lead in climbing out of the mudhole.”
“Hoosiers have said they don’t want redistricting. Indiana Republican lawmakers have said they don’t want redistricting—until the Trump administration bullied them into it,” U.S. Rep. Andre Carson, an Indianapolis Democrat, who could become a target next week, told 24sight News Monday. “I have faith in the leaders who have chosen not to succumb to these blatant political threats and encourage them to stay strong—it’s more important to have a pat on the back from your constituents than a pat on the head from a lame duck president.”
And Republican supporters of the effort have said they need to do more work to change public opinion and pitch the case that redistricting is needed to stop Democrats from exacting revenge on Trump and his administration if they win the House, and possibly the Senate, next November.
The White House and Republicans in favor of redistricting should retake the narrative from Democrats, independents and Republicans who oppose the effort, longtime Indiana Republican Tony Samuel told 24sight News.
“You can’t be intimidated, you’ve got the numbers (of voters) and the message,” said Samuel, who co-chaired Trump’s 2016 campaign in Indiana. “You do have a strong political message and you can make a strong policy argument and you can’t be intimidated by the junk the Democrats have got.”
For now, Trump’s online army has revived a boogeyman. An old scur of the dominant Trump wing of the Republican Party. Albeit one who wouldn’t hurt a fly, it seems, even if it perched on his head for what felt like a lifetime.
That could just be the theater of it all, but Trump’s online army has also been posting personal contact information for lawmakers — possibly in violation of Indiana law which makes it a felony to threaten harm and post their personal contact information.
Over the weekend, longtime Indiana Republican Mike Murphy said he received an unsolicited request online to pressure state senators on the Trump-requested map with a list of state senators’ personal cell phone numbers.
Murphy, a former state representative, recalled being stalked and threatened regularly by an activist years ago who was angry that state lawmakers would not mandate that HIV results be made public.
“I lived with that, for more than a year, so I’m particularly sensitive to what can happen when issues get embedded in a crazy person’s mind,” Murphy said Monday. On Monday afternoon, Murphy posted a photo on Facebook of the state’s intimidation statute.
— contributed to this report.
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*** Important Update! *** I had to pull back from the daily noon shows to work on projects which pay the bills here. (The show takes a lot of work to plan, produce, perform, edit, post, etc.) Tom LoBianco Reports is dialing back to a couple times a week. This also gives me more time to report important stories like what’s happening in the church family which effectively catapulted Indiana’s lieutenant governor, Micah Beckwith, on to the national stage. (More coming on that front.)
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