Special session turns up heat on Republican holdouts

Indiana Gov. Mike Braun is calling lawmakers back Monday to draw new districts favoring Republican candidates.

The special session follows pressure from the White House. However, spokesperson Molly Swigart from the office of Republican senate president pro tem Rodric Bray said in an email there may not be enough votes to get the job done.

Braun initially said he wouldn’t call a special session until he had the votes he needed, but changing his mind could turn up the heat on detractors, said Michael Wolf, acting director at the Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics.

“The real pressure point here might be a reluctance to actually have initiated this,” Wolf said. “Once the political pressure comes on and a potential primary challenge, people might fall in the line and support this changed map.”

Senate Republicans need at least 25 votes to pass the new maps, which could net the party one or two seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Some polling shows that redistricting is unpopular in Indiana, and Republican dissenters have stood by the maps they drew in 2021.

Holdout Gregory Goode, a senator from Vigo County, said he won’t be bullied, writing on social media, “I reflect on political heroes who stood up for the greater good above the politics of the day.”

Republican Sen. Spencer Deery of Lafayette said on Facebook in August, “groups from outside Indiana are trying to convince Hoosiers that we should use your tax dollars to start a redistricting war that no one will win. It would be a race to the bottom.”

But Wolf doesn’t think that resistance will hold. The national Republican Party could recruit primary challengers in seats held by dissenters.

“Indiana seems very reluctant to be tackling this. Still, the nationalized pressure will definitely lead to this going forward,” he said.

Some Republican senators have been vocal about why they feel redistricting is important. In a campaign ad, northeast Indiana’s Liz Brown said, “if woke Democrats get control of Congress, they’ll push amnesty, trans ideology and abortion on demand. If we don’t act, we are putting our conservative values at risk.”

Lawmakers in Texas, North Carolina and Missouri have already passed maps to help Republicans.

Democrats in Virginia convened Monday to consider redistricting for their party. And California voters will decide on a Democratic-backed redistricting there next week.