‘Tonight, we learned that President Trump’s endorsement has more weight than former Vice President Pence’s in his home state of Indiana’
By Anthony Iafrate, Daily Caller News Foundation
At least five of the seven Republican Indiana state senators whom President Donald Trump targeted for defeat lost their reelection bids Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.
The president had endorsed primary challengers against seven of the 21 Republicans in the Indiana state Senate who voted in December 2025 to block a redistricting effort backed by Trump and Gov. Mike Braun that would have likely flipped both of the state’s Democratic-held seats to the GOP in the midterms. Of the Trump-backed outsiders, five were able to pull of victories in a state the president carried by 19 points in 2024, with one race too close to call as of Wednesday morning — a positive early sign of Trump’s influence over his party’s electorate as November approaches.
The Trump-backed map blocked by the GOP-dominated Indiana State Senate would have likely resulted in Republicans winning all nine of the Hoosier State’s House seats, a net gain of two seats. The map would have given the GOP only half of the four seats they are projected to lose in Virginia due to the state’s aggressive voter-approved Democratic gerrymander, given it passes judicial muster.
Between January and April, Trump sent a series of Truth Social posts announcing his “Complete and Total” endorsements of the seven challengers and variously referring to the anti-redistricting incumbents he was targeting as Republicans in name only (RINOs) and “America last.” A total of $13.5 million — a virtually unprecedented sum for state legislative races — was spent on the competitive races with the lion’s share of this money going to the slate of candidates backed by the president, Politico reported.
“We could have easily picked up two seats in Indiana,” the president said in several of his posts, referring to the failure of the restricting vote.