Trump-Backed Candidates Defeat Republican Incumbents in Indiana Primary Elections

On December 11, 2025, twenty-one Indiana Republican state senators joined all ten Democrats to vote down a Trump-backed congressional redistricting plan, 31-19 [1]. It was a rare act of defiance — elected Republicans rebuking a sitting president of their own party on his signature electoral priority. Five months later, on May 5, 2026, five of the seven targeted incumbents were swept out of office by Trump-endorsed challengers, most by margins exceeding 20 points [2].

The Indiana primaries were not a normal election. They were a $13.5 million demonstration of what happens when a president decides to punish dissent within his own party — and a warning shot to every Republican officeholder in the country who might consider crossing the White House [3].

The Redistricting Fight That Started It All

The conflict traces back to the summer of 2025, when Trump and his allies began pressuring Republican-controlled state legislatures to redraw congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterms. Indiana, where Republicans hold seven of nine congressional seats, became a focal point. The proposed map would have redrawn two Democrat-held districts — the 1st (centered on northwest Indiana) and the 7th (Indianapolis) — to create what would likely have been a 9-0 Republican delegation [4].

Trump deployed his full apparatus. Vice President JD Vance visited the state multiple times. House Speaker Mike Johnson called legislators directly. Charlie Kirk, the co-founder of Turning Point USA, traveled to Indianapolis in August 2025 to warn state lawmakers that his organization would work to oust anyone who voted against the map [5]. Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025, just weeks later [6].

Despite this pressure, Indiana Senate President Pro Tem Rodric Bray allowed the vote to proceed on its merits. Twenty-one of the chamber's 40 Republicans voted no, citing concerns about the process, the precedent of mid-decade redistricting, and the principle that state legislatures should not serve as instruments of federal political strategy [1][7].

The no vote was a political earthquake. It was the first major defeat for Trump's national redistricting push, which had already succeeded in Texas. Trump responded by endorsing primary challengers against seven of the dissenting senators [2].

The Results: A Rout in Six of Seven Races

The margins were not close. In five of six decided races, Trump-backed challengers won with 58% or more of the vote [8].

Source: NBC News / AP

Data as of May 6, 2026CSV

District 1: Trevor De Vries, an insurance broker, crushed incumbent Dan Dernulc with 75.1% of the vote — the widest margin of the night [8].

District 19: Blake Fiechter, a real estate agent who had initially dropped out of the race in February citing insufficient resources, reversed course after a visit to the White House in March. He defeated Travis Holdman, the third-ranking Republican in the Senate and a member since 2008, with 61.6% [2][8].

District 21: Tipton County Commissioner Tracey Powell unseated 80-year-old Jim Buck, who had served in the Indiana legislature since 1994, with 64.7% of the vote. Buck had the endorsement of former Vice President Mike Pence [2][8].

District 11: Dr. Brian Schmutzler defeated Linda Rogers with 58.9% [8].

District 41: State Rep. Michelle Davis defeated Greg Walker, a 20-year incumbent, with 58.8% [8].

District 38 (the exception): Greg Goode held his seat, defeating Trump-backed Vigo County Council member Brenda Wilson with 53.5%, the only incumbent to survive [8].

District 23: Spencer Deery led Trump-backed challenger Paul Copenhaver by just three votes — 6,334 to 6,331 — with the race too close to call as of Wednesday morning. Former Governor Mitch Daniels had endorsed Deery [2][8].

Follow the Money: A 4,736% Spending Explosion

The scale of outside spending was unprecedented for Indiana state legislative races. Ad spending across the seven contested races totaled approximately $13.5 million, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact — a 4,736% increase over the roughly $250,000 spent on state Senate races in the previous cycle [3][9].

Source: AdImpact / NOTUS

Data as of May 6, 2026CSV

The money flowed overwhelmingly from Washington-based organizations aligned with Trump and U.S. Senator Jim Banks of Indiana, a close presidential ally. The two largest spenders were Hoosier Leadership for America ($5.2 million) and American Leadership PAC ($3.8 million), both associated with Banks [9][10]. Club for Growth Action spent $2 million across eight races [3]. Turning Point Action, carrying forward Kirk's pledge, committed to an "eight-figure spend" and deployed field operatives from around the country for door-to-door canvassing [3][6].

Governor Mike Braun and Senator Banks personally contributed six and seven figures respectively [3].

On the incumbent side, the Indiana Senate Majority Campaign Committee — the caucus's campaign arm — spent approximately $2.4 million defending its members [10]. The incumbents significantly outraised their challengers in direct fundraising, but direct fundraising proved irrelevant against the tidal wave of outside money.

The Spencer Deery race in District 23 illustrated the absurdity of scale: over $3 million in ads were spent in a district of roughly 135,000 people, for a race decided by three votes [2].

Grassroots Anger or Top-Down Enforcement?

Supporters of the Trump-backed challengers reject the framing of these races as a hostile takeover. James Blair, White House Deputy Chief of Staff, said after the results: "When you never descend from the ivory tower to talk to voters, you sometimes don't hear what they are saying" [3].

Senator Banks argued the results reflected genuine constituent sentiment: "President Trump is the single most popular Republican among Hoosier voters" [3].

The Federalist published a post-election analysis headlined "Grassroots GOP Ousts Indiana Republicans Who Betrayed Base on Redistricting," arguing that the incumbents had ignored their voters' preference for maximizing Republican representation in Congress [11].

There is a version of this argument worth taking seriously. Indiana is a deeply red state Trump carried by roughly 20 points in 2024. Many Republican primary voters genuinely believed their state legislators should have drawn more favorable maps when they had the chance, and the redistricting vote was a tangible, easily understood grievance — not an abstract policy disagreement. Some of the defeated incumbents, despite long tenures, had grown complacent about constituent engagement in low-turnout state primaries.

But the counterargument is substantial. Steve Shine, the Allen County GOP Chair, told reporters: "There's a feeling that we can make up our own minds and that there's no rubber stamp" [3]. Senate President Pro Tem Bray was blunter, telling CNN: "This is really driven from outside the state of Indiana, mostly in Washington, DC, and the money is coming from outside of Indiana as well" [10].

The spending data supports Bray's characterization. The 4,736% increase in ad spending was almost entirely driven by national organizations, not local donors. Turning Point Action brought field operatives from other states. The challengers, in most cases, were not prominent local figures — Fiechter had dropped out of the race before a White House visit brought him back in [2].

Spencer Deery, the incumbent in the closest race, offered perhaps the sharpest critique: "What is being set up here is the potential model for any party to raise ridiculous amounts of money in D.C. and then use that to control states" [2].

The Institutional Collapse

The Indiana Republican Party's response to Trump's intervention reveals the asymmetry of power within the modern GOP.

The Senate Majority Campaign Committee backed the incumbents, spending $2.4 million — a meaningful sum by state legislative standards, but dwarfed by the $13.5 million in outside spending [3][10]. Senate President Pro Tem Bray publicly defended his members' right to vote their conscience and criticized the outside intervention. On election night, despite the losses, Bray said he would seek to remain as Senate leader [10].

But the party's institutional defense was thin. Governor Braun and Senator Banks — the state's two most prominent Republican officeholders after Trump — sided with the challengers and contributed significant funds to defeat their own party's incumbents [3][9]. The challengers reportedly sought pledges from incoming senators that they would vote to oust Bray as Senate president pro tem, a direct challenge to the chamber's institutional leadership [10].

Republican consultant Marty Obst offered the pragmatic view from the Trump camp: "There's accountability to those actions" [2]. In this framing, the primary losses were not punishment but consequences — the normal functioning of democratic accountability.

Historical Context: Trump's Endorsement as Enforcement Tool

Trump's record of primarying Republican incumbents has evolved significantly across three election cycles.

In 2022, Trump endorsed in 176 contested Republican primaries with a 90% overall success rate, though that figure was inflated by the fact that 74% of his endorsees were incumbents who would have won regardless [12]. In races where Trump specifically backed challengers against Republican incumbents, the results were more mixed — roughly six of seventeen endorsed challengers won [12]. The most prominent victories came against House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after January 6: Reps. Tom Rice, Peter Meijer, Jaime Herrera Beutler, and Liz Cheney all lost their seats [12].

In 2024, Trump's non-incumbent endorsees won 82% of contested primaries [13].

Indiana 2026 represents something different from both cycles. This was not about ideology, impeachment votes, or personal loyalty tests. It was about a single procedural vote on redistricting — and the message was delivered with overwhelming force. Five of seven targets eliminated, all by double digits.

The escalation is clear: from punishing impeachment votes (an extraordinary act of party disloyalty) to punishing a redistricting vote (a routine legislative judgment call). The bar for what constitutes a primary-worthy offense has dropped considerably.

General Election Implications

The immediate general election risk from purging these incumbents is limited. All seven targeted districts are heavily Republican. Trump carried most of them by 20 points or more in 2024 [10]. The one exception is District 1, near Lake Michigan and southeast of Chicago, where Trump won by approximately 7 points — a competitive margin that could theoretically give Democrats an opening if the new nominee underperforms [10].

At the congressional level, Indiana's existing district boundaries remain unchanged because the redistricting effort failed. None of the state's nine congressional seats is expected to be competitive in November [14]. The irony is that Trump's retribution campaign succeeded at punishing the legislators who blocked his map but did nothing to change the map itself.

The National Warning

The implications extend far beyond Indiana. Republican lawmakers in other states facing similar redistricting pressure — including potential fights in North Carolina, Ohio, and Georgia — now have a concrete example of the cost of defiance [15].

For the roughly two dozen House and Senate Republicans nationally who have voted against Trump priorities on various issues, the Indiana results sharpen the calculus. Primaries are now a demonstrated enforcement mechanism, not an empty threat. The infrastructure exists — the PACs, the field operations, the media ecosystem — to mobilize overwhelming force against any Republican incumbent in a Trump-friendly district.

The question is whether this mechanism works everywhere or only in deeply red territory. Indiana's targeted districts were overwhelmingly Republican, meaning Trump-aligned challengers faced no risk of creating a general election pickup opportunity for Democrats. In swing districts or purple states, the calculus could be different — a primary challenge from the right might produce a nominee too extreme to win in November.

Greg Goode's survival in District 38, and Deery's near-survival in District 23, also suggest limits. Not every Trump endorsement is a death sentence. Local name recognition, strong constituent relationships, and the specifics of each district still matter at the margins — even when they cannot overcome a 50-to-1 spending disadvantage.

But the dominant lesson from Indiana is simpler and starker: in a Republican primary in Trump country, the president's opposition is close to disqualifying. Five veteran legislators learned that on Tuesday night. Every Republican in the country is absorbing that lesson now.