Why don’t more Republicans defy President Trump? The presidential poll numbers are bad. The war in Iran raises the price of gasoline. The president’s family keeps billions. The President seems to care only about building shiny monuments for himself. With the upcoming midterms looking bleak for Republicans, you’d think Trump’s allies would be taking a cue from Meat Loaf: “I’d do anything for love, but I won’t.” But no. Disciplinary violations are still rare and manageable.
To better understand Trump’s power over his party—its limits and strengths—read yesterday’s Indiana Republican primary.
You may remember that at the end of last year the Indiana Senate rejected a plan supported by Trump to require the government to remove control of two US congressional seats in the Democratic House of Representatives. Twenty-one Republicans joined with 10 Democrats to defeat the measure, 31–19. Republican opponents cited voters’ unpopularity with the gerrymander. The plan would have denied the city of Indianapolis representation in Congress by cutting it into pieces swallowed up by neighboring suburbs and suburbs, among other drawbacks.
Trump and Vice President Vance immediately threatened to punish Republican opponents. Eight Indiana state senators were targeted for primary challenges. The Trump White House and its allies—including the anti-Trump free market group Club for Growth, which now supports him—spent heavily (for Indiana) on those challenges, at least five of which went their own way. (Counting up as I type.) This victory paves the way for Trump’s grand plan to unseat Indiana Senate President Rodric Bray, who failed to push through the president’s gerrymander plan. The only candidates who had pledged to oppose Bray’s re-election won Trump’s endorsement and campaign support.
Concerned Republicans across the country have heard this message: Get with Trump, too goes finish politically; break him, and you are finished for sure.
Republicans launched the latest gerrymander battle last year in a bid to squeeze five more House seats from Texas. The Democrats, after returning to California and Virginia, seemed to be the winners of the contest. The Texas veteran had been predicated on the assumption that Trump’s gains with Texas Latinos in 2024 would last, but Latino support for the GOP is slipping. Republican hopes for Texas are fading. Some experts estimate that the new Texas party maps will find only two GOP seats for the state.
But all is not lost for Republicans, thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision last week to weaken Voting Rights Act by giving states new permission to eliminate congressional seats held by blacks and Latinos. Because the Supreme Court too adopted participant sexual breeding in 2019, the practical effect will be to allow Republicans in Mississippi and South Carolina to remove seats as long as they are careful to use the word. A democrat in their internal documents and never a word Black.
Any Republican who might have hesitated to use this new permission to clear Democratic seats now understands—thanks to Indiana—the penalty for not following Trump’s wishes.
Yet Democrats are not helping their own case, having contracted a chronic Republican disease: candidate quality disease. In the 2010 and 2012 political cycles, the Republican Tea Party movement won primaries against mainstream Republicans, pro-business and radical and unorthodox candidates. (One recorded a TV commercial denying that he is a witch. Another suggested that women didn’t need access to abortion after rape, because women rarely get pregnant when rape is “legal.”) These candidates threw away races they could have won in Delaware, Indiana, Missouri, and Nevada—postponing the GOP takeover of the U.S. Senate from 2010, when it was close to 2014.
Something similar could befall the Democrats now.
It’s become an article of faith among progressives that Kamala Harris lost in 2024 because she didn’t talk enough about the Palestinians and Gaza. Actual data available confirm that Harris lost because he was seen as too far to the left of where most voters placed themselves. But beliefs don’t have to be grounded in reality to motivate action.
In the 2026 cycle, Democrats are fielding candidates who have taken positions that would seem politically suicidal: a US House candidate in New Jersey who once witnessed the behavior of the “blind sheikh” behind the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center; a candidate for the US Senate in Michigan who campaigned with Hasan Pikera Twitch broadcaster who has said that America deserved 9/11; and a a candidate for the United States Senate in Maine who unconvincingly claimed not to know that the skull-and-bones tattoo he had worn for nearly 20 years was linked to the Nazi SS.
Most comments about these candidates focus on whether they are doing harm to their communities. But as the experience of the Tea Party emphasizes, all politics is national. Nominating an extremist in New Jersey could hurt Democratic candidates across the country. Despite Trump’s unpopularity, the Democratic brand is still weak, and April CNN poll it shows. Even now, despite tariffs, the Iran war, and the Trump administration, more Americans have a favorable opinion of the Republican Party (32 percent) than of the Democratic Party (28 percent). Progressives want to bet that “Gaza First” can beat “America First.” For the underdeveloped, such a gambling strategy seems to be a quick way to political failure.
And if, by the summer and spring, Trump gets his way out of Iran, the price of gasoline drops, and the election race heats up, Republican leaders can give any advantage. Gerrymanders work best when the vote is close. The corruption of the Trump administration should make the gap too big to bridge, but the “Gaza First” Democrats are doing everything they can to close it. If they succeed, the staunch Indiana state senators who opposed Trump may have sacrificed their work.
