Craig Hames, a soft-spoken 47-year-old resident of southern Indiana, stepped up to the microphone at a town hall on Wednesday night and faced Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, a Republican.
“Will you give us your word tonight that you will oppose redrawing congressional lines?” Mr. Hames, a democratic socialist, asked.
“I can’t do that,” Mr. Beckwith said, before the crowd quickly drowned him out with angry boos and even louder applause.
The push by President Trump to redraw political maps and add more Republican seats in Congress has landed in Indiana.
It has quickly become a heated political issue even in small communities far from the state capital. In Newburgh, a southern riverfront town that hugs the Kentucky border, dozens of residents crowded into an event center this week to meet and question Mr. Beckwith, one of the highest-profile elected officials in Indiana to announce strong support for redistricting. That effort could flip one or both of the two congressional seats now held by Democrats.
Whether enough Republicans in Indiana will immediately join the push is far less certain.
Many have responded with silence. Others have been ambivalent, huddling behind closed doors to decide whether to support a call from the Trump administration to redraw their maps.
At least 10 state legislators have chosen defiance. Even as pressure from the White House has ramped up, those lawmakers, a small fraction of the roughly 110 state legislative Republicans in Indiana, have expressed opposition to rare mid-decade redistricting in social media posts, interviews and formal statements. One of those lawmakers later reversed course and said he supported redistricting. The Republican legislators who have said they are opposed to new maps include some from suburban swing districts and others from deeply conservative areas who won their seats by 30 or 40 percentage points.
“If we do that now, the rulebook gets tossed out the window,” State Representative Jim Lucas, a Republican from southern Indiana, said in an interview. He reasoned that Democrats, if they had the chance, would retaliate and redraw maps to favor their own party, just as Gov. Gavin Newsom is doing in California.
Besides, he said, Republicans already hold seven of Indiana’s nine congressional seats. “We have a saying: The pigs get fat, the hogs get slaughtered,” Mr. Lucas said. “We should be happy with what we have.”
This summer’s bitter national debate over redistricting began in Texas, where redrawn political maps that give Republicans up to five new seats in Congress were held up in the State Senate on Friday by a Democratic filibuster. The final vote is still expected by Saturday, and Gov. Greg Abbott is expected to sign the measure next week, just as the White House had sought. Mr. Newsom responded in kind on Thursday, signing bills to create new maps that could help Democrats flip five seats in their favor if the state’s voters approve the change in November.
In Indiana, pressure from Mr. Trump has been increasing, though largely kept behind closed doors.
Earlier this month, Vice President JD Vance flew to Indiana with multiple White House officials. Mr. Vance took the lead in meeting with top state Republicans, making the case for why the president felt Indiana should redraw their maps, according to a person familiar with the meeting, who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations. The delegation asked Indiana legislators to draw a 9-0 Republican map.
The governor and legislative leaders said they understood the White House wishes but made no commitments, according to the person.
“We listened,” Gov. Mike Braun said to reporters after the meeting, referencing redistricting.
Since the meeting, senior White House officials have been calling individual lawmakers in Indiana, urging them to redraw the maps.
State Senator Jim Tomes, a longtime Republican lawmaker, has not received a call from the White House about redistricting, he said in an interview this week.
One fellow lawmaker phoned him to ask what he thought about the issue. He responded that he was opposed.
“In my opinion, it’s pretty doggone good,” Mr. Tomes said of the current map, “and they should leave it alone.”
Most Republican state lawmakers do not appear to have made public statements on the remapping issue. Plenty of Indiana officials support drawing new maps.
Representative Victoria Spartz, whose congressional district includes Indianapolis suburbs and several small cities, said on social media that her state would have the opportunity to “stand with President Trump and the state of Texas to stand up for our REPUBLIC!”
“Given developments across the country,” she added, “I fully support mid-cycle redistricting.”
State Senator Gary Byrne told The News and Tribune, a local newspaper in southern Indiana, that he saw redistricting as a “constitutional way for statehouses to control what’s going on in D.C.” and that he would support a new map that would help Republicans “gain a seat or two.”
With Republican supermajorities in both chambers of Indiana’s General Assembly, the opposition of several Republicans and all Democratic legislators would not be enough to thwart the new maps if a special session brought lawmakers to Indianapolis. A spokesman for Governor Braun, a Republican who has been publicly noncommittal about calling a special session, did not respond to an interview request. The speaker of the House, Todd Huston, and Republican leaders in the Senate did not agree to interviews.
Allies of the White House have also been making a case for drawing new maps in Indiana.
“We will support primary opponents for Republicans in the Indiana State Legislature who refuse to support the team and redraw the maps,” Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, an influential conservative organization, wrote on social media.
Lawmakers and residents across Indiana began receiving robocalls and text messages last week, pushing for the redrawing of maps. The messages came from a group called Forward America, which has little public information available.
Democrats have very little leverage to block the redrawing of maps in Indiana, but have appealed to voters, who polls show generally oppose gerrymandering.
Any redistricting effort is expected to target Northwest Indiana, a traditionally Democratic area that has been trending toward Republicans in recent years. That area, along the Lake Michigan waterfront near Chicago, is racially diverse and set apart from most of the rest of Indiana by its time zone and economy, which is heavily reliant on steel mills and manufacturing. Representative Frank Mrvan, a moderate Democrat with strong labor union support, has kept that congressional district in his party’s hands despite attempts by Republicans to flip it.
Republicans are also looking at Indianapolis, the state’s most populous city and one that is centrally located in the state, as one that could easily be split apart. Indianapolis is home to Representative André Carson, the other Democrat in Indiana’s congressional delegation.
State Representative Earl Harris Jr., a Democrat from East Chicago in Northwest Indiana, called the discussion of remapping “a bit of a slap in the face of the voters.”
He said mid-decade redistricting violated the principle that voters should choose their elected officials, not the other way around, and he said he hoped more Republicans would come out against the idea.
“It’s kind of against the Constitution and against the rule of law, shall we say,” Mr. Harris said. “There’s a lot of our Republican friends who talk about that on a regular basis. And so I’m not 100 percent surprised that some of them came out and said, ‘Hey, this is not the direction we should be going.’ My hope is that behind the scenes, there’s a lot more.”
Indiana Republicans will again face White House officials next week, when legislators will fly to Washington for a series of meetings at the White House as part of the administration’s intergovernmental affairs agenda. White House officials said the meeting would focus on how they could carry out the America First Agenda in their own legislatures, and did not specifically mention redistricting, though it is clearly essential to the president’s agenda.
In Newburgh, Mr. Beckwith’s town hall was cut short not long after the redistricting question was raised. Several audience members shouted and cursed at the lieutenant governor, upset with him about immigration and other issues, and two people were arrested, including a woman who was accused of assaulting a sheriff’s deputy.
Bobbi Richardson, a retired businesswoman who supports Mr. Trump, left the building discouraged. All the screaming and scuffling was disruptive, she said, and instead of talking about state property taxes at the meeting the conversation was wasted on redistricting and other issues.
“They were not Indiana items,” she said. “And that’s what we should have been talking about.”
Julie Bosman reported from Newburgh, Ind.; Mitch Smith from East Chicago, Ind.; and Nick Corasaniti from New York. Tyler Pager contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett and Kirsten Noyes contributed research.