Don’t make no waves, don’t back no losers — that famous adage of the Richard J. Daley era seems appropriate for today’s Republican moment in Indiana, with a twist. Next door, state legislators who bucked presidential wishes for a mid-decade congressional remap were unceremoniously ousted thanks to a significant outside investment from President Donald Trump and his allies.
So, perhaps the message is just don’t make no waves. Fall in line, in other words. Even if you’re being asked to join a fight that’s not your own.
Trump’s Indiana revenge tour took down five state senators from within his own party who last December bucked his push for new political maps, a move that drew Trump’s wrath, including a battle of words as the president resorted to threats and name-calling to coerce lawmakers to vote with him.
“That kind of language doesn’t help,” state Sen. Travis Holdman said at the time. Holdman voted against Trump’s Indiana redistricting play. Today, he’s one of the state lawmakers who finds himself soon to be out of a job. He and four others lost to a new set of Republicans that proudly wear Trump’s endorsement. So far, the sole survivor is Sen. Greg Goode. As of late Friday afternoon, the race between Trump-backed Paula Copenhaver and incumbent Sen. Spencer Deery was still pending.
Remember: These were state lawmakers. Not members of Congress. Public servants who are primarily accountable to Hoosiers. Call us old-fashioned, but we think state legislators should be allowed to exercise independent judgment.
True, it took voters showing up to the polls to secure wins for these Trump-backed challengers, and we’ll give them that much. We’ll even go so far as to acknowledge that political competition is a good thing, and something we call for regularly here in Illinois.
And, of course, politics has never been a gentle business. Presidents pressure allies, and interest groups spend money. Primary challenges are a long-standing feature of American politics, and we are not naive about that reality. But there is a big difference between ordinary political competition and a coordinated national effort to purge state lawmakers for exercising independent judgment on a matter before their own legislature.
Supporters of the remap effort argued the stakes were national and that Republicans needed every possible House seat ahead of what could be a difficult midterm environment. Fair enough. But that logic effectively reduces state legislatures to instruments of national party strategy, rather than independent governing bodies accountable first to their own voters.
And what happened in Indiana was not homegrown, organic competition. These races certainly would not have drawn this level of money and national attention had these lawmakers not crossed the president. Challengers saw an infusion of millions of dollars in campaign cash for races that aren’t typically flush with so much money and interest. For example, the Club for Growth, which usually focuses on congressional races, invested roughly $2 million into targeting seven incumbents who refused Trump’s call for redistricting. The Club also sent out professional mailers and ads to get out the vote. That’s a huge advantage for these newcomers.
Conservatism once championed decentralized government and local accountability. State and local lawmakers were supposed to answer primarily to their own constituents, not national political figures. The traditional conservative notion of federalism reflected skepticism of concentrated power and hinged on the idea that leaders closest to their communities were better positioned to understand local needs and values. States were supposed to function as laboratories of democracy, not regional branches of a national political movement enforcing ideological conformity from the top down.
Indiana shows that principle is an afterthought for the modern Republican Party, sending a chilling message that state-level independence has become politically risky. A party organized primarily around loyalty to one person becomes untethered from principle. Under such a structure, there’s little room for discussion or disagreement. Regular people lose out in the absence of healthy political debate.
We don’t want to live in a world where our ugly federal politics bleeds into every aspect of life and governance. We’ve seen how that works, and how national issues obscure the very important business of running a city, a school district or a state. Increasingly, every level of American government is becoming overly nationalized. School boards become culture-war battlegrounds. Governors act like cable-news pundits. State legislative races revolve around loyalty to national personalities rather than debates over roads, taxes or schools. Politics that once reflected local priorities increasingly functions as an extension of D.C.-style tribal warfare.
We prefer it when politicians pay attention to doing the job they’re meant to do. To that end, the Indiana state lawmakers who made up their own minds on political maps should’ve been allowed to vote their own way without being bullied by folks concerned with D.C. politics.
Those who lost on Tuesday can at least walk away knowing they didn’t cave to immense pressure on an important vote. We hope those left standing can summon the courage to maintain their independence.
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