Politics
Trump Spent $13.5 Million on Indiana Revenge. The Ads Barely Mentioned Redistricting.
By Mike Harper · May 6, 2026
Five Indiana Republican state senators lost their seats Tuesday to Trump-backed challengers. Across roughly 80 days of campaigning, the national organizations that spent $13.5 million to defeat them ran ads that almost never mentioned the thing Trump said he was furious about.
The redistricting vote — the December decision by 21 Republican senators to block Trump’s push to redraw Indiana’s congressional maps and add two new GOP-leaning seats — was the stated reason for the entire operation. It was the reason Trump called the incumbents RINOs and said they needed to be punished. It was the reason JD Vance flew to Indianapolis and Jim Banks pledged seven figures.
But the ads themselves focused primarily on other things: the challengers’ conservative credentials, their alignment with Trump on national issues, their energy and relative youth. One ad campaign compared certain incumbents to soft toilet paper. Another criticized one of them for being 80 years old. The redistricting vote — the policy dispute that triggered the entire primary fight — was rarely the argument being made to the voters who decided it.
At least five of the seven Trump-endorsed challengers won, several by margins exceeding 60%. Senator Greg Goode of Terre Haute — who had been among the first targeted and had survived a swatting attempt — appears to be the only Trump-opposed incumbent who held on. Senator Spencer Deery of West Lafayette won by three votes, with the race still being certified. Senator Rick Niemeyer of Lowell, whom Trump did not formally oppose, also survived.
The incumbents who lost included Senator Greg Walker of Columbus, who had broken down in tears on the Senate floor describing his fear for the future of the Republican Party if it surrendered its independence to presidential pressure. He lost to state Representative Michelle Davis, who said after her victory that Tuesday’s results might reopen the door to a redistricting effort next year.
“Everyone in Indiana politics should have learned an important lesson today: President Trump is the single most popular Republican among Hoosier voters,” Sen. Jim Banks said in a statement following the results. “Indiana is a conservative state, and we deserve conservatives in our State Senate.”
What the money actually bought is worth examining. The $13.5 million spent on eight state Senate races is a roughly 5,000% increase from the $250,000 spent on all Indiana Senate races in the 2024 cycle. The Hoosier Leadership for America PAC, aligned with Banks, spent nearly $5 million alone. America Leadership PAC, connected to advisers to Trump Jr. and Vance, added more than $3 million. Club for Growth Action contributed $2 million across eight races.
The defeat of five sitting members of a state legislature over a local redistricting dispute that didn’t appear in most of the ads is not really a story about redistricting. It’s a story about whether any amount of individual political credibility can survive a $13 million campaign in a deep-red state that connects an incumbent’s name to the word RINO.
The answer, in Indiana on Tuesday, was no.