MARTINSVILLE — Shortly after the Indiana Senate decisively shut down mid-decade redistricting in a 31-19 vote earlier this month, President Donald Trump faced questions from reporters inside the Oval Office about the political defeat.
Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance had been pressuring Indiana Republicans for months to redraw the state’s congressional maps before next year’s midterm elections in hopes of giving the national GOP two more Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Indiana is one of several Republican-controlled states that has faced pressure from the Trump administration to redistrict so Republicans can expand their slim majority in the House next year.
Indiana House Republicans delivered for President Trump, voting 57-41 to redraw Indiana’s maps earlier this month in such a way as to potentially give Republicans a 9-0 congressional count, rather than the current 7-2.
But the Indiana Senate was a bigger ask, as Senate President Pro Tem Rod Bray (R-Martinsville) had been saying for weeks — there were not enough votes in the General Assembly’s upper chamber to successfully redistrict.
Ultimately, he, along with 30 other senate colleagues, voted against redistricting, ending a political battle that had captured national attention going back to late summer.
President Trump was not pleased.
“You had one gentleman, the head of the Senate, I guess, Bray or whatever his name is, I heard he was against (redistricting),” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office hours after the Dec. 11 vote. “He’ll probably lose his next primary, whenever that is. I hope he does. He’s done a tremendous disservice.”
Other Trump allies, including Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, echoed Trump’s criticism of those senators who voted against the redistricting effort.
“Yesterday, the Indiana Senate faced a simple choice: Stand and fight a Marxist movement… or choose dishonor,” Beckwith said in a Facebook post Dec. 12. “They chose dishonor.”
Though Bray and other lawmakers faced attacks from some prominent Republicans, they also received broad support from across the political spectrum, and the issue seemed to reinforce that more moderate members of the GOP still have some muscle, at least in Indiana.
With the hot-button issue finally in the rearview, Bray made a visit to The Correspondent’s office last week to discuss why he voted the way he did, and what comes next for the General Assembly. Bray also talked about his meeting with President Trump back in August, and revealed what the president is like behind closed doors.
A White House visit
Bray started at the beginning back in August, when the pressure began to build, particularly from D.C. He talked at length about Indiana Gov. Mike Braun’s effort to call a special session of the General Assembly, and about what he told the governor regarding the issue of redrawing congressional maps mid-decade, something that is typically done at the beginning of each decade soon after a census is taken.
“I try to keep tabs on where our Senate is on the issues,” Bray said. “Our votes never were at a spot where I thought this was going to pass.”
“If there’s a bill we know won’t pass, we don’t bring it to the floor,” Bray continued. “The majority of us were not for it.”
Bray told Braun this, but on Oct. 27, the governor nevertheless called for a special session of the General Assembly, requesting that it begin on Nov. 3. Braun was intent on a vote by the Republican supermajority to redraw Indiana’s congressional maps.
The Nov. 3 date was quickly disregarded by lawmakers, as it would have been difficult for all of them to gather so quickly, and on Nov. 14 — mere days from “Organization Day,” the ceremonial start of the annual session — Bray’s office issued a statement saying the General Assembly would not convene for formal, legislative duties until the General Assembly kicked off at the first of the year. In his statement, Bray said the votes in the Senate simply weren’t there, so no need to meet and waste the time, energy and taxpayers’ money on a futile effort.
But the pressure continued to build. Organization Day was marked by tension among the two chambers and the governor, and the pressure only increased as House Speaker Todd Huston (R-Fishers) voiced support in his chamber for the redistrict effort.
Then, on Nov. 25, Bray said the General Assembly would reconvene on Dec. 8 after all — a week after the House planned to convene and put forth a redistricting bill — as part of the regular 2026 session, rather than a special session. He said the issue of redistricting was causing “strife here in our state,” and he hoped to resolve the issue.
Bray told The Correspondent redistricting became such a heated topic because of the outside pressure on lawmakers from national leaders like Trump and Vance.
Vance made headlines earlier this year when he visited lawmakers in Indianapolis back in August. Bray said this meeting was “cordial” and “amicable,” and said Vance stressed the importance of redrawing the map in the GOP’s favor.
Bray and other Republicans had two additional meetings with Vance, the third taking place at the White House in Washington, D.C. At one point during that meeting, Bray and Speaker of the House Todd Huston (R-Fishers) were tapped by White House aides.
“The President would like to see you in the Oval Office,” they said.
Despite the circumstances of the visit, Bray said his visit to the Oval Office was the “thrill” of his life. He described the 20-minute sitdown with Trump as a friendly meeting wherein Trump reiterated what Vance had already told the Indiana lawmakers.
When asked if hearing Trump speak in private was in contrast to Trump’s blustery public persona, Bray simply said, “President Trump is who he is.”
‘No guaranteed success’
Bray had additional communication with Trump over the phone, with each conversation becoming increasingly pointed. Bray said he and Trump share the goal of seeing more Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives, but he told the president he disagreed with him about how to achieve that goal.
Bray said he told Trump he believed redrawing the map could very well backfire, saying it was highly possible the map designed to give Republicans a 9-0 majority could result in a 6-3 majority instead.
Bray said he believed the proposed maps would weaken the other Republican districts, and it would require sitting members to run in districts that looked very different from the ones they knew.
“There was no guaranteed success,” Bray said. “There was nobody who had walked in any local parades or eaten a corndog at any county fairs. I had very strong concerns that (the new maps) wouldn’t achieve what it was supposed to achieve.”
Bray further criticized the idea of mid-decade redistricting by likening it to elected officials selecting their voters instead of the other way around, and added that voting against it ensured Hoosiers could retain their trust in the state’s institutions.
Several Republicans who voted to redraw the maps, including state Rep. Craig Haggard of Mooresville, said the GOP should gerrymander Indiana’s maps because Democrats in other states have done the same in their favor. Haggard said he did not fault Democrats for doing this, as it is perfectly legal, but believed Republicans should level the playing field.
Bray did not buy that argument.
“Your mother told you, ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right,’” Bray said. “Indiana has to conduct itself in its own way, regardless of what other states are doing.”
For Bray, though, the most important reason to vote against the redistricting effort was because his constituents wanted him to vote against it.
“I’ve never received as much constituent outreach on any other issue during my time in office,” he said.
Bray said for every call to his office urging him to vote with President Trump, he had 10 imploring him to vote the other way — a sentiment echoed by his counterpart in the House, Rep. Peggy Mayfield (R-Martinsville), who said the constituents who reached out to her office opposed to redistricting outnumbered supporters, 8 to 1.
Bray also spoke on how Indiana Republicans might increase their congressional majority under the current maps. He said Republicans would continue to do well at the ballot box if they continued to write good policy, and believed the party would succeed or fail on its own merits.
“I think an 8-1 majority is very reachable,” Bray said, though he added that a 9-0 majority would be much more difficult.
As for his own political future, now that Trump has expressed his wish to see Bray ousted from office?
“That is his prerogative to feel that way,” Bray said. “I expect to be primaried — that’s how our system works. I welcome it.”
Looking toward 2026
After explaining why he voted against the redistricting effort, Bray talked about what Hoosiers could expect from their representatives in the new year. A major issue he talked about was figuring out ways to make the state more affordable for its residents.
“Indiana is one of the lowest-cost states in the nation, but Hoosiers don’t often feel that way,” Bray said.
He cited the Republican tax agenda as an effort to make life more affordable, touting that taxes had been cut 20 times in 10 years.
Bray said a major issue Republicans would be tackling next year was Medicaid spending, which he called “wildly unsustainable.”
“The program is trying to grow wildly out of control,” Bray said, citing how the program has become one of the state’s largest budget items over the years. “We want to make sure the people who are on it are the people who need it.”
Bray has previously expressed concerns about Medicaid’s growth, and he said last week that it’s become such a big budget item, it drains money that might otherwise go toward things like education and infrastructure. Paying for such a large program becomes increasingly difficult as the state continues to bring in less tax revenue.
Also in the works for next year is a constitutional amendment that would give judges more leeway to deny bail in circumstances beyond murder or treason, as is currently the law. Bray said this would help address violent crime in the state and would help prevent violent offenders from repeating their crimes on bail.
Near the end of the interview, Bray addressed critics of this year’s Senate Enrolled Act 1, a property tax cut that’s received significant pushback from local governments and public schools who have claimed that it would be detrimental to their budgets.
Bray defended the cuts, saying that most Hoosiers had wanted them, and arguing that local governments would still see an increase in revenue, just not as big of an increase as they had anticipated.
He acknowledged the unique circumstances of Morgan County, which has some of the lowest property taxes in the state yet some of the highest income tax.
He anticipates state lawmakers will spearhead some amendments in the upcoming session to the 11th-hour budget that passed in the spring to help remedy a few unintended consequences, including those for Morgan County’s unique approach to local taxation.
But the bottomline remains the same.
“(Local governments) are just going to have to be more efficient,” Bray said.
