Jean Leising spoke at a breakfast this fall at her 8th grade grandson’s school. Hours later, when she was set to give him a ride home from basketball practice, he bashfully told her that his entire team had received text messages about her that day — “and they were all bad.”
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Recounting the moment to CNN shortly after she joined 20 other Republican state senators in rejecting President Donald Trump’s redistricting push, Leising said she laughed the moment off with her grandson — but that it ultimately led to her opposing the president.
“Boy, when I got home that night, that’s when I decided,” said Leising, a 76-year-old grandmother of eight, first elected to the Senate in 1988. “I was angry. So the next day, I said, ‘I’ve got to talk about this.’ Because this is over the top. This shouldn’t be the way it was.”
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“But that was the beginning,” she added. “It only got worse from there.”
It was clear on Thursday that a pressure campaign waged by the White House and its allies had backfired. A state that Trump won by nearly 20 points in 2024 gave him a massive political black eye, rejecting a push to create two more GOP-friendly US House seats that could have helped Republicans retain the House majority in next year’s midterms.
Several Republican senators noted on Thursday that constituents opposed a mid-decade redrawing of US House maps and that they questioned the wisdom or the precedent of joining the national redistricting battle. But a number of Republicans, including people who voted for the president three elections in a row, also gave deeply personal reasons over the last several weeks.
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Sen. Mike Bohacek has a daughter with Down syndrome. He was offended by Trump’s use of a slur for people with disabilities, in a Truth Social post deriding Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and said that Trump’s “choices of words have consequences.”
Sen. Greg Walker, who represents former Vice President Mike Pence’s hometown of Columbus, said he was among the senators targeted by swatting attempts in the weeks leading up to Thursday’s vote. While law enforcement has not publicly linked the swatting or other threats to a political motive, Walker said he felt voting yes would reward wrongdoing and set a dangerous precedent.
Sen. Greg Goode, whose town hall in Terre Haute this fall revealed massive public opposition to mid-decade redistricting, said the new maps would splinter communities with similar interests. He also criticized “over-the-top pressure from inside the Statehouse and outside,” as well as “threats of violence, acts of violence.”
“Whether we realize it or not, whether we accept it or not, the forces that define this vitriolic political affairs in places outside of Indiana have been gradually and now very blatantly infiltrated the politi
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