Trump gets revenge, and other takeaways from Tuesday’s Indiana and Ohio primaries

By Eric Bradner, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump vowed revenge when the Republican supermajority in the Indiana state Senate embarrassed him in December, voting down Trump’s demands to redraw the state’s congressional maps to help the party win two more seats.

In Tuesday’s primary, he got it.

At least five of the seven Trump-endorsed challengers defeated GOP incumbent state senators who broke with the president and voted against redistricting.

Those senators said at the time they were following the will of their constituents. But after millions of dollars in advertising and outsized attention on ordinarily low-key state legislative primary races, Tuesday served as a reminder that all politics, no matter how local, can be nationalized.

Prior to Election Day, Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith — a staunch Trump supporter who has butted heads with Republican leadership in the state Senate, where he presides, and who campaigned with the challengers — had said the pro-Trump forces winning at least three races would make a statement.

“It’s better than I expected,” Beckwith said in an interview Tuesday night, as those challengers’ wins piled up.

“It was really that battle between the old-school Republicans of the Mitch Daniels, Mike Pence, George Bush era, versus Donald Trump and the ‘America First’ era,” he said, naming two of the state’s former Republican governors, along with the 43rd president. “And Indiana — at least the Republicans — are saying, we want to be the ‘America First’ party.”

It’s still Trump’s party

If the Indiana Senate’s rejection of Trump’s push for redistricting in December revealed that his influence has limits, the outcome of Tuesday night’s primaries in the Hoosier state demonstrated that — for Republican voters — it’s still Trump’s party.

Trump endorsed challengers to seven Republican incumbents who voted against redistricting. Shortly after 9 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday, CNN had projected five of them as winners, with one more too close to call. Only one incumbent Republican facing a Trump-backed challenger, Sen. Greg Goode of Terre Haute, was projected to win.

Sen. Spencer Deery, a West Lafayette Republican who was locked in a tight race with challenger Paula Copenhaver, said on CNN Tuesday that “the truth is I know that Trump doesn’t really have any idea who I am or any idea who my opponent is.”

Maybe so, but the president and his political allies flooded the ordinarily sleepy state legislative primaries — where the spending is typically in the tens of thousands and primary votes cast number about 10,000 to 12,000 — with millions of dollars in advertising casting the incumbents as disloyal to Trump and blaming them for voters’ various frustrations, particularly property taxes.

Trump’s approval rating has slipped nationally, and his support among independents has evaporated. But very conservative voters — those who make up his base — are still with him. And they are the voters who decide contests like state Senate primaries in deep-red Indiana. That’s a reality Deery also acknowledged.

“Trump is perhaps not as popular in my district as he once was, but he is still overwhelmingly popular,” Deery said.

Skyrocketing spending in Indiana contests

In interviews across the state, Hoosier voters described being inundated with television and digital advertising and daily mailers from candidates and the outside groups supporting them. The numbers back that up.

The political advertising tracking firm AdImpact said that $13.4 million was spent on advertising in this year’s Indiana state Senate primaries. For comparison: In the 2024 election cycle, about $280,000 was spent on state Senate primary ads in Indiana — in all races combined.

The bulk of that spending came from a group linked to US Sen. Jim Banks, a close Trump ally. Club for Growth led the direct mail effort for the pro-Trump forces, Indiana Republicans said, and Turning Point USA supplied ground troops for door-to-door get-out-the-vote efforts as the group sought to carry out one of the last political stances taken by its late co-founder Charlie Kirk, who was killed weeks after urging Indiana Republican lawmakers to redistrict.

The incumbents and their supporters bemoaned outside forces’ role in the Indiana primary. Indiana Senate President Pro Tem Rodric Bray said the primary contests were “really driven from outside the state of Indiana, mostly in Washington, DC, and the money’s coming from outside Indiana as well.”

But the flood of advertising spending — more than 47 times more than was spent on state Senate primaries just two years earlier — proved too much for most incumbents to overcome.

GOP’s redistricting race speeds up

Before Tuesday’s primary, Republican states across the South — emboldened by a Supreme Court ruling last week further gutting the Voting Rights Act — were scrambling to redraw their congressional maps in time for November’s midterms, even though some had already mailed out their primary ballots.

Trump’s big wins in Indiana will almost certainly embolden those Republican-dominated states, with Tuesday’s results showing the political cost of breaking with the president.

Already, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a new map intended to reduce Democrats’ representation in the Sunshine State from eight seats to four.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry has delayed the state’s primary so that Republicans there could pass a new map. Republican governors in Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee are also pursuing new maps.

Meanwhile, May’s primary lineup includes more tests of Trump’s grip on the GOP. The clearest will come in Kentucky on May 19, when Republican Rep. Thomas Massie — consistently a conservative thorn in Trump’s side — faces a Trump-endorsed challenger in former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein.

Stage is set in key Ohio races

Ohio’s primary Tuesday came with high stakes, but low drama.

As expected, former Democratic US Sen. Sherrod Brown skated to his party’s nomination to take on Republican Sen. Jon Husted in what’s likely to be a marquee matchup this fall, with Democrats eyeing Ohio as a pickup opportunity as they seek a net gain of four seats to win Senate control.

Republican entrepreneur and 2024 presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy won the party’s nomination for governor. He’ll face Democratic Dr. Amy Acton, the state’s former health director, in the race to replace outgoing GOP Gov. Mike DeWine.

The most important race of the night might have come in the Toledo-based 9th District, where Republicans were selecting a nominee from a crowded field to take on Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur. After the state’s congressional districts were redrawn last year, the GOP sees northwest Ohio as one of its best pickup opportunities on the map.

Republicans selected former state Rep. Derek Merrin, who lost to Kaptur by less than 2,400 votes in 2024.

Big Democratic win in Michigan

While Indiana showed Trump’s continued dominance in Republican politics, Michigan offered a glimpse at another dominant trend so far in the 2025-26 election cycle: Democrats’ overperformance in special elections.

In a state Senate special election crucial to Democrats’ hopes of keeping their slim majority, Democratic nominee Chedrick Greene coasted past Republican Jason Tunney. Results were still being counted late Tuesday night, but the big margin stood out compared to the district’s 2024 presidential results. It was swing territory, with former Vice President Kamala Harris winning by less than a percentage point in that portion of the perennial battleground state that’s certain to be at the center of the 2028 presidential race.

The two outcomes aren’t necessarily at odds. Trump retains his support among the most conservative voters — the kind that vote in a reliably red state’s primary. But overall, Democrats animated by opposition to Trump’s presidency are more energized, and are improving on their previous margin in a long string of special elections across the country.

The tension between these two realities might not be fully on display until closer to the midterms in November, when candidates in battleground states and districts will be forced to choose between moderating their positions and appealing to the most energized forces in their bases.

The-CNN-Wire
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