Pete Buttigieg, the former U.S. transportation secretary and potential 2028 presidential candidate, slammed Indiana Republicans on Thursday for considering a mid-decade redistricting plan.
During a rally at the Statehouse in Indianapolis, Buttigieg, a former mayor of South Bend, vowed to help Democrats fight any redistricting push in the state, casting blame on President Donald Trump for pressuring state Republicans to pass new maps that would boost the party in next year's midterm elections.
“We are here because Indiana Republicans are being pressured by Washington Republicans to do something that they know in their hearts is wrong,” Buttigieg said. “They are being pressured to change the rules so that voters don’t have a say anymore. And they know that that is wrong. And we know why they’re doing it … because the agenda of Washington Republicans is so unpopular that even here in Indiana, they are afraid of losing, if they have to run on a fair map.”
Buttigieg called mid-decade redistricting efforts “cheating” and vowed that, “if they do the wrong thing, we will be here to hold them politically accountable.”
Invoking Trump's past claims of voter fraud, Buttigieg said Republicans “have tried to undermine our trust in the way that our neighbors run our elections in our communities.”
“I’m not talking about changing what’s inside of a machine. I’m not talking about changing a vote that went one way and making it look like it came another way. I’m talking about a form of cheating that is happening right out in the open,” Buttigieg said. “They’re admitting it out loud that they don’t have to do that to manipulate the results of an election.”
Buttigieg’s speech Thursday makes him the latest potential 2028 White House contender to seize on Democratic energy centered on redistricting. Shortly before he took the stage, Buttigieg's Win the Era PAC sent out fundraising texts criticizing Trump for "pressuring states to redraw congressional maps" and asking for "your help in this effort" to fight Republicans.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has aggressively pushed a plan to help redraw his state’s congressional map in response to Republican efforts in Texas, while Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker helped provide refuge for Texas Democratic lawmakers who fled the state to delay the GOP's plans. Newsom and Pritzker are possible Democratic presidential candidates.
Indiana Republicans have in recent weeks more openly discussed moving forward with a plan to further carve up Democratic areas in the state's congressional map.
Republicans hold seven of Indiana's nine congressional districts. The two districts that Democrats represent are in the eastern suburbs of Chicago in the northwestern part of the state and most of the greater Indianapolis area.
“They killed Charlie Kirk — the least that we can do is go through a legal process and redistrict Indiana into a nine to zero map,” GOP Sen. Jim Banks told Politico last week. “I sense it from supporters all over the state; that now’s not the time to back off. Now’s not the time to be nice. Now’s the time to engage in a peaceful and political way.”
A group of Indiana state Republicans met with Trump at the White House last month and one of the topics discussed was mid-decade redistricting efforts.
The state's governor, Mike Braun, a Republican, said this week that a special legislative session on redistricting “probably will happen” and that not holding one could risk blowback from the Trump administration.
“If we try to drag our feet as a state on it, probably, we’ll have consequences of not working with the Trump administration as tightly as we should,” he said on WOWO, an Indiana talk radio station.
There also appears to have been some momentum among state Republican lawmakers who were skeptical of the effort.
State Rep. Jim Lucas posted on Facebook last week that he’d changed his mind on the issue, writing, “I am now a rock solid HELL YES for redistricting!” He’d previously said that he was a “hard no” on the issue, according to the Indiana Capital Chronicle.
Spokespersons for state House Speaker Todd Huston and state Senate President Rodric Bray, both Republicans, didn’t respond to questions about Thursday’s Democratic rally and the status of redistricting talks.
Indiana Democrats have extremely limited options in trying to block a GOP-led redistricting effort. Republicans enjoy a supermajority in the Legislature, meaning that they’d easily be able to establish a quorum on their own, without any help from Democrats, and could use other tactics, like suspending the rules on the floor, to pass their agenda quickly.
Thursday’s rally came days after Missouri’s Republican-controlled state Legislature passed its own plan to redraw the state’s congressional map to give the GOP an additional pick-up opportunity next year, and weeks after Texas Republicans enacted maps aimed at netting their party up to five more seats.
In addition, California Democrats, urged by Newsom, voted last month to place a measure before voters in November to temporarily override the state’s independent redistricting commission and draw new maps that could result in a gain of five Democratic seats.
Other Republican-led states could soon move forward with similar moves. In Ohio, the state constitution requires lawmakers to draw new maps before 2026. Florida state House Speaker Daniel Perez has said Republicans could address mid-decade redistricting through a special legislative committee.
And Kansas Republicans have also increasingly signaled an intention to redraw their maps before 2026.
“My sense is that if Trump thinks the GOP needs just one more seat, Republicans in Kansas would go ahead,” state Senate President Ty Masterson, a Republican, told The Associated Press last week.
Republicans already hold three of the state’s four congressional districts. The fourth, held by Democratic Rep. Sharice Davids, contains large parts of Kansas City and its suburbs. The GOP also holds a supermajority in the Kansas Legislature.
In an interview, Davids called the GOP efforts in other states, and the potential one in Kansas, "a purely political move" and blamed Trump for "instructing states to try to do a mid-decade redistricting" that she said was a product of his massive tax and spending bill's making so many changes to Medicaid and food assistance.
"They know that their policies are so extreme and so unpopular that they're literally willing to cheat to win," said Davids, who was elected in 2018. “We can call it shifting the goal post, changing the rules of the game. But it is cheating."
