SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
President Trump continues to pressure Republicans to redraw congressional maps and states across the country. But in Indiana, Republican lawmakers voted against a plan to do just that. Our friends at the NPR POLITICS PODCAST broke down what this all means. Here's senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro, senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith and political correspondent Sarah McCammon.
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DOMENICO MONTANARO: I mean, it's probably the biggest pushback he's gotten within his party in the time that he's really been on the political stage, I would say, in many respects. There were many Indiana Republicans who were willing to go along with this plan to try to squeeze out two more seats from Indiana to try to help Republicans retain control of the house. That's what this was really all about. But voters in the state just didn't want it. They'd seen significant pushback. A lot of these lawmakers were receiving threats as well from the right and still rejected what was being proposed.
TAMARA KEITH: People were doxed. People had pizza show up at their home. They had swatting. There were large protests organized by allies of President Trump at the state capitol. They were under intense pressure, and they didn't like it. State Senator Spencer Deere is among those who voted against it.
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SPENCER DEERY: And as long as I have breath, I will use my voice to resist a federal government that attempts to bully, direct and control this state or any state. Giving the federal government more power is not conservative.
KEITH: And that's a federalism argument, right? It's saying, we're the state of Indiana. We should be able to decide what we want to do. And the president and the speaker of the House and the vice president and all of the people who are lobbying on this shouldn't tell us what to do.
SARAH MCCAMMON: President Trump is in a vulnerable place. His poll numbers are down. He wants more Republicans in Congress for the rest of his term. And yet here was a group of Republicans who were willing to vote against it.
MONTANARO: I do think that it's interesting nationally, considering this pushback that Trump has gotten, and maybe he wouldn't get that kind of pushback if he was more popular. The fact is, Trump is at the Nader of his popularity in the second term. He's in the 30s, according to a lot of polls. Recent AP-NORC poll, for example, had him at 36% approval rating, which was even lower than our poll was last month - the NPR/PBS News/Marist poll - and not by much, and he only had a 31% approval rating when it came to handling of the economy. So people are kind of, in some respects, looking past Trump, and I kind of wonder what this is going to mean more broadly when we see Trump off the national stage and sort of that, you know, big piece of the dam, the big brick in the dam is removed.
KEITH: President Trump used the best leverage that he's had throughout his political career, which is to say, If you cross me, if you don't do the thing that I want you to do, then I'm going to primary you - I'm going to support someone else to run against you in the Republican primary, and I'm so all-powerful that you will lose your job. And 21 Senate Republicans in the state of Indiana said, all right, you can try. It has worked in the past. The question is whether that power, that ability to strike fear in members of his own party is waning because he is definitionally a lame duck.
MCCAMMON: President Trump likes to win. This was a big loss for him. What is he saying about it?
KEITH: Oh, he is saying the thing that he says when he loses, which is, oh, you know, I didn't really care that much.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, we won every other state. That's the only state - it's funny 'cause I won Indiana all three times by a landslide, and I wasn't working on it very hard. Would have been nice - I think we would have picked up two seats if we did that.
KEITH: Oh, no, he was working on it very hard. The speaker of the House was working on it very hard. The vice president was working on it very hard. And President Trump has said, in no uncertain terms, that he believes the fate of his presidency, the fate of the country is on the line because if Republicans lose control of the House of Representatives, which seems entirely possible, then he's going to have a miserable last two years in office.
MONTANARO: Republicans have a really, really narrow majority in the House, just a few seats more than Democrats. So every seat here is going to matter. So to say, I wasn't that focused on these two seats, that's just not the case.
I mean, they want every single seat that they possibly can get to be able to have the advantage to build in some cushion because right now, Democrats have a significant advantage. The wind is completely at their backs. And they are also redistricting, doing this mid-decade redrawing, in places like California, potentially Virginia, which could offset a lot of these Republican-pushed changes.
State like Louisiana and Florida, which are controlled by Republicans, are going to try to squeeze out some more seats on their own. But again, those could be offset by Virginia while California offsets Texas, and we're talking about all this work, millions of dollars spent, for nothing really.
MCCAMMON: For a wash, potentially.
MONTANARO: Right.
KEITH: And let me just add the other factor here, which is, when you take a seat that is really super safe and you draw it to make two seats, neither of them are as super safe as before.
DETROW: For more insights and analysis, you can listen to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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