Permission Denied

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, May 06, 2026

 

Steve Hayes told me yesterday that he appreciated my ability to quickly generate opinions on the day’s news without veering into gratuitously contrarian “hot takes.”

 

I took that as a dare.

 

Today is an ideal moment for a hot take, as chance would have it. There was a major development in American politics overnight, the main implication is obvious, and so everyone has the same boring take on it.

 

The only way to distinguish myself is to turn up the heat.

 

The major development is the outcome of Indiana’s state Senate primaries. Needing to care about state legislative contests—let alone intraparty contests—is a grim plot twist even by the standards of this era, and like most other such plot twists, it was foisted on us by Donald Trump. Last year the president declared jihad on Republican lawmakers in Indiana who refused to gerrymander their state to maximize the number of GOP-held House seats; on Tuesday, several of them finally had to face Trump-backed challengers at the polls.

 

The jihadis won. Trump’s candidates prevailed in five of the seven contested districts, winning by no less than 17 points in each. In a sixth district, the incumbent he targeted currently leads by 3.

 

Not three points. Three votes.

 

You don’t need me to spell out the takeaway from that. It’s still Donald Trump’s party, to borrow a cliche that was used this morning by every hack in the commentariat. Ten years on, the GOP continues to function the way the universe did in the famous Twilight Zone episode about the little boy with magical powers. Take care to stay in the good graces of an omnipotent sociopathic child or he’ll wish you into the cornfield.

 

Had Republican voters in Indiana rejected the jihadis, today most of the political world would be trumpeting the looming end of the hostage crisis that’s defined the party since 2016. That takeaway also would have written itself: Between the hubris of the Iran war, the shock to oil prices, and the president’s dogged disinterest in addressing the cost of living, he had finally lost his proverbial grip on the GOP base. Every Republican official in the country would have taken heart, concluding that at long, long last it was safe-ish to defy Donald Trump.

 

As it is, every Republican official in the country is drawing the opposite conclusion. The permission they’ve spent the past decade desperately seeking from their base to break with the president was denied again last night. Compliance or the cornfield, now more than ever.

 

That’s a straightforward take on what happened, and it’s true as far as it goes. The Indiana results will suppress any inchoate impulses toward rebellion that might have been brewing among Republican invertebrates in Congress against a guy currently rocking a 39 percent approval rating. It was a good night for Donald Trump, unambiguously.

 

Whether it was good for anyone else, and whether he deserves as much credit as he’s getting for the outcome, are separate matters.

 

A strategic rationale.

 

Was the president’s support really the difference between whether the jihadis won or lost?

 

I’m sure he mattered to their margins. It’s hard to imagine multiple longtime incumbents losing by landslides without the cult leader excommunicating them en masse for heresies against gerrymandering.

 

I think there’s a case to be made, though, that most or all of the primaries would have gone the same way even if the president had declined to weigh in on them.

 

That case starts with the fact that Trump was by no means alone in pressuring Indiana Republicans to purge the heretics in the state Senate. Most of the heavy lifting was done by outside groups like the Club for Growth and organizations aligned with Sen. Jim Banks, a MAGA loyalist. No less than $13.5 million was spent on the primaries, most of it targeting the incumbents—a nearly 5,000 percent(!) increase over the 2024 cycle. Turning Point USA also supplied volunteers to help turn out voters for the jihad.

 

Every one of those outfits had a sound political reason to participate, separate and apart from making a certain omnipotent sociopathic child happy. It was in their interest as fierce partisans to punish Republican lawmakers who had proved skittish about redistricting.

 

Two weeks ago Democrats in Virginia nuked their own state House map in order to maximize their party’s advantage in House races this fall. Had that referendum failed, maybe Republican voters in Indiana would have viewed their own state senators’ reluctance to gerrymander less as a partisan betrayal and more as statesmanship designed to avert a national race to the bottom.

 

But once Virginia went nuclear, Indiana’s refusal to do so felt like unilateral disarmament. And now that the Supreme Court has opened the way for Southern red states to redraw majority-minority districts, Republicans across the country have a strong partisan incentive to encourage GOP lawmakers in those states to get cracking by showing them what will happen to them in their next primary if they don’t.

 

Simply put, this wasn’t the usual petty “retribution” driven by Trump throwing a tantrum over some Republican official’s refusal to do him a corrupt favor. There was an honest-to-goodness prisoner’s dilemma strategic rationale for the bloodletting. The GOP as a whole stood to gain from making an example of the Hoosiers who pumped the brakes on redistricting, so it did. Spending by outside groups and grassroots anger at state Senate incumbents might not have been as intense without the president’s encouragement, but I bet it still would have happened. And it may have produced similar outcomes.

 

It could pay off for the right long-term. If Americans continue to migrate from blue states to red ones, reapportionment following the next census will place more House seats at the disposal of Republican state legislatures. In a country in which ruthless maximalist gerrymandering has been fully normalized, the right will probably end up gaining House representation on balance from the process.

 

Hoosier Republicans helped that normalization along last night by voting the way they did, firing a shot across the bow of hesitant GOP lawmakers in every state. Sure, total partisan warfare on redistricting will probably ruin American democracy, but it’s silly to expect right-wingers to care about that. Look who they’ve chosen to lead them for the last decade.

 

A Pyrrhic victory?

 

That’s the case for why Republicans generally, not just Trump himself, benefited from the results in Indiana.

 

But it’s a shaky one. Given the vagaries of population flows and unpredictability of election results over the next three cycles, no one would bet very heavily on one party gaining a decisive redistricting advantage over the other by the time new House maps are drawn.

 

And in the meantime, there are reasons to think yesterday’s vote bodes poorly for the GOP this fall.

 

To begin with, the margins in the state Senate races brought to mind a new op-ed from pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson titled “Trump Is Losing Normie Republicans.” The president remains overwhelmingly popular among members of his party, she concedes, but right-wingers who think of themselves chiefly as supporters of the GOP rather than as supporters of Trump have begun to waver.

 

Those so-called “normie” Republicans are meaningfully less likely than MAGA Republicans to strongly approve of his handling of the economy and the war in Iran, to say that it’s extremely important for their party to win the midterms, and even to feel motivated to vote in November. There’s no significant anti-Trump faction left in the GOP but there is a significant faction that’s disaffected, enough so to make a blue wave possible in the midterms if these voters fail to turn out.

 

I thought of that faction yesterday when considering that all but one of the Indiana Senate incumbents on the ballot ended up pulling at least 35 percent of the vote, a respectable haul in defeat given the immense firepower arrayed against them. Despite Trump’s endless exhortations, millions of bucks spent in attack ads, an extensive opposition ground game, and the white-hot partisan inflammation caused by Virginia, more than a third of Hoosier Republicans stubbornly stuck by the lawmakers who rejected ruthless gerrymandering. If I were a GOP strategist, I’d worry—a lot—about how those apparent “normies” are thinking about their choice this fall.

 

A more obvious problem for the party in last night’s results is that, as much as Republican lawmakers have hated being held hostage by Donald Trump for the last 10 years, they’re going to really hate him tightening his grip when they’re six months out from a national election and his polling is consistently dipping below 40 percent.

 

That’s the counterargument to my claim earlier that the outcome was good on balance for the GOP. It was rational for Indiana Republicans to incentivize redistricting in other red states, but it sure wasn’t rational for them to signal to their elected representatives that there’ll be hell to pay for breaking with a president whose national support is in the toilet. And whom Americans increasingly believe is neither physically nor mentally fit to lead.

 

Case in point: Michigan held a state Senate special election yesterday with real consequences for the balance of power, effectively deciding which party would control the legislature’s upper chamber. There was every reason in the abstract to expect a nailbiter given the high stakes and closely divided Michigan electorate. Trump won the state by fewer than 1.5 points over Kamala Harris in 2024 and Harris won the Senate district contested last night by less than a point over Trump.

 

Democrat Chedrick Greene ended up winning by 19, another impressive overperformance by a liberal base that’s very, very eager to register its anger toward the president by clobbering Republican candidates down ballot. The last thing those candidates need under the circumstances is to be forced by the right to cling as tightly as ever to that president. Yet that’s precisely what GOP voters in Indiana have now compelled them to do.

 

You can understand, then, why Senate Democrats might be even more excited today to make Republicans vote on funding Trump’s ballroom than they were yesterday. Americans already hate the ballroom and are destined to hate it more amid an affordability crunch as its price tag climbs to 10 digits. But how can Senate GOPers say no, having just watched their own base in Indiana reaffirm that the president’s wishes should be Republican lawmakers’ commands?

 

There’s one more noteworthy wrinkle to last night’s results. And this one is a little hot-take-y.

 

Disgruntlement.

 

The state Senate primaries weren’t the only Republican contests in Indiana yesterday. Primaries for the House of Representatives were also held—and in five of the seven districts, the challengers took 30 percent or better from incumbent members of Congress.

 

That’s unusual, and why it happened is unclear. The state’s House Republican caucus had no direct role in the redistricting debate and, to my knowledge, Trump had no axe to grind with any of them. A surprisingly large number of right-wingers intent on throwing the bums out appears to have shown up organically, without the bums being targeted by some powerful figure or outside organization.

 

I can think of two explanations for that.

 

One is that the intense anti-incumbent sentiment in the state Senate primaries spilled over unexpectedly to congressional primaries. Notably, per NBC News, many of the attack ads aimed at the state senators who defied the president on gerrymandering didn’t lead with that fact but with other grassroots grievances, like Chinese ownership of local farmland.

 

Many Republican voters who absorbed the Trump-led scorched-earth campaign in Indiana may have come away thinking it had less to do with the peculiarities of redistricting than with needing to purge all RINOs posthaste. For feral populists, any incumbent is a RINO almost by definition.

 

The other explanation (hot take incoming!) is that the revolt against congressional Republicans may have been a case of GOP voters venting their anger about the state of the country and choosing targets that would cause them less cognitive dissonance than venting it at Donald Trump would.

 

Gas is approaching $5 per gallon in Indianapolis. Inflation, which the president was reelected to solve, may be headed for a new normal of 4 percent annually. A war that was supposed to last four to six weeks has now dragged past 60 days, with the president suspending new operations almost as quickly as he announces them and slouching toward a deal scarcely better than the one Barack Obama brokered in 2015.

 

There’s a lot of disappointment among Trump voters, even if only a select few will admit to it.

 

What do you do if you can’t bring yourself to direct that disappointment at the leader of your cult, a figure in whom you’ve invested not just your politics but your dignity? You direct it at the people around him. In the same way, perhaps, that Republicans reflexively blame his aides whenever Trump does something stupid or offensive (“whoever advised the president to do that should be fired!”), some percentage has perhaps chosen to blame GOP members of Congress for their dissatisfaction with his presidency and voted accordingly last night.

 

As I said earlier, that’s not necessarily inconsistent with the results in the state Senate primaries. It’s possible to be disappointed with Trump and to be angry that GOP state lawmakers passed on their chance to keep pace with blue states like California and Virginia in the redistricting wars. If you can’t direct your unhappiness squarely at our term-limited president, who will (probably) never again appear on a ballot, you can direct it at his party’s representatives in Congress.

 

Think of Republican voters as an army in retreat, demoralized by the fact that they keep losing battles and desperate for a way to reassert their power over someone. The mini-revolt in Indiana’s congressional primaries might be understood as some of the rank-and-file wanting to shoot their officers, purging the traitors who’ve—supposedly—led them to looming electoral disaster by turning the House under GOP control into a preposterous clown show of endless dysfunction.

 

Tragically, we’ll have to wait a bit longer for the emperor who’s actually led them into disaster to finally be held accountable by members of his party. Maybe the Trump hostage crisis will finally end after a midterm wipeout, or maybe not unless and until his job approval falls below 30 percent. Hoosiers would have done their party and the country a great service by speeding up the process last night. But Republicans, given a chance to do the right thing, will always disappoint you.