As Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee rush to redraw their congressional districts before the 2026 election, officials from previous White House administrations offered some advice for state lawmakers across the country: Leave the maps alone.
Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for former President George W. Bush, and Jeff Eller, former deputy assistant to the president and director of media affairs in the Clinton administration, were in Indianapolis on May 6, the day after all but apparently two Trump-endorsed candidates swept incumbents from their Indiana Senate seats in the Republican primary. The defeated longtime lawmakers were among the 21 GOP senators who have faced President Donald Trump’s wrath for blocking the effort to redistrict mid-decade and turn all nine of Indiana’s congressional districts red.
Fleischer said redistricting should remain an exercise completed by the state legislatures every decade. Having the Democratic and Republican parties trying to grab power every two years by redrawing the maps will fray one of the ties that bind Americans together.
“Even politics has to have rules,” Fleischer said. “Both parties have to be fair to each other. You cannot have a world in which Democrats say Republicans should not exist and Republicans say Democrats should not exist.”
Eller described the push for midcycle redistricting as letting the “genie out of the bottle.” Returning to the 10-year cycle dependent on the result of the U.S. Census would be difficult but waiting a decade to redraw the lines allows the rancor that arises during redistricting to settle and relationships to mend.
“This midcycle redistricting, I think, is overall counterproductive to the longer-term effort on keeping people engaged and furthering democracy,” Eller said. “I think it hurts.”
Fleischer and Eller spoke about redistricting after the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site’s Off the Record event at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in downtown Indianapolis. Both men, along with Maureen Groppe, correspondent for USA Today, were panelists for the discussion “The Press and the Presidency,” which focused on the interaction between the White House and reporters.
The president’s party often loses seats in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate during the midterm elections, according to The American Presidency Project. However, as explained in a National Constitution Center blog post, the loss does not always equate to the opposite party taking control.
During former President Bill Clinton’s two terms in the White House, the Democrats lost 52 seats in the House and eight in the Senate during the 1994 midterms. This flipped control of both chambers to the Republicans. Four years later in 1998, Democrats actually picked up five seats in the House, while not winning or losing any seats in the Senate, but the Republicans were still the majority party on Capitol Hill.
Bush’s first midterm election in 2002 bucked history with Republicans gaining eight spots in the House and two in the Senate, which enabled the GOP to capture the lower chamber and retain its hold on the upper chamber. Democrats came roaring back and took control of both chambers in 2006, after Republicans lost 30 seats in the House and six in the Senate.
The Trump administration has been trying to improve its chances of keeping Capitol Hill in Republican hands by pressuring GOP-led states to redistrict before this year’s midterm election – even though the next census is four years away. An analysis by the National Conference of State Legislatures concluded that the current rate of midcycle redistricting has not been seen since the 1800s.
Fleischer said he did not “mind a tough gerrymander,” but the congressional districts should not be redrawn any more frequently than every 10 years.
“I think this is kind of like the flu. Both parties have caught the redistricting fever, and you just have to hope that they one day shake it out of their system and we move on,” Fleischer said. “It’s just not healthy for the country if this becomes an every-two-year ordeal.”
Eller also seemed to indicate the remedy to midcycle redistricting was time.
“We have a built-in, self-correcting mechanism in our democracy, and I think over time, it will right the ship,” Eller said. “We’re at a very distinct moment in time, and I’m hopeful that it self corrects, but I do think we should go back to the 10-year (redistricting) cycle, because the census data matters.”
Texas kicked off the current frenzy by redistricting last year and other red states, such as Missouri, North Carolina and Utah, have followed. California countered by redrawing its congressional map to favor Democratic candidates.
The recent ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, removing the restraints against racial gerrymandering. Consequently, Southern states, including Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee, are rapidly reconfiguring their congressional boundaries to eliminate majority-minority districts.
Indiana, along with a handful of other states, including Kentucky, Nebraska and, most recently, South Carolina, rebuffed Trump’s demands to redistrict.
As a result, the Trump administration and political action committees aligned with the president unleashed a relentless campaign, including spending an estimated $12 million on advertising, against the Hoosier GOP senators who rebuked redistricting. Trump, himself, posed for pictures in the Oval Office with the Indiana candidates he endorsed and was active on social media criticizing the incumbents.
Eller said presidential interest and involvement in local politics is common. The Clinton administration, he said, kept track of the political battles and victories within the states, paying attention to special elections and state legislatures.
“For this president, it’s a big deal and that’s his choice,” Eller said of Trump. I’ll leave it to the historians to say if it diminishes the role of the president or not. But every White House pretty much goes deep into politics at every level. They just do it different.”
Fleischer said Indiana’s rejection of midcycle redistricting was “remarkable and bold,” and the state should find comfort in standing firm on its principles. Yet, he conceded some Republican state senators paid for their principles with their legislative careers.
“When you enter public service, you have choices to make,” Fleischer said. “You can stand on principle, do what you think is right and lose your reelection and feel good about yourself … or you can say the reason I ran for office is so I could get reelected. It doesn’t matter what I do in the years in between.”
The Indiana Citizen is a nonpartisan, nonprofit platform dedicated to increasing the number of informed and engaged Hoosier citizens. Operated by the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) public charity.
This article was written by Indiana Citizen reporter Marilyn Odendahl. You can reach her at marilyn.odendahl@indianacitizen.org.
Dwight Adams, an editor and writer based in Indianapolis, edited this article. He is a former content editor, copy editor and digital producer at The Indianapolis Star and IndyStar.com, and worked as a planner for other newspapers, including the Louisville Courier Journal.