State Sen. Spencer Deery is crisscrossing his West Lafayette neighborhood on an electric scooter, slipping glossy flyers with his cell number into mailboxes and pleading with voters that he is not the Republican in name only that TV ads portray him to be.
Deery is one of seven incumbent Republican state senators who voted last year against a mid-decade redistricting push backed by former President Trump. Trump publicly rebuked those senators on Truth Social, saying they should be ashamed and should be primaried — and that rebuke has brought heavy outside intervention into Indiana’s primaries.
A Trump-aligned dark money group routed about $1.5 million to an organization running television ads against the incumbents. Advertising trackers show nearly $7 million in TV spending this year on Indiana state senate races, most aimed at ousting lawmakers who opposed the congressional map changes. The Club for Growth, led by former Rep. David McIntosh, is adding roughly $2 million more, primarily on mailers.
McIntosh called the effort an “all-in” push to help challengers win. Marty Obst, a longtime Republican consultant who helped lead the redistricting effort, described it as a top priority for Trump and warned there would be “consequences and accountability” for the vote against the maps.
Groups aligned with the former president coordinated with his political team to recruit and back challengers. Challenger Paula Copenhaver says she was contacted in January by a presidential political adviser and by March had posed for photos with Trump in the Oval Office — a step she described as humbling.
Longtime state legislators who opposed the redistricting effort say the infusion of national money and attention has been jarring. Jim Buck, who served 18 years in the Indiana Senate, said he had never seen Washington meddle so directly in state races. Buck says his campaign faced more than $1 million in outside spending against him this cycle, compared with what he called big money of about $150,000 in the past.
Out on the campaign trail near an early voting site, Deery said many voters now recognize him from negative ads. Reactions vary: some give him cold stares, others thank him. One voter told him he’d rarely voted Republican but went to the polls for Deery because of the onslaught of attack ads.
Deery frames the contest as larger than local policy disputes. He warns that permitting enormous sums from Washington to influence state legislative fights could become a model for national parties to control state decisions, undermining the 10th Amendment and states’ autonomy.
Not all conservatives support the national intervention. Former Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels, an early opponent of the redistricting push, called the outside spending “dumb,” saying it appears driven more by retribution than strategy.
A Trump political adviser, speaking off the record, predicted the incumbents would suffer political losses and said the campaign is intended to send a message in Indiana while helping defend Republican congressional majorities this fall. For challengers like Copenhaver, the race is framed as accountability: if lawmakers won’t redraw maps when they have the chance, that is a problem, she says.
The Indiana primaries will be watched as a test of whether presidential influence and large out-of-state spending can reshape state legislatures. With millions poured into TV ads, mailings and national endorsements at stake, the contests illustrate how intraparty fights have nationalized and become costly — and what that may mean for state control over local decisions.