Pete Buttigieg, former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, praised the state’s Republican lawmakers on Thursday after they firmly rejected Donald Trump’s redistricting push.
The Indiana Senate voted 31 to 19 against adopting new maps that would favor Republicans in next year’s midterms. “It’s absolutely extraordinary,” Buttigieg told MS NOW’s Chris Hayes on “All In,” hours after the vote failed.
Republicans rejected the bill despite an intense lobbying campaign from the administration, which included a visit from Vice President JD Vance in October. “The Indiana GOP needs to choose a side,” Vance wrote in a post on X shortly before the lawmakers took up the bill.
“The vice president said they have to pick a side, and they did,” the former transportation secretary told Hayes.
“Now, to be clear, they didn’t stop being Republicans. This is a conservative state. These are conservative legislators, but they figured out that the right thing to do — and for them, the smart thing to do — was to say no to the White House, no to Donald Trump, and no to JD Vance,” he added.
The transportation secretary praised state lawmakers for standing strong in the face of the president’s pressure campaign.
“Having spent a fair amount of time around the Indiana legislature, I got to tell you just how intense this pressure might have been,” Buttigieg explained. “These are not full-time legislators; at least last time I checked, they don’t even have a full-time staff member. They often share a legislative aide. So imagine having a day job, being a part-time legislator, and you get a phone call from the president of the United States. You get an in-person visit from the vice president of the United States. You got the speaker of the House in Washington working the phones.”
“That pressure is enormous, and they said, ‘No’ — it’s an extraordinary thing,” he said.
Buttigieg said political organizing in the state also contributed to the president’s failure. In September, he, along with hundreds of other protesters, rallied against the redistricting efforts inside the Indiana Statehouse.
Buttigieg said he thought the outcome of Thursday’s vote was “especially important at a time like this, where a lot of people at home are wondering if they have any power at all.”
“It demonstrated that the people of Indiana — again, still a very conservative state — they did not think that this was right,” he told Hayes.
Buttigieg argued the public rebuke showed that the president may not be as all-powerful as he presents himself to be. “A big part of how Trumpism works is to make you feel totally disempowered, to make him feel inevitable, and yet the clear takeaway from this is he is not unstoppable, and you are not without power,” he said.
“A whole bunch of people stood up, rallied in the State House, made those phone calls — the exact kind of old-fashioned political organizing things that some of us asked, ‘Does this still matter? Does this still work?’” the Democrat continued.
“It clearly had an effect,” Buttigieg said of the efforts, “stiffening the spines of these Indiana Senate Republicans who, in the end, had this vote, and it wasn’t even close.”
You can watch Buttigieg’s full interview on “All In with Chris Hayes” in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.