By Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Esq.
Turning Point USA and the Trump political operation spent north of $6 million in Indiana, flew their challengers to the Oval Office for photo ops, and ran a ground game that would make a presidential campaign blush. The result on May 5 was, by any honest measure, a win. Five of seven Trump-endorsed challengers knocked off Republican state senators who voted no on redistricting. A sixth incumbent who wasn’t even on Trump’s hit list, Rick Niemeyer, lost anyway.
The celebration came with two asterisks. Greg Goode outworked the operation in Senate District 38 and won going away. Spencer Deery, written off in some quarters on election night, now leads Paula Copenhaver by three votes in Senate District 23 with only two provisional ballots left to consider — both in Tippecanoe County, where Deery ran up 65.9 percent. A recount is the only path left for Copenhaver, and even that runs through a Recount Commission chaired by Secretary of State Diego Morales, who has been publicly aligned with the same Turning Point operation that endorsed her. Whether Morales recuses or not, the optics are going to be the story.
Net result: five scalps, not seven. Out of twenty-one no votes.
Here is the part the national press isn’t doing the math on.
Senate Pro Tem Rod Bray’s job is not, in fact, in serious jeopardy.
Start with the denominator. The Republican caucus is 40 members. To hold the gavel, Bray needs 21 votes. And here is the structural detail the insurgents apparently never accounted for: only half the Senate was on the ballot in 2026. Of the 21 Republican senators who voted no on redistricting, only the subset whose four-year terms happened to expire this cycle were even eligible to be primaried. The rest — roughly a dozen no votes — are sitting safely in their 2028 cycle, untouched, still in the caucus, and still presumably loyal to Bray on a leadership vote.
The TPUSA-aligned freshmen walking in the door next January number five, assuming all of them win in November. Even if those five vote as a perfectly disciplined bloc against Bray, which freshmen almost never do, he starts the count with 35 members who are either returning incumbents — including a dozen redistricting holdouts the Trump operation simply couldn’t reach this cycle — or open-seat replacements with no particular tie to the insurgent operation. He doesn’t need to persuade. He needs to not screw it up.
Then there is the hidden math. The December 11 redistricting vote was 21 Republican noes and 19 Republican yeses. But anyone who has spent five minutes around the Statehouse knows a meaningful slice of those 19 yeses were coerced yeses. Members who counted to 26, saw the bill was going to die, and voted yes anyway to keep a Trump endorsement off their primary opponent. A recorded floor vote on a high-profile bill and a secret caucus ballot for pro tem are two completely different animals. The incentive structure flips. There is no political cost to voting your conscience on leadership, and there is significant upside to voting for the guy handing out committee chairs.
Bray’s real coalition is almost certainly larger than the 21 noes suggest. Possibly considerably larger.
Now add the November problem. I have seen this movie before. The year was 2012. The race was Mourdock versus Lugar. The Tea Party knocked off an institutionalist Republican in the primary, the Republican base fractured, the Lugar voters did not transfer cleanly, and Joe Donnelly ended up in the United States Senate from Indiana. That is what happens when a movement that exists to punish its own party’s incumbents forgets that the incumbents had voters.
Look at the primary numbers. Setting aside Lake County for a moment, the four other TPUSA wins came in at roughly 60 to 40 — Schmutzler 59, Fiechter 61, Powell 65, Davis 59. Even with a Trump endorsement, even with millions of dollars in dark money, even with a primary electorate that is the most favorable possible audience for an insurgent, the challengers averaged in the low sixties. Which means 35 to 40 percent of Republican primary voters in those districts looked at the incumbent the President was trying to fire and voted to keep him anyway. That bloc does not vanish in November. It becomes available — to a Democrat, to an independent, to a Libertarian, or to the couch.
And Democrats are running candidates in every Senate seat on the ballot this cycle. Every single one. Which means in every district, there is a name on the November ballot ready to receive the protest vote. In most of those districts, that fact is academic. In SD-1 and SD-11, it suddenly isn’t.
Senate District 1 in Lake County is its own animal and the most marginal Republican hold in the chamber. Dan Dernulc won it 52-48 in 2022 as a relative moderate. He lost the primary 75 to 23, with a third candidate taking the rest. That is not a normal result. That is a primary electorate that rejected the incumbent emphatically and elevated a challenger, Trevor De Vries, who had to run hard enough right to produce a number like that. Now De Vries has to defend a district that was a four-point race in 2022 with the moderate version of the brand. The 23 percent of Republicans who stuck with Dernulc in the primary are exactly the moderate-leaning Lake County voters who are most available to a Democrat, to Ballard, or to staying home. Senate District 11 around South Bend is friendlier turf but the same structural problem applies on a smaller scale.
The macro environment makes both districts worse for the new nominees, not better. Beau Bayh will likely be at the top of the Democratic ticket — though Blythe Potter is a real factor heading into the June 6 convention and not to be dismissed — and Bayh has a real shot at winning. He carries a name brand Indiana Democrats have not had at the top of a ticket in a generation, and the political legacy still moves voters in this state in ways no other Democratic name does. Whether he wins outright or simply runs strong, the downballot effect is the same: Democratic turnout spikes in places like Lake County and St. Joseph County, which is to say the counties anchoring the two most marginal Republican Senate seats in the state.
The Republican side has its own convention problem. Diego Morales is not a lock for renomination at the June 20 GOP convention. Jamie Reitenour is running as the constitutional-right insurgent and David Shelton is back for another try after losing to Morales in 2022. A three-way contest in which Morales survives by splitting his opposition is exactly the kind of nominee Democrats would draw up on a napkin. A non-Morales nominee changes the analysis, but the betting line says Morales hangs on.
Then add the third- and fourth-party math. Libertarian Lauri Shillings is already on the November ballot by virtue of her party’s automatic ballot access. And assuming Greg Ballard makes the ballot as an independent, which looks increasingly likely, the picture gets meaningfully worse for the TPUSA-installed freshmen. Ballard gives moderate, suburban, country-club Republicans — the kind who looked at the new nominees in SD-1 and SD-11 and quietly recoiled — a place to land that is not voting for a Democrat. Shillings gives libertarian-leaning Republicans a similar exit ramp. Every Ballard vote and every Shillings vote in those districts is a vote the TPUSA-installed nominee was counting on. Republicans do not have to defect to the Democrat. They just have to defect to Ballard or Shillings, and the math collapses on its own.
It is also worth saying out loud that 2026 is not shaping up to be a particularly good year for Republicans nationally. Midterms historically punish the party in the White House, the macro indicators are not pointing the GOP’s way, and Indiana is not as immune to national tides as the last decade of results suggests. The same Democratic energy producing competitive races in places it hasn’t existed for years is going to show up here too.
Which brings us to the question nobody on the insurgent side has answered, because the answer is embarrassing: will Turning Point USA spend a dime to defend its nominees in November?
Of course it won’t. TPUSA’s mission is intra-party enforcement. Once the primary is over, the operation packs up and goes home. The general election becomes the Indiana Republican Party’s problem — the same state party the TPUSA operation has spent the last six months publicly steamrolling and is now expected to write checks on behalf of nominees it didn’t pick.
The insurgents also have a problem they haven’t solved and may not be able to. They ran as Trump candidates, not as a slate with a leadership pick. “Anti-Bray” is not a candidacy. It is a mood. Until somebody on that side names an alternative pro tem and gets twenty other senators to publicly commit, the soft yeses in Bray’s column harden by the week.
There is real irony here. The entire exercise began because Donald Trump wanted two more Republican congressional seats out of Indiana. The deliverable, when you tally it up, may be zero new congressional seats, somewhere between one and two fewer Republican state senate seats, and a pro tem fight the insurgents lose anyway.
The last time a movement convinced itself that purging its own incumbents was a strategy, Joe Donnelly went to Washington. Ask Richard Mourdock how it worked out.
In politics, as in poker, it matters whether you’re counting the chips on the table or the chips in the other guy’s stack.
Right now, Bray has the bigger stack. And the bigger sack. And he knows it.
