While President Donald Trump’s influence continues to define the national Republican Party, a quiet resistance is forming in the very trenches where power is drawn: the states. In an effort to secure a GOP stronghold in the House, Trump and his allies have leaned hard into an aggressive redistricting strategy — but they’re discovering that not all Republicans are willing to bend the knee.
In Kansas, Nebraska, Indiana, and New Hampshire, a handful of stubborn, principled, and in some cases, elderly Republican lawmakers are throwing sand in the gears of a Trump-backed remapping campaign that has already delivered seven new GOP-friendly House seats across three states. But momentum is slipping, and Trump’s political machine is starting to sputter where he has the least control: local legislatures.
Take Kansas Rep. Mark Schreiber, a Republican who voted against his party on transgender legislation and now refuses to support a special redistricting session — despite mounting pressure from GOP leadership and threats of White House wrath. “If they called, I would tell them basically the same thing,” Schreiber said. “I’m not changing that viewpoint.”
In Nebraska, the resistance comes from State Sen. Merv Riepe, an 83-year-old conservative iconoclast who’s grown comfortable being a thorn in Trump’s side. Riepe already blocked a Trump-favored electoral overhaul last year, and now he’s doing the same on redistricting. “It looked like simply a party maneuver,” he said bluntly.
These are not rogue moderates or anti-Trump Republicans in the mold of Liz Cheney. They’re local leaders with safe seats, long memories, and little patience for top-down power plays. Their defiance doesn’t come with fireworks — it comes with shrugging off threats, rolling their eyes at political pressure, and voting according to their own calculus.
Even in Indiana, where Trump allies like JD Vance have descended and Gov. Mike Braun has now called a special session, legislative leadership remains fractured. Senate President Rodric Bray says he still doesn’t have the votes. State Sen. Greg Goode has gone so far as to host a “listening session” for his constituents, resisting pressure with a Bible in one hand and a veiled warning in the other.
Trump’s control of the national GOP is undeniable — but this episode illustrates a more nuanced reality: local politics is still local, and some Republicans care more about preserving procedural norms than delivering partisan wins.
The irony? These holdouts are likely the last vestiges of the party’s pre-Trump identity — fiscal conservatives, institutionalists, old-school Republicans who aren’t impressed by rallies or cowed by Twitter threats. Many are nearing retirement or, like Riepe, joke about being too bad at golf to quit.
In New Hampshire, Gov. Kelly Ayotte — a former senator and one of the few remaining establishment Republicans in the Northeast — has quietly blocked redistricting efforts despite pressure from Trump loyalists like Corey Lewandowski. Her refusal has effectively iced the effort, and insiders say it’s not defiance so much as pragmatism: redrawing the districts might not even produce a winnable seat.
If that sounds like reasoned governance over blind loyalty, that’s because it is.
For all the bluster about party unity and MAGA control, this episode reveals the soft limit of Trump’s influence: state-level Republicans who are too secure to scare, too old to intimidate, and too focused on governing to play the national game.
They’re not trying to embarrass Trump. They’re not staging revolts. They’re simply doing what Congress rarely does anymore — weighing the facts, doing the math, and deciding it’s not worth the mess.
And perhaps most telling of all: Trump’s team can threaten primaries, they can stage visits, and they can apply pressure — but unless they’re willing to redraw the maps themselves, they’re at the mercy of the very political infrastructure Trump once vowed to bulldoze.
