By MIKE MAGEE
“Hoosiers receive heroes’ welcome upon return to Bloomington” he shouted last week ESPN Headlineas IU claims first place in college football nationally. It had been a long time since sport had lifted the spirits of that state.
In his classic review of the famous movie “The Hoosiers,” Roger Ebert writes: “This is a movie about a small Indiana high school that sends a team all the way to the state basketball finals in the days when schools of all sizes played in the same tournaments and a David could kill a Goliath. That’s still the case in Indiana.”
That final sentence came to mind last month, when the Midwestern state with a population of about 7 million (17th in the country) punched above its political weight and earned headlines like this on December 11, 2025 in the hill – “Indiana Senate rejects new House map, defying Trump”.
Some facts were clear: Twenty-one Indiana state senators had joined all 10 Democratic state senators in defeating a proposed redistricting map that would have ensured a gain of two additional House seats for Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections. But most political pundits misunderstood why they did so and ignored a crucial economic report from 10 months earlier that informed their actions. More on that in a moment.
First a little history. A century ago, Eli Lilly Jr. (grandson of the founder of famed pharmaceutical giant Lilly & Co.) struck a deal with the University of Toronto to be the sole supplier of its life-saving drug, insulin. Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, they were ideally positioned because the state’s three economic pillars were manufacturing, agriculture, and health sciences.
Ensuring an adequate supply of insulin was a scientific and logistical challenge of historic proportions. Eli Jr.’s focus on in-line manufacturing helped. Raw material demands required the design of a dead-end refrigerated rail support system at Lilly’s manufacturing plants. This became necessary since purifying 8 ounces of insulin required two and a half tons of beef or pork pancreas, easily available on state farms. Getting raw materials locally was not a problem. At that time, 86% of the state’s land was controlled by 195,786 farming families engaged in agriculture (including livestock management and slaughterhouses).
A century later, the State remains largely dependent on its tripartite pillars: manufacturing, agriculture and health sciences. That was the message delivered to great political effect on April 15, 2025 in a first economic forecast update from Muncie, Indiana, home of Ball State University and its respected Business and Economics Research Center led by Michael J. Hicks, PhD. For more than 50 years, CBER has published “nonpartisan, data-rich research relevant to communities and businesses across Indiana.” Its reputation is based on one word: trust.
On January 16, 2025, CBER released its highly anticipated 2025 forecast for the state economy. Local politicians and the business community were encouraged by the projection of 2.5% GDP growth and the addition of 37,000 jobs with Dr. Hicks noting: “This is the strongest forecast I have provided since coming to Ball State.” But the fine print included a warning: “The direction of domestic fiscal policy, especially tariffs, adds an unusually high level of uncertainty to this forecast.”
On April 15, 2025, bells began to ring south of Muncie in the capital, Indianapolis, minutes after CBER published CBER Forecast Update: Indiana in 2025. In his opening, Hicks stated that Trump’s economic policy actions “merit a substantial revision of the 2025 forecast” for the state. They were now able to calculate an “eight-fold increase in taxes on imports and production for Indiana manufacturing companies, equivalent to a trade-weighted average tariff tax of 22.3%.”
To make clear how devastating this was for their state, three points were highlighted:
- Trump’s total tariff tax equaled the state’s projected general fund revenue for the entire year.
- The project’s tax rate matched those linked to the Smoot-Hawley Act tariffs that triggered the Great Depression of the 1930s.
- The uncertainty and risk to his state’s economy had already resulted in a 26% three-month decline in job postings.
Compared to the previous analysis, GDP growth showed a drop of 4.5%, from +2.3% to -2.0%, and a change of 92,000 jobs from +37,000 to -55,000, including the loss of 19,000 jobs in the manufacturing sector. Unemployment, according to the report, would rise to just under 6% by the end of the year.
According to state economists, Indiana was an easy target for the huge negative economic impacts of a second Trump term. The combination of Trump’s tariffs and A big and beautiful bill that the Republicans were forced to accept and promote, would destabilize their tripartite economy in the following ways:
- Manufacturing: Beyond tariff-related cost increases on auto parts, machinery and construction, disruption to supply chains and disruptions to inventory management would be difficult to reverse. Delays and price increases would likely lead to retaliatory tariffs and decreased demand for Indiana products that would shift to foreign customers.
- Agriculture: Export markets for Indiana’s three major agricultural products (corn, soybeans and pork) had already been severely affected by the state’s agricultural community. ICE’s immigration policy negatively affected workforce availability, compromising productivity and competitiveness.
- Healthcare: Hoosiers were heavy consumers of ACA benefits in the form of Medicaid expansion and federal ACA Marketplace policies with subsidies up to 400% of the federal poverty rate. The loss of those subsidies in January 2026 was now projected to increase ACA insurance premium rates for 300,000 Hoosiers by an average of 31.14%.
His summary warned that it was not subtle: “Indiana is now entering recessionary economic conditions, and will remain so until some time after tariffs are substantially reduced and freer conditions for trade are restored. . . “This is a policy-induced recession.”
This toxic mix of bad financial news bubbled over the next seven months as Republican leaders in the state House grew increasingly resentful that their Republican leaders in Congress were marching in lockstep with the president they had helped elect by a whopping 20% margin just 13 months earlier.
To add insult to injury, President Trump was personally demanding passage of an unpopular redistricting plan to gain two additional seats in the House of Representatives in the 2026 elections. The day before the December 10 vote, at 8:27 p.m., he threatened the state’s Republican legislators in Social Truth with these words: “Anyone who votes against redistricting and the SUCCESS of the Republican Party in DC will, I am sure, find themselves with a MAGA primary in the spring.”
It was not lost on anyone that this was the state of Vice President Mike Pence, who had come to the rescue on January 6, 2020, when the chairman of the Joint Session of Congress confirmed the legitimate results of the 2020 election. real words had included this scolding directed at his current tormentor: “I am proud of my role…almost no idea is more un-American than the notion that anyone can elect the American president…The presidency belongs to the American people and the American people alone.”
The state House vote on December 11, 2025 rejected redistricting and was called by media outlets across the country a “major blow to President Trump.”
Journalists across the country were quick to try to explain: “Why take a stand now?” The next day, the Huffington Post went out of its way to explain why with an article titled, “These Are the Indiana Republicans Who Voted to Crush Trump’s Redistricting Plan.” In true Hoosier fashion, Senator Sue Glick of LaGrange, Indiana, spoke for her colleagues when she offered her point of view: “Hoosiers are very resilient and they don’t like to be threatened. They don’t like to be bullied. They don’t like to be harassed in any way.”
But the real answer is closer to the capital of Indianapolis: Muncie, home of Ball State University’s CBER. As director Michael Hick had so clearly projected months earlier: “This is a policy-induced slowdown.”
Mike Magee MD is a medical historian, author of CODE BLUE: Inside the United States medical-industrial complex. (Grove/2020) and regular THCB contributor
