By Marilyn Odendahl
The Indiana Citizen
April 13, 2026
Although Alexandra Wilson was motivated to enter the race for the Indiana Senate by her concerns over plans to consolidate Terre Haute’s high schools, the calls and text messages she received after filing her candidacy paperwork show the Trump and Braun administrations were still focused on the fight over redistricting.
Wilson is running in the GOP primary next month for state Senate District 38, the seat currently held by Republican Greg Goode, of Terre Haute. Her candidacy is raising fears that she will draw votes away from another GOP challenger, Brenda Wilson, who has been endorsed by President Donald Trump, and create confusion over two GOP candidates with the same last name, allowing Goode to win the Republican nomination.
White House officials, along with Gov. Mike Braun’s chief of state, Joshua Kelley, and Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith as well as Evan Oudekerk campaign manager for Club for Growth, reached out to Alexandra Wilson in the days after she filed to run in early February. She kept text messages and voice mails, and recorded phone conversations with officials from Trump’s and Braun’s offices.
In one recorded call with Alexandra Wilson, White House political director Matt Brasseaux floated the idea of her leaving the race in exchange for a job in state government or appointment to a state board or commission. He said he understood her reasons for getting into the race, but he thought she could positively impact her community from a position outside of the legislature.
“I’m just trying to think outside the box to where we can kill two birds with one stone, and you have the ability to affect change and do exactly what you’re talking about doing, but, also, we have the ability to take out Greg Goode and move on,” Brasseaux said.
Caucused into the Indiana General Assembly in 2023, Goode is among the 21 Republican state senators who joined senate Democrats in December to defeat the push to redraw Indiana’s congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterm election. Goode, who was the only Republican legislator to hold a public meeting about the plans to shuffle the state’s congressional district map, said he followed his constituents, who were overwhelming opposed to redistricting.
President Donald Trump pressured Hoosier lawmakers to redistrict in order to put Republicans in all nine of the state’s congressional seats. When the effort failed, Trump vowed revenge and is now backing GOP challengers to the Republican legislators who voted against the new map.
In the race for state Senate District 38, Trump has endorsed Brenda Wilson, Vigo County Council member and an employee in Republican Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita’s office.
The White House defended its actions. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told NBC News Trump has empowered his team to “find out the facts” about races across the country.
“This is what a political team does. They talk to candidates across the country. And it’s not, you know, again, it’s not coming from a place of malice,” Leavitt told NBC News. “It is coming from a place of doing their jobs to report back to the president what’s going on in these races.”
Alexandra Wilson, who says she is a Trump supporter, resisted the offers, telling the callers she is confident she can win the Republican nomination and that her message will resonate with voters without having to spend astronomical amounts of money. Even as her 2010 arrest for resisting law enforcement has become public and she has been called a “convicted felon” in a protracted battle to forcibly remove her from the ballot, Wilson is not reconsidering her decision to run.
“I’m not someone to bow down from bribery or intimidation,” Wilson told The Indiana Citizen. “I will do the opposite, because I am not that kind of person. There’s a difference between right and wrong, and what they’re doing is wrong.”
The effort to get Alexandra Wilson off the ballot extended to Vigo County Republican Chair Randy Gentry. A former official in the first Trump administration, Gentry said he also received calls from White House officials who were focused on getting Alexandra Wilson off the ballot.
Gentry tried to explain to them that the voters in Senate District 38 were more concerned about consolidation and funding of the local high schools than about drawing a new congressional district map.
“Local politics is really about taxes and people putting food on the table and spending money and doing it wisely,” Gentry said. “I said to them, ‘I just feel like you probably are not paying attention to what I see on the ground. You guys are worried about this redistricting process, and I just don’t think that it’s important. It’s not as important to the people in this county as it is to you folks.”
Wilson’s decision to run for elective office echoes the adage that all politics is local. She is angry about legislation that Goode pushed through in 2025 that gives the Vigo County School Corp. access to county monies as it moves forward with plans for consolidation and construction of a new high school. With an estimated price tag of $220 million, Wilson is concerned the new “mega school” will drain public dollars and lead to higher taxes for county residents.
“It is too much on family budgets,” Wilson said. “The cost of living is getting astronomical. … I don’t want to see anybody struggling any more than they already are.”
However, the Trump administration appears to be keeping its eye on redistricting and, more specifically, on ousting the state senators who handed Trump an embarrassing defeat.
James Blair, White House deputy chief of staff, called Wilson while flying to Germany with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In a 22-minute conversation, Blair batted around the possibility of Trump switching his endorsement to Alexandra Wilson and then applied a kind of litmus test, focusing on the issue that drew Trump’s ire.
“Obviously, the first question I sort of have to ask, even to speak with the president, is where do you standing on redistricting,” Blair asked.
“I definitely support the President,” Wilson replied.
“Good. And redistricting?” Blair asked again.
“I’m not opposed to it by any means. I get why and I’m not opposed to it,” Wilson responded.
“If it came up again, do you think you’d vote for it?” Blair continued.
“I believe so, yeah. If that’s what, you know, the President is asking and needs, yes, I will,” Wilson said.
Blair then talked more about Trump’s frustration with Indiana lawmakers who did not support redistricting.
Seven of the state’s nine congressional districts are held by Republicans, but Trump wanted the map reconfigured to give all of those seats to the party. However, the proposed map drawn by GOP legislators did not guarantee Republicans would capture every seat. Rural voters were also worried their voices would be diluted by the new map, which split Indianapolis, a Democrat stronghold, into multiple districts, and opponents were preparing to file at least one lawsuit against any map that passed.
Still, Blair implied that Hoosier lawmakers snubbed the president by voting down the new map.
“He asked everybody, like, very clearly, and there’s a bunch of people that sort of told him to pound sand,” Blair said. “(Trump) doesn’t ask a whole lot. I mean, that was sort of the point we made to the guys, (telling them), ‘We don’t ask you for anything, actually. We’re asking you for one single thing.’”
To get on the ballot, Alexandra Wilson had to get Gentry’s consent because she had only voted in the 2016 Republican primary and state law requires that candidates vote in two of their party’s primaries before they can run for office.
Gentry said he talks to the individuals who want to run on the Republican ticket to get an understanding of their political beliefs. He asks about their views on taxes and fiscal matters as well as cultural issues. He supported Alexandra Wilson, he said because she supported the election of Trump.
“She was a big, big fan of Donald Trump,” Gentry said.
In her conversation with Brasseaux, Wilson assured him she backed the president.
“I support Trump 100%,” Wilson said. “I voted for him. Every time I’ve had a chance to go in and do that, I’ve done so. I’m for President Trump.”
However, she reiterated to both Brasseaux and Blair that she got into the Senate race because she was angry about the local school issue. She said she understood her candidacy raised the possibility of “throwing a monkey wrench” into the administration’s plans to oust Goode, but she was running because of her “concern for the people here.”
Like Brasseaux, Blair explored the potential for Wilson to abandon her candidacy. In his phone call, he asked if Trump wanted her “to stand down in this race,” could the administration do something to help her with that?
Wilson replied she had already been offered appointments and positions in state government to get her to step away from the race. She said she was not interested, because she believes the state legislature is where she can address the issues surrounding the consolidation of two Terre Haute high schools and funding for their new building.
“I don’t want to be disrespectful to the president,” Wilson told Blair. “(But) I don’t think that there’s a full grasp of what is going on in this district and how important it is.”
Blair responded that he understood the school issue, but he pushed back on the notion that the administration is out of touch.
“We were told we didn’t have a grasp on whether or not we could really win the congressional seats,” Blair said. “And that’s not meant to smirch you. It’s just, you know, we’ve been told for six or seven months we don’t have a grasp, including on the things that we know, like how to win congressional districts and what the numbers say.”
By Feb. 13, Alexandra Wilson was no longer receiving any phone calls, but the campaign to end her candidacy took a harsher turn.
Her impulse as a 19-year-old in 2010 to step on the gas pedal, rather than pull over when a police car’s flashing lights appeared in her rearview mirror, is now part of a courtroom drama over whether she is eligible to be a candidate under the state’s candidate disqualification law. As her past has been flung into the public arena, she has been called a “phony candidate” and “convicted felon.”
Attorney James Bopp, stalwart of political conservatives, is litigating the case against Alexandra Wilson. While declining to disclose who is funding the litigation, Bopp said he got the call to file a challenge to Wilson’s candidacy with the Indiana Election Commission at 6 p.m. Feb. 12, hours from the noon deadline on Feb. 13 for filing such an action.
The two Democrats and two Republicans on the Election Commission split over the challenge, which enabled Wilson to remain on the May primary ballot. Bopp subsequently filed a petition for judicial review in Clay County Circuit Court and in the accompanying memorandum described the Commission’s ruling as “arbitrary, capricious, and contrary to law.”
In public, Bopp has dismissed Wilson as a “political neophyte” and alleged, even though she is a registered Republican, that she has joined Democrats in a scheme to draw votes away from the candidate endorsed by Trump and get Goode reelected.
“The Democrats shouldn’t be meddling in (the Republican primary),” Bopp told The Citizen. “They’re meddling and on Goode’s side. That’s the only thing you could derive from this.”
Blair brought up the arrest and guilty plea in his conversation with Wilson. He told her the national press had the story and when she replied she was willing to discuss it on the campaign trail, he cast doubt that she would be able to address it solely through conversations with voters.
Blair said the opposition would hammer the issue. The opponents, he said, would put their version of her story on television ads and campaign flyers. When Wilson did not blink, Blair mentioned her “husband’s DUI a few years back.”
Wilson replied her husband is now sober. Also, reminded Blair, her husband is not the one running for the Indiana General Assembly.
“If I thought that there was something that I couldn’t handle, I wouldn’t be involved in it in the first place,” Wilson told Blair.
“They’ll work to assassinate your character and everything else,” Blair responded.
Speaking to The Citizen, Wilson said the accusations about her have had a negative effect. The voters in her district have a “sour taste in their mouth about me” even though they have not met her or heard her stance on the issues.
“To be honest with you, what they have been putting me through has made me more tenacious and given me more drive to get my word out there and do what’s right for the people of the district,” Wilson said. “I would not want anyone else to go through it and I would not want an elected official in office that is willing to go the route that has been happening to me.”
Dwight Adams, an editor and writer based in Indianapolis, edited this article. He is a former content editor, copy editor and digital producer at The Indianapolis Star and IndyStar.com, and worked as a planner for other newspapers, including the Louisville Courier Journal.
The Indiana Citizen is a nonpartisan, nonprofit platform dedicated to increasing the number of informed and engaged Hoosier citizens. We are operated by the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) public charity. For questions about the story, contact Marilyn Odendahl at marilyn.odendahl@indianacitizen.org
