Repeal of district map hinges on ‘no’ vote on Proposition A
Eric Leventhal knows he will vote for a Democrat in Congress in Missouri’s November election. He just does not know which Democrat will be on his ballot. Leventhal voted for Fred Wellman in the state’s second congressional district in the August primary, but the district boundaries have shifted since then. He lives near the border of the first and second districts and said he is no longer certain which one he occupies. “It is dizzying and embarrassing, frankly,” said Leventhal, a 35-year-old stay-at-home father.
Leventhal’s situation captures the anger and confusion spreading across Missouri, where a Republican push to redraw the state’s congressional map collapsed in court after a legal battle rooted in Trump’s effort to gain an advantage in the midterm elections. The redrawn map was used in the August primary but will not govern the general election. In the space of one month, the Missouri supreme court and the U.S. supreme court rebuked the Republican effort four times; during one volatile stretch, the map intended for the general election flipped three times in a single week.
In September 2025, Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe approved the new map, which reshaped the partisan composition of the state’s eight congressional districts and eliminated the Kansas City-based district held by longtime Representative Emanuel Cleaver, splitting Democratic voters in the city across rural districts. Republicans already controlled six of Missouri’s eight seats; under the redrawn map they would have controlled seven.
The fight turned on a distinctive feature of Missouri law — a constitutional provision that lets voters place most laws the legislature passes before a referendum if they gather enough signatures. A group called People not Politicians submitted more than 300,000 signatures in December, more than enough to send the measure to the ballot. Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, refused to certify it, announcing on 4 August, the certification deadline, that the state’s referendum process could not apply to redistricting. Richard von Glahn, the group’s executive director, sued immediately. On 3 September, the Missouri supreme court unanimously overruled Hoskins, ordered the referendum onto the ballot, and barred the state from using the new map for the 2026 election. Between 3 September and 25 September, Republicans sought U.S. supreme court review, and the court rejected the effort each time. Hoskins also faced a contempt hearing at the Missouri supreme court over the dispute.
The general election will now move forward under the map in place for the 2022 and 2024 elections, meaning hundreds of thousands of voters will cast ballots in a district different from the one where they voted in the primary. Some voters directed their fury at Hoskins and the Republicans who allowed the saga to unfold, saying the effort could backfire and energize people to come out. “Everybody wants to motherfuck the secretary of state,” said Bernie Ryan, a 64-year-old electrician in St Louis.
Hoskins said in a 25 September statement that his office would comply with the law and that he had confidence local election authorities would administer a seamless general election. “I am proud of the fight I put up to defend the virtues of our constitutional republic, upon which our Founding Fathers built this great country,” he said. He has suggested Republicans will revisit the map, and a Republican state senator posted “8-0 2027” on X after the state supreme court’s decision.
The Missouri battle was part of a broader national push. Trump made an unprecedented effort to get Republican-controlled states to reconfigure their boundaries in the middle of the decade to add Republican seats, and more than half a dozen states complied — a move that could have netted Republicans as many as nine additional congressional seats. With Democrats poised to do well in the midterm elections, the strategy has not gone as planned; at least one top Republican has conceded the party will not win all of the districts it redrew in its favor.
Cleaver, first elected to Congress in 2004, decided to run again even though the redrawn district was one Trump would have carried by 18 points in 2024. “This was so wrong that I felt like I almost had to do it. To not do it was a surrender, and that would speak horribly to my own children and others as well,” he said. Campaigning in rural areas far outside Kansas City, Cleaver said Republicans began approaching him at events to tell him they were supporting him; he speculated the support reflected the gerrymandering. “People didn’t like mid-decade redistricting, and to many of them, it was like pure, undistilled cheating. I think they lost people on that level,” he said. With the old map back in place, candidates are running in the districts where they won their primaries, leaving Cleaver virtually guaranteed re-election.
Wellman, a former army pilot who served as executive director of The Lincoln Project, a Republican anti-Trump group, is the Democratic challenger to Representative Ann Wagner in the second district, which stretches from the suburbs of St Louis west into the state. Wagner was first elected in 2012, and Trump carried the district by eight points in 2024; the redrawn version would have given him an 11-point margin. With the old boundaries restored and Democrats poised to do well in the midterms, Wellman said donations and volunteers have surged since the court ruling, and that Republicans were paying a “heavy price” for blocking the referendum. “Clearly I thrive on chaos,” he said at a fundraiser at an Irish bar in Webster Groves, just outside St Louis. “The real political part of it is just how monumentally dumb it was. What they’ve done is all they’ve done is now put Missouri on the map. They’ve done more for my campaign right as far as New York, DC, people out there are paying attention.”
Von Glahn said the rulings had energized voters. “I think the rulings have energized people because it has reminded people that the game, while it can feel rigged at times, we can’t sit on the sidelines,” he said after addressing a local Democratic club at La Fiesta Mexican restaurant in St Louis. Von Glahn, who spoke on his 19th wedding anniversary, wore a black T-shirt reading “informed plebeian” — a joke aimed at lawyers for the state who argued the referendum would place control of redistricting in the hands of an “uninformed plebiscite.” “Actually, we’re not the morons that you think we are,” he said.
People not Politicians still faces one more task: persuading voters to officially repeal the map Republicans passed. The measure, Proposition A, asks voters whether they want to approve the map the legislature adopted, so defeating it requires a “no” vote — a counterintuitive setup the groups are working to explain in the final sprint of the election. On a sticky evening in early October, Holly Swift, 48, canvassed a quiet street in Maryland Heights, a St Louis suburb, with her 12-year-old daughter, Addie. “It basically allows the politicians to pick their voters, as opposed to voters picking and electing their politicians,” Swift told one voter. “My 12-year-old should be studying for a math test right now. But we’re out here trying to defend democracy.” Over about two hours, the pair knocked on roughly 30 doors; not a single person said they were voting in favor of the amendment. In the year or so she has volunteered on the proposition, Swift said she has not met anyone who supported the effort to redraw the maps. “This is not a Democrat thing. This is not a Republican thing. This is not an independent thing. This is a Missouri thing,” she said at one door.
Missouri’s veto referendum process dates to the start of the 20th century, and voters have been asked to use it more than two dozen times — voting in favor of repeal in nearly every instance. Even a successful repeal may not end the fight. A separate ballot measure this fall could make it harder for lawmakers to revisit the map, but Cleaver predicted Republicans would try again. “It’s gonna be done all over again,” he said. “This was initiated by the White House, and this is what the president wants. I have not seen any examples of Republicans not giving him whatever he wants.”