Guerrilla Projections and Defending Democracy in Missouri

LEE’S SUMMIT, MISSOURI – The group was looking around for an available wall.

Activists with Indivisible Kansas City were targeting Jon Patterson, the Speaker of the Missouri House of Representatives, who is seeking a seat in the state Senate in a battleground race against Democratic state Rep. Keri Ingle. They had flyers to hand out, but Krista Mann, who organized the action, had also created a slide presentation reminding voters about Patterson’s longtime support for data centers.

The slides explained that Patterson personally prevented votes on transparency measures and supported a bill allowing Missouri power companies to charge ratepayers for building electricity infrastructure “to provide the power that we need for the data centers.” Mann hooked a portable projector into her computer and displayed the presentation on a brick facade outside a bank. They called it a “guerrilla projection.”

Lee’s Summit is a purple suburb of Kansas City, and the seat is critical to Missouri Democrats’ efforts to deny Republicans a supermajority in the state legislature. But while that was the focus, the chatter among the Indivisible activists and the smattering of passersby on this Friday night in the downtown entertainment district was about ballot measures.

“As a woman I need my rights back,” Cheryl Cheek said by way of greeting me. An ex-Republican from a family full of Republicans, Cheek told me she was new to politics, but she was clearly filled with the zeal of the recently converted. She seemed to be spending every waking moment in the resistance, whether taking smaller actions like sending Donald Trump the drawing he penned for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday book, or engaging people to get them to vote. “I’m not in good health … but I don’t stop moving,” she said.

Cheek said canvassing voters scared her, though I saw little fear as she handed out flyers and talked people up. And more often than not, the conversation turned to Amendment 3.

This is the primary measure being contested in radio and television ads in Missouri, and the most direct effort Missouri legislators are taking this November to actively nullify the will of the voters. Missourians enshrined the right to an abortion into the state’s constitution in 2024, ending an abortion ban enacted in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling. But state legislators defiantly placed Amendment 3 on the ballot to reverse the public’s expressed will and reinstitute the abortion ban. (The new ban is slightly different, as it includes new exceptions for rape, incest, medical emergencies, and fetal anomalies.) To push it along, lawmakers added on to the initiative a ban on gender-affirming care, using demonization of transgender people to try to take away women’s rights.

Missouri regularly elects a Republican House and Senate, but since 2020 voters have not just legalized abortion, but approved recreational marijuana, accepted the Medicaid expansion, raised the minimum wage, and installed paid sick leave. Lawmakers reversed the sick leave and have been hard at work trying to stop the pesky voters from agreeing to things they don’t like. In August, they tried to pass Amendment 4, which would have made ballot measures virtually impossible to pass. Voters thrashed that at the ballot. Having lost out on dismantling the ballot initiative process, lawmakers then opted to dismantle voter-approved measures one by one, as with Amendment 3.

Polling on Amendment 3 is essentially a dead heat, but the yes side is well under 50 percent. Voters don’t really like being defied by their own representatives. Foot traffic was unusually quiet in Lee’s Summit—families were probably at a bunch of “Trunk or Treat” events at local churches, the activists told me—but several people mentioned Amendment 3 as they took flyers. One person said he was door-knocking against the amendment the next day.

The Amendment 3 fight has been so emotionally charged that it has completely overshadowed the ballot question observers thought would be the main event: the referendum on the legislature’s gerrymandered map that attempted to eliminate the seat of Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) by breaking up his Kansas City district. Citizens had to fight Republican officials for a year to place the referendum, Proposition A, on the ballot. But the same Republicans ran out of steam trying to support the new maps; they have exhausted all their funds and aren’t running ads in the final two weeks. The smart money is on the citizen referendum to win, preserving Cleaver’s district.

Two other Amendments, 7 and 8, were placed on the ballot by the legislature. Amendment 7 would take tax revenue to create a “prosperity fund” designed to build such a big endowment that it would eliminate all state taxes over time. (It’s not at all clear how.) Amendment 8 would let the state attorney general remove elected sheriffs, but not county prosecutors.

One man who took a flyer in Lee’s Summit was skeptical of the legislature-created ballot measures and repeated a slogan that the activists knew well: “Yes on 6, the rest are tricks.”

Amendment 6 would affirmatively prevent the state legislature from weakening the initiative or referendum authority, or from repealing any laws passed by initiative unless finding an 80 percent supermajority in both chambers. That would invalidate future efforts like Amendment 3, while making the direct-democracy process a fundamental right in Missouri.

Whether all this meddling by legislators will trigger voters to rethink why they vote for these people in the first place remains to be seen. The Indivisible activists were on a mission to get that to happen, through protests, yard sign deployment, banner drops—whatever can get the word out. A separate guerrilla projection they pulled off later that weekend was succinct: “The G.O.P. Allowed This Dumb Iran War.”

Cheek told me about coping with her MAGA family; before he died, her Fox News–watching dad once took a swing at her once while she was his caregiver. This was her first election cycle as an activist and she had clearly caught the bug. Asked why she was working so hard on it, she said: “I found a community here … We can’t be silent anymore.”