In Missouri, the main legislative event of the past few weeks has been the mad scramble to dispense with decennial redistricting. Stripping away this long-accepted feature of American government with minimum drama demonstrates how fast democracy can wither and die in the nation’s statehouses.
After prodding from President Trump, plus fine-tuning by Gov. Mike Kehoe (R-MO), the majority of the men and women serving in the state legislature signed off on a new congressional map that “cracks” metro Kansas City, the heart of the Fifth Congressional District, in a ploy to send Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-MO) into retirement and dilute the interests of the city’s voters, especially in African American and Latino neighborhoods.
The most powerful lawmaker to oppose this chicanery, state Sen. Lincoln Hough (R-Springfield), the state Senate Appropriations Committee chair, promptly lost his post. The governor signed the map into law in a “closed event” on Sunday.
The mid-decade redistricting push merely adds to the systemic weaknesses that Republicans have exploited. Missouri had already engaged in serious direct-democracy backsliding, treating several recent ballot initiatives passed by voters as something akin to trifling opinion polls rather than will-of-the-people mandates to enact. And in the same legislative session, they passed a new restriction on ballot initiatives that will make passage of citizen-generated constitutional amendments functionally impossible in the future.
The redistricting controversies have melded with direct-democracy backsliding to produce “my way or the highway” governing: Many politicians don’t want to give up a lifetime of power to spend more time campaigning in competitive districts. So why not resort to the time-honored tradition of selecting some voters and disadvantaging others?
The mapmakers bulldozed metro Kansas City into three new districts with little consideration for current realities or the third rails of history. If Troost Avenue, named for 19th-century Kansas City founder and slave owner Benoist Troost, divided Black KC from white KC, why not use that well-known dividing line, whose purpose no one could misinterpret, in the new congressional districts? All that mattered was generating a 7-1 Republican advantage that the mapmakers reasoned would boost the GOP’s chances of holding on to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Missouri had already engaged in serious direct-democracy backsliding, treating several recent ballot initiatives passed by voters as something akin to opinion polls.
Kansas City, the state’s largest city, dominates the Fifth Congressional District, a largely urban-suburban enclave under the map drawn in 2022. The city is a hub for finance, tech, and health care workers. Its public transit system, RideKC, was the country’s first no-fare-required network. It has arts and culture draws and big-league sports—Missouri and Kansas continue to wrestle over who gets to spend billions on new digs for the hometown NFL and MLB teams. It’s no stranger to the national housing affordability crisis—many Kansas City residents rent.
Cleaver, the first Black mayor of Kansas City, has represented the district for more than 20 years, winning 60 percent of the vote in 2024. The district is mostly white, with large percentages of African Americans and Latinos.
The adjacent Fourth District contains rural communities and small towns, where transportation funding for local road and highway improvements has been the greater concern. Under the 2022 map, the district is predominantly white; just 4 percent of residents are Black and 5 percent are Latino. Rep. Mark Alford, a white former local television anchor, represents the Fourth District. He won more than 70 percent of the vote in 2024.
The new 2025 map breaks off two pieces of Kansas City and slots them into a reconfigured Fifth Congressional District with more rural territory in central Missouri, along with the Black neighborhoods along one side of Troost Avenue, while the Fourth Congressional District absorbs more of the suburban and urban metro areas, plus the white section of the city on the other side of Troost. The Third Congressional District takes the remaining section of the city and sheds rural sections.
“Generally speaking, anytime we see this type of gerrymandering, it harms all of the voters and it helps just politicians who want to take the voters that are voting for them,” says Mark Gaber, who directs the redistricting litigation and policy program for the Campaign Legal Center, a government watchdog group that’s working on one of the lawsuits against the new map.
“The district centered around the metropolitan area of Kansas City,” he adds, “and combined folks who had like interests and needs for representation. Then we also had a dedicated District Four that was based in rural, western, and southwestern central Missouri. Now there’s going to be big chunks of the metro area in both of those districts—and that takes away from the ability of the rural voters to get dedicated representation for their needs.”
Gov. Kehoe has flatly stated that Republicans carved up the district to help maintain a GOP majority in the House. It’s a problematic development. “We shouldn’t assume that we won’t see mid-decade redistricting before the 2028 elections, before the 2030 elections,” says Travis Crum, a professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “Then once we restart the clock after the 2030 census data comes out, more states might say, ‘Hey, Missouri, Texas, maybe California did this. We can do it too.’”
The Supreme Court set the table for partisan gerrymanders in its 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause decision, ruling that political questions like partisan gerrymandering are beyond the reach of federal courts. “It basically was open season for partisans to drive those interests in drawing maps,” says Kareem Crayton, a vice president at the Brennan Center. “What we’re now seeing is sort of layers upon layers of partisan interests, not of the people in the state, but from Washington, D.C.”
As the mapmakers finished their work, the lawsuits began to rain down. One group of voters backed by the ACLU, the ACLU of Missouri, and the CLC rests on four arguments: (1) The state constitution only allows a single redistricting plan in each decade after the decennial census; (2) The map is not continuous since it places one precinct in two separate districts; (3) It fails the compactness test, as the new district spreads across the state; and (4) The map also violates the state constitution’s equal population requirements.
The Missouri NAACP filed an amended complaint alleging that the governor did not offer any evidence of an “extraordinary circumstance” to support his call for a special legislative session, and sought to prohibit the governor from authorizing the new maps. Another group of Missouri residents has also filed a suit arguing that mid-decade redistricting is unconstitutional.
Another development, however, has upended the political dynamic. Missouri law allows voters to exercise a “people’s veto.” People Not Politicians, a voting reform advocacy group, is in the middle of a referendum campaign that would require voters to approve the new maps. A successful signature-gathering process would stop the clock and prevent the new map from going into effect as long as the group collects a minimum of 107,000 signatures by December 11.
If those signatures pass muster on the verification front, the measure would go to the November 2026 ballot; but the Missouri General Assembly could also try to move the election date. No matter what date is ultimately selected, the 2025 map cannot take effect until Missouri voters decide to accept or reject those changes through the referendum process. The referendum’s defeat would mean that the 2025 map goes into effect. If the referendum passes, the 2022 map would remain in place.
In short, the referendum just making the ballot in Missouri could potentially nullify the 2025 map for the 2026 election. But state lawmakers have become expert at denying the will of the people expressed at the ballot box, another indicator of accelerated democratic downshifting.
Missouri’s assault on direct democracy intensified after voters narrowly passed the Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative in 2024.
Missouri isn’t an outlier in this respect. A September study published by the Fairness Project tracked ballot initiative legislation in 15 states. Between 2000 and 2023, state lawmakers considered nearly 400 bills to curb the initiative process. In 2025 alone, state lawmakers introduced 148 bills designed to curb ballot measures. While Democratic states have also instituted ballot initiative curbs, direct-democracy backsliding and intense partisan power plays have been more dramatic in Republican states.
Missouri’s assault on direct democracy intensified after voters narrowly passed the Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative in 2024. Soon after, Republican legislators decided that ballot initiatives are abominations that must be eliminated. Not only did state lawmakers approve a new congressional map during the last legislative session, but they devised their most insidious tool yet: a “concurrent majority” requirement that any citizen-initiated constitutional amendment put before voters must receive majorities in all eight congressional districts. Currently, ballot measures only require a simple majority statewide. This change must be approved by voters.
The legislature has also decided to wade back into an issue that voters believed they had decided: abortion. The initiative’s narrow win convinced lawmakers not only to revisit the issue, but to pair it with another unrelated subject: a prohibition on gender transition operations and related drug treatments. Linking these two hot-button issues together as a single measure could spell defeat for both.
A Missouri judge recently ruled that the abortion question can reappear on the ballot but the summary that accompanies the initiative must explain that, if passed, the new measure would supersede the 2024 initiative and ban all abortions. A new summary must be completed by the end of the year.
“We can have a real conversation about what it says about the Missouri legislature that they have radically diminished the impact of the minimum wage and paid sick leave initiative, but they have not succeeded at undermining the impact of the abortion initiative—at least not yet,” says Kelly Hall, the executive director of the Fairness Project.
The redistricting, abortion, and concurrent majority issues could possibly all end up on the November 2026 ballot together, along with any other ballot questions that pass muster. But trying to calculate precisely where voters will land on these issues in less than 18 months is a game for fools and pollsters.
With people eager to volunteer to collect signatures for the referendum on the congressional map, it’s clear that state lawmakers have delivered a wake-up call, though probably not the one they expected. Missouri’s contributions to a permanent Republican majority fail to consider voter sentiment, which could become quite combustible as disenchantment with the country’s direction grows.
In 2006, Republicans lost control of Congress as anger over George W. Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War exploded. In 2010, it was the Democrats’ turn to be “shellacked,” after the conservative backlash to Barack Obama’s plans to drag the country out of the Great Recession.
Then again, who cares what voters think? “Listening to voters seems to be sort of out of fashion,” says Hall. “What’s in fashion seems to be, I’m in power, so my way goes, and the rules be damned. That is a flavor of what we are seeing when it comes to wanting to break down institutions that have served these states particularly well for many, many years.”