Sept. 16 (UPI) — The national, partisan push to capture congressional seats hit a snag in Missouri last week when the Supreme Court blocked a redistricted map from being used in November.
When voters in Missouri participated in the state’s primaries last month, they did so under a different district lines than what will be in effect in November’s midterms. The high court issued a pair of rulings with the practical effect of requiring the state to hold its elections under a congressional map drawn in 2022, rather than one the legislature passed in 2025.
The court’s ruling is the latest turn in what has been a monthslong series of developments affecting how votes are tallied in crucial races in November. Ohio, Texas and California started the movement last year, with Texas Republicans explicitly stating the goal was to add Republican-leaning districts.
Texas’ new map adds five districts that are expected to favor Republicans based on voter patterns and census data.
California responded in kind, adopting a voter-approved map that adds five districts that lean toward Democrats.
Missouri was the latest state to join the fray, adopting a map in May that would add one Republican-leaning district.
The map reshaped districts in Kansas City, including District 5 which is held by Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. The new map was expected to put Cleaver’s seat into a more favorable position for Republicans.
Cleaver is being challenged by Republican state senator Rick Brattin and Libertarian Randy Langkraehr.
Peverill Squire, a professor in the University of Missouri’s Truman School of Government and Public Affairs, told UPI Brattin is the candidate who will be most impacted by the decision to go back to the 2022 congressional map.
“He will now have to turn in an urban district focused on Kansas City rather than a district that had been gerrymandered to include mostly rural areas, including the part of the state where he resides,” Squire said. “The impacts elsewhere are minor; relatively few voters will notice differences with the districts used in the primary election.”
District 2, made up largely of the south and west suburban regions of St. Louis, was redrawn to give Republicans a greater chance to hold the seat. It is currently represented by Republican Ann Wagner. Under the 2022 map, the race still favors Wagner but the margin is more narrow.
Democrat and U.S. Army veteran Frederick Wellman is challenging Wagner.
The political impact of the Supreme Court’s decision is minor in the immediate, as Squire described, but the administrative tug-of-war that led to this point reaffirmed the roles of states and the federal government as well as the judiciary in the election process.
“The federal judiciary’s involvement in this dispute is somewhat curious,” Squire said. “The Missouri Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision based on the state constitution and state laws, essentially saying that the Missouri Secretary of State [Denny Hoskins] failed to follow the law and that the 2025 map should have never been used until the voters passed judgment on it in a veto referendum. It appears the U.S. Supreme Court understood that point.”
“My guess is that the U.S. Supreme Court did not want to overturn a unanimous state supreme court on a matter of the state constitution and state law,” he added. “Given how close we are to the November elections and the various dates where ballots have to be finalized, printed, and distributed, they probably also thought to get deeply involved now would cause election chaos.”
Travis Crum, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told UPI that the Supreme Court has thus far stayed in line with the Purcell Principle, an election doctrine and legal precedent that prevents states from making changes to election rules too close to Election Day.
The Supreme Court still has a key question to answer due to the Missouri primaries and election being administered under two different maps. The question is whether this amounts to a violation of voters’ rights in the districts affected.
The impact on voters’ rights in this case is the question Republicans Rep. Bob Onder and Brattin are putting before the court in a lawsuit against the state seeking to restore the 2025 map.
The lawsuit was filed earlier this month. In it, the plaintiffs argue that hundreds of thousands of registered voters who participated in the Aug. 4 primary under the 2025 map will be moved into different districts for the Nov. 3 election.
Onder and Brattin also argue that they “won nominations by advocating to a particular set of voters in their respective HB1-designated districts.”
“The entire State of Missouri has now been plunged into legal and electoral uncertainty over which Congressional maps govern Missouri’s 2026 general election and which candidates represent whom,” the lawsuit reads.
The Eighth District Court is set to hear oral arguments in the case on Thursday. Election officials are required to send out to military and overseas voters 45 days before an election under the federal law, the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. That deadline is Saturday.
As Onder, Brattin and the other plaintiffs in the case, which includes a group of voters, called for an expedited decision, Crum said Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins played a role in putting the entire issue under a time crunch.
“The conventional wisdom here in the state was that the delay was purposeful in order to try and box in the courts,” Crum said.
Hoskins sought to use the 2025 congressional map despite a court order blocking it. The Missouri Supreme Court found last week that Hoskins was in contempt for directing election administrators to use the blocked map, but it also decided that he had cleared himself of being in contempt after abandoning the plan coming into compliance with the court order.
Hoskins’ contempt hearing was taking place when the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision came down.
More may come of the congressional map saga in the courts before Nov. 3. What has been made certain is voters will have the opportunity to weigh in at the polls.
The ballot measure Proposition A asks voters to decide if House Bill No. 1, the bill that created the new congressional map, will repeal and replace the 2022 map.
A vote “yes” will adopt the map drawn in 2025, which is meant to favor Republicans. A vote “no” will leave the 2022 map in effect.
Should the ballot measure to adopt the new map fail, Crum and Squire are unsure if lawmakers will make another attempt at redistricting before the end of the decade.
“There was some dissension within the Republican caucus in Jefferson City as to whether or not to even do the 2025 redraw,” Crum said. “Partly because they were worried about creating a dummymander with certain districts. Partly because some of them just believed in institutional norms and that this was a bit too aggressive.”
The partisan success of newly drawn maps across the country may also inform whether the redistricting arms race between Republicans and Democrats continues. Crum expects some states to charge ahead with plans to redraw, even before the 2028 presidential election, regardless of November’s outcomes.
“If you see some of the gerrymanders backfire, there’s going to be far less appetite for doing it,” he said.
Source: U.S. News
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