KANSAS CITY, Missouri – On the weekends, Terri Craddock-Moore religiously reads her local newspaper, trying to keep up with what’s happening in her district.
She has spent the past few months watching the back-and-forth over Missouri’s new Republican-drawn congressional map and the fallout in U.S. Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver II’s 5th District. While she felt clear about her choices after studying voting guides, many of her neighbors were left confused about who the final candidates would be in one of Missouri’s most diverse districts.
At her precinct, Craddock-Moore heard of a man upset that Cleaver’s name was missing from his ballot during the August primary. In that moment, the consequences of redistricting became painfully clear: who gets represented and the confusion that impacts voter turnout.
“I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this person was not informed and doesn’t know what’s going on,’ and it’s just sad,” she said.
A month later, the Missouri and U.S. supreme courts ruled that Cleaver would return to the ballot in his existing district. The state will use its 2022 congressional map for the Nov. 3 general election, even though August’s primary used the boundaries redrawn in 2025. The state’s court has ordered at least changes, causing confusion and chaos in district 5 and beyond.
When early voting began Oct. 20, residents like Craddock-Moore lined up to vote for Democrat Cleaver or the Republican nominee, state Sen. Rick Brattin. They’ll also vote on a ballot measure, Proposition A, deciding if a new map will be used in future elections.
Uncertainty about the Missouri ballot over the summer came as Southern states faced redistricting battles, intensified by the U.S. Supreme Court’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act and the legal path it opened for new maps.
Black voters have navigated sudden changes in election dates, ballots, polling places, and candidates, making it difficult to cast an informed vote. The court’s decision, which made proving racial discrimination in voting harder, has had a disproportionate impact on Black and Hispanic communities.
Kansas City’s redistricting battle had already been brewing for well over a year when the Supreme Court’s decision intensified fights across the country.
A community refuses to stay quiet and mobilizes
Craddock-Moore and others witnessed a confusing partisan fight over the 5th Congressional District, with some residents telling Capital B that the battle among legislators prevented voters from exercising their rights.
Last year, Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe signed the redrawn congressional map into law. This past August, Missouri used that 2025 map, which broke up the strongly progressive Kansas City district and folded in more Republican-leaning areas.
Capital B has reached out to several state and county Republican officials in the greater Kansas City metropolitan area but didn’t receive responses by the time of publication.
After the last court decision, Brattin, the Republican nominee for the 5th District, was worried the move would disenfranchise voters and said the use of the 2022 map would alter how he approached his campaign.
“It’s almost an insurmountable uphill battle because now I’ve got to retool a campaign to a new district mid-cycle with only less than 60 days left. I mean, it’s ridiculous,” he told KCUR’s Up To Date. “I can’t believe that the government would step in and do this to, you know, not just the candidates but to the voters in general.”
Others see what happened as a win.
It is a lesson about the impact of residents mobilizing and refusing to stay quiet, said Jamie Johnson, a former legislator and the coalition director for People Not Politicians, a nonpartisan organization.
Now, the group faces two challenges: educating voters about the ballot language and keeping Republican-led officials at bay until voters can decide.
Since last fall, more than 2,000 People Not Politicians volunteers canvassed, rallied, and called voters throughout the state to collect signatures and raise awareness about the upcoming measure. With just three staff members, including Johnson, the nonprofit’s volunteers collected over 300,000 signatures to bring Proposition A to voters.
“We are entitled to the constitutional right to a referendum,” Johnson said. “And we have been challenged at every turn because this map was ordered by somebody with more weight with Missouri lawmakers and politicians than the people that they represent.”
While Craddock-Moore never met a campaigner face-to-face, People Not Politicians and its messaging fired up voters ahead of the midterms.
Still, not everyone took the redistricting as a call to action. Some residents remained irritated by the sudden and quick changes in short periods of time.
What this street represents in a redistricting battle
Lavance Kennar, 50, lives along Troost Avenue, a street that has long marked Kansas City’s racial and economic divide. If voters approve the Republican-led map on Election Day, he fears the Black vote will be scattered, deepening old wounds that leaders like Cleaver worked hard to overcome.
“This street right here is pretty much the dividing line of this city,” said Kennar, sitting on his front porch overlooking the busy road.
After Kansas City’s late-19th-century economic boom, Black residents were pushed out, leading many to settle on the east side of Troost Avenue. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional, the Kansas City school board manipulated attendance boundaries to ensure white schools were separated from Black schools.
Today, the effects of Troost’s symbolic line remain stark: One side thrives with new businesses and development, while the other struggles with underinvestment and enduring stereotypes.
Across the street, a coffee shop that opened in 2021 sits beside a Family Dollar, an AutoZone and a used car lot — a mix of longtime businesses that line the road before the housing becomes more visibly modern.
Kennar said that even today, west of Troost is where you typically find white residents, while the east end is also being gentrified.
If voters reject the new map and uphold the 2022 one, Kansas City’s core, including Troost Avenue, will remain united, preserving a stronger collective voice for its diverse communities.
Keeping the 5th District intact is crucial for Democrats. It is Missouri’s second-most diverse district, with Black residents making up 21% of the population and Hispanic residents 12%, according to the Census Reporter.
Missouri’s 1st District, which covers St. Louis and is represented by Wesley Bell, also a Black man, has the most Black residents in the state. The district has the highest percentage of Black residents at 43%.
Restoring faith in the right to vote
It’s the district’s diversity and the electorates’ voting power that was also at stake, Johnson said. She wasn’t shocked about the last-minute push to use the 2025 congressional map, even weeks before the election. To her, it’s just another day in the Missouri legislature.
Johnson served in the state assembly from 2023 to 2025, and was the first Black person elected to represent a Platte County district in the General Assembly. While in the legislature, she witnessed elected officials vote the opposite of their constituents, a pattern she recognized early on.
“People don’t pay attention to Missouri; they assume it’s a red state, but there are people fighting back,” Johnson said.
Yet, the recent redistricting has dispersed the Black vote, with some voters becoming discouraged to participate in the local elections.
Kennar said he thinks redistricting is an attempt from the far-right not only to cheat, but also to confuse and frustrate voters.
At work, he’s heard other Black people justify moves by the Trump administration, but said they often use “buzzwords” meant to divide people on hot-button issues such as gender ideology, religion, and immigration as a divide.
Just a few doors down from Kennar’s house, Ezra Smith shared similar suspicions as his neighbor, except he has more faith in Kansas City voters and thinks more people are paying attention. His issue, though, is knowing where to vote.
While playing a heated game of chess, Smith explained how redistricting is just a small part of the story. He feels the system has become increasingly unfair to the working class. His distrust, he said, comes from how politicians on the federal level and now the state level have failed his community.
Still, he said Cleaver can prevail, given how much he’s done to advocate for residents within his district.
Ahead of the election, the new hurdle is getting folks educated on the proposition and where to vote.
“If [Cleaver’s] on the ballot, they know who he is, and I think they’ll vote for him,” said Smith, who’s lived in Kansas City for decades. “What’s gonna be confusing is when somebody goes to the poll that they first sent them to go to, and then they tell them no, and then people get frustrated.”
In an previous interview with Capital B, Cleaver said even his daughter, who received a journalism degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, called to ask if she could vote for him after the tug of war between elected officials and state Republicans.
He said he’s experienced his own constituents asking him what district they belong to in the wake of the battles within the state legislature.
On her front porch, watering her flowers, Craddock-Moore shook her head as she recalled what she heard in Kansas City about the power of the vote. Redistricting, she said, has discouraged her neighbors from casting ballots.
But she had a message to younger voters: Drown out the noise and the attempts to gerrymander the area. She understands why redistricting makes people doubt their vote matters, but she warned that disengagement is how the state got here, by electing the wrong people.
“Young people, in particular, your vote counts,” she said. “Your voice counts. You got a whole lot longer to be here than a whole lot of us. You’re going to be lost in the shuffle because we’ve got some real strange people trying to run our country now.”
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