A federal appeals court in Missouri said the state must use a Republican redistricting map weeks after the Missouri Supreme Court ruled against the decision twice.
On Sept. 21, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the state to use a congressional map Republicans drew in 2025 that would split one of the state’s two most progressive districts into three conservative-leaning districts. The ruling comes after a federal judge in Missouri, on Sept. 2, temporarily blocked the state from reverting to its 2022 map for the November election.
As of Tuesday, election officials are still administering the election under the 2022 map while absentee voting has begun on ballots printed with those lines.
Voters in Missouri cast ballots in the August primary under the 2025 Republican-drawn map that split Kansas City among three congressional districts. Weeks later, the state’s Supreme Court ruled to block that map for the general election.
The new map, often referred to as the 2025 map, was drawn to improve Republicans’ chances of winning seven of Missouri’s eight U.S. House seats by reshaping the Kansas City district represented by longtime Black Democratic U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, which is 21% Black with the average income sitting just below $68,000, according to Census Reporter.
“People are angry,” Cleaver told Capital B. “And particularly in the Black American community, they’re paying very close attention.”
If the state’s Supreme Court decision is upheld, it means the state will instead use its 2022 congressional districts for November’s general election, even though candidates competed in last month’s primary under the newer boundaries. Last week, the state Supreme Court had unanimously blocked the new districts from being used in November.
The Missouri fight is part of a broader wave of mid-decade redistricting that began after the White House urged Republican-led states to redraw congressional maps to help the party maintain or expand its House majority. Democrats have since pursued redistricting efforts of their own in several states.
Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe signed the new map into law in September 2025 after it passed the Republican-controlled General Assembly. The map targeted the 5th Congressional District, represented by Cleaver since 2005, by stretching the district eastward to include more Republican-leaning areas. Cleaver is one of only two Black congressional representatives from Missouri (the other is Wesley Bell in St. Louis).
The Sept. 3 decision grew out of a referendum campaign led by People Not Politicians, a Missouri voting rights group, which gathered more than 300,000 signatures seeking to put the new congressional map before voters. Missouri voters will decide Nov. 3 if the new maps will move forward.
In a statement provided to Capital B, Richard von Glahn, the group’s executive director, said the fight over a referendum should have never gotten this far.
“This shouldn’t have needed to go to court at all,” he said. “It caused chaos, confusion, and wasted taxpayer dollars because Secretary of State Denny Hoskins delayed sufficiency, ignoring the voice of more than 300,000 Missourians who legally followed the process to get the referendum on the ballot this November.”
von Glahn also pointed to the unanimous ruling from the seven-member Supreme Court, whose judges were appointed by governors of both parties.
“Missouri is fortunate to have a model system for keeping politics out of our judiciary. The Supreme Court of Missouri has five justices appointed by a Republican governor and two by a Democrat. A unanimous decision makes it clear to all that this wasn’t about politics, it was about the law,” he said.
Voting rights advocates see the referendum battle as proof that organizing can still reach outcomes that courts and legislatures necessarily cannot.
“One of the premises I hold dear is that all power is in the people,” said Robert Weiner, director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
“If the people organize and speak up and voice their views in referenda, in speaking out and protesting and marching, that may be what it’s going to take to retrieve some of the civil rights that we’ve lost in recent years,” Weiner said.
Missouri Supreme Court Chief Judge Ginger Gooch said the referendum petition filed by the group was “legal, sufficient, and timely.” Justices held that “the Missouri constitution authorizes that ‘any act of the general assembly’ can be subject to voter referendum and ‘no exception applies.’”
The state’s redistricting battle is part of a national effort pushed by President Donald Trump. It began with Texas changing five congressional districts—most drastically, 20-year U.S. Rep. Al Green’s heavily Black and Latino 9th District. That district went from roughly 70% minority voters to around 40%.
Last year, the Republican-controlled Indiana Senate killed efforts to redistrict the state’s only two Democratic districts. Efforts in Colorado, New York, Virginia, and Wisconsin were blocked by courts, while Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, and Maine all hit roadblocks within the state legislatures.
