After months of legal challenges, it’s official: Missouri will use a congressional map drawn in 2022 for the November elections, rather than the gerrymandered map passed last year by Republican lawmakers.
For many Kansas Citians, that means weighing in on different candidates in the general election than in the Aug. 4 primary.
At the urging of President Donald Trump, Republicans in the Missouri General Assembly approved a redistricting plan in 2025 that divided Kansas City between three different congressional districts. Their aim was to turn Democratic U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II’s seat into a safely Republican one, helping to maintain GOP control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
But which map will be the standard for future elections has yet to be determined.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week that Missouri must use the 2022 map for the Nov. 3 general election, and Missourians will determine the fate of the 2025 map in a referendum during the same election. In Missouri, laws subject to a referendum are suspended until voters weigh in.
What Missouri Proposition A would do
Proposition A will ask Missouri voters to affirm or reject the redistricting plan passed by the state legislature last year. The ballot title reads as follows:
“Do the people of the state of Missouri approve the act of the General Assembly entitled ‘House Bill No. 1 (2025 Second Extraordinary Session),’ which repeals Missouri’s existing congressional plan, and replaces it with new congressional boundaries that keep more counties intact?
State and local governmental entities estimate no costs or savings.”
A “yes” vote supports changing the state’s congressional map to the 2025 plan that turns Cleaver’s district into a Republican-leaning one.
A “no” vote opposes changing the boundaries and maintains the 2022 congressional map.
What led to Missouri Proposition A
Missouri lawmakers redrew the state’s congressional lines in a special session last year during a nationwide redistricting frenzy.
Redistricting, or the re-drawing of congressional districts, usually happens once a decade after a U.S. Census. But in 2025, at the request of Trump, Missouri and multiple other states, including Texas and Florida, passed new maps with the aim of adding more Republican-leaning seats to the U.S. House of Representatives. Other states, including California, redistricted in response, hoping to add Democratic-leaning seats.
Under the 2025 map, Cleaver’s 5th District would stretch from Troost Avenue, a longtime racial and economic dividing line, nearly 200 miles east to Osage and Maries counties — grouping majority-Black urban neighborhoods with whiter, rural communities.
Meanwhile, the 4th District would include all of Kansas City west of Troost, stretching 150 miles south to Dade County. The 6th District cuts up Kansas City’s portions north of the Missouri River all the way to the state’s northern border.
An anti-redistricting group called People Not Politicians subsequently gathered more than 300,000 signatures to force a public vote on the map. But Secretary of State Denny Hoskins waited until the last possible day to reject the referendum petition, arguing that it was unconstitutional.
Election officials across the state used the 2025 map for the August primary.
Proposition A officially made the November ballot a month later, when the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously reversed Hoskins’ decision. The court ruled that redistricting laws were in fact subject to referendums, and because the effort had enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot, the 2025 map never actually took effect.
That resulted in an extended legal back-and-forth over which map should be used for the general election.
The U.S. Supreme Court weighed in three times within just a few weeks that Missouri must proceed with the 2022 map. Ballots were sent out using that map, and voting is now underway.
Using the 2022 map for November’s election means Cleaver is favored in his reelection bid against Republican state Sen. Rick Brattin. But if voters approve the 2025 map at the ballot box, the seat is likely to swing towards a Republican candidate in the future.
- Brian Ellison, KCUR senior news analyst
