At the beginning of July, the prospect that Missouri lawmakers would return to Jefferson City in the fall to redraw their congressional map seemed ludicrous.
Missouri Republicans were just a couple of years removed from a bitter and divisive legislative session in which redrawing the state's eight congressional districts exacerbated existing tensions. And states typically don't engage in redistricting in the middle of the decade without some sort of judicial order.
But President Donald Trump is asking GOP leaders, some of whom passionately argued against splitting Kansas City into multiple districts in 2022, to come back for a September special session. They'll seek to redraw Missouri's 5th District in a way that will make it difficult, if not impossible, for Democratic Congressman Emanuel Cleaver to win reelection in 2026.
Trump has pushed multiple Republican states, including Texas, to engage in the unusual mid-decade remapping to preserve a fragile GOP majority in the U.S. House during the final two years of his presidency.
And Missouri Republicans have responded.
"I want the strongest map that's going to send the most representatives to D.C. that share Missourians' core constitutional values," said state Sen. Nick Schroer, R-St. Charles County.
Even if Republicans are able to surmount the legal and political hurdles to drawing Cleaver out, the effort could actually help Missouri Democrats in the long run.
And Democrats also pointed out that redistricting will further increase tensions in the legislature.
"We can remember that only 23 Republicans in the House voted in favor of a 7-1 map," said Democratic House Minority Leader Ashley Aune, referring to a map that takes aim at Cleaver's district. "And so the idea that so many of them would come back and just change their mind, because Trump told them to, that was kind of wild to me."
Another shot at redistricting
With Democratic states like California, Illinois and New York now mulling their own redistricting pushes, Missouri Republicans like Lt. Gov. David Wasinger said Republicans need to go after Cleaver's seat.
"We missed the chance to secure a 7-1 map in 2022, a mistake President Trump rightly calls on us to fix," Wasinger said. "Missouri's next congressional map must protect Missouri values and ensure our representatives in Congress are as conservative as the voters who send them."
Wasinger is referring to how Republicans fought in 2022 over whether to go with the current map, which has six Republican-leaning seats and two solidly Democratic districts, or try to divide Kansas City enough to make it winnable for Republicans.
Missouri Republicans solidly rejected that idea at the time. But few GOP lawmakers appear likely to go against Trump's wishes.
That may explain why legislators who didn't support going after Cleaver's in 2022, like Senate President Pro Tem Cindy O'Laughlin of Shelbina, sound ready to pursue a redrawing in September.
"The work that President Trump has done has turned our country back from the edge of the cliff that the Biden administration was driving us over," O'Laughlin wrote in a recent Facebook post. "Missouri's conservative voters (from both parties) would not want to return to that as evidenced by the last election."
Could the plan backfire?
Numerous Republican consultants and political figures have told St. Louis Public Radio that Missouri's redistricting push is a bad idea that may not even achieve its intended purpose of gaining Cleaver's seat.
In 2022, Republicans rejected the 7-1 map because they feared that adding significant parts of Kansas City to Reps. Sam Graves and Mark Alford districts' would make those safe GOP seats perennially competitive. And that might mean Missouri could send three or four Democrats to Congress if Republicans have a catastrophically bad election cycle.
While Schroer hasn't seen a map that GOP leaders have settled on yet, he conceded that the final outcome wouldn't necessarily be an easy defeat of Cleaver.
"There are ways to make it more conservative, more Republican leaning," Schroer said. "But ultimately, in the way that it's going to have to be drawn, you're going to have to have a strong candidate that's going to hit the ground and be able to connect with voters on each side of the aisle."
Even if Republicans find someone to capture the 5th District seat in 2026, the fact that the Kansas City area could have up to three perennially competitive seats could be a boon for Democrats.
That's because both parties would likely spend millions of dollars on congressional districts that previously weren't competitive, potentially motivating more Democratic voters in the Kansas City area to come to the polls.
Republican political consultant David Barklage said the end result will likely not be the most pro-Trump congressional delegation possible. Instead, Barklage said, "the unintended consequences of this attempt to go 7-1 will actually make several districts much more competitive."
But even though the redistricting push could backfire on Republicans, Democratic state Sen. Patty Lewis said that isn't a reason to pursue a redistricting special session.
"This is unprecedented to do this not following the census," Lewis said. "I hope that the super majority stands up to the president and does the right thing, and we don't go into a special session and gerrymander the congressional maps."
Sign of polarization
While states typically don't redraw their congressional lines in the middle of the decade, at least one redistricting expert said the trend isn't completely absent from American history.
Washington University School of Law professor Travis Crum noted that state legislatures regularly engaged in mid-decade redistricting throughout the late 1800s.
"And I think one of the things that's really an interesting parallel between today and the late 1800s is that both periods were ones of intense partisan polarization," Crum said. "And you would see state legislatures redraw in an attempt to get more partisan advantage. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it would backfire. Because obviously, redistricting software didn't exist in the late 1800s, and political science wasn't really a field back then either."
Cleaver said he's dismayed that Republican members of the Missouri congressional are openly supportive of Trump's plan.
That includes U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Ballwin, who said in a statement that "while redistricting is up to the state legislature and the governor, I am fully supportive of their efforts and have made that clear to the governor and the president."
Some Missouri Republicans have sought to justify their redistricting push by pointing to Democratic states that gerrymander their maps against Republicans, such as Illinois. Illinois redrew after the country completed a census – while Missouri and Texas are drawing their new maps with estimates that are roughly four years old.
Cleaver doesn't think it's a good thing that any state, including Democratic ones, are scrambling to redraw their lines because of Trump's prodding of Texas. He said voters will end up being the losers.
"This is going to ignite a bloody mess in our country," Cleaver said. "Why would we, with intentionality, try to tear up our country more than it's already being torn?"
Impact on the St. Louis region
Although much of the focus will be on how Republicans draw districts around the Kansas City area, the redistricting will almost certainly change how some St. Louis-area seats are arranged.
Schroer, for instance, wants all of St. Charles County to go into Congressman Bob Onder's 3rd District. That would likely make that heavily Republican seat more concentrated around the St. Louis exurban counties, including Lincoln and Pike.
If all of St. Charles County is put into Onder's district, Wagner's St. Louis County-based 2nd District would have to add territory, likely in Jefferson and Washington counties. Those types of moves would likely keep the 2nd District, which the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is targeting, fairly competitive in an election year when Republicans might not do well nationally.
Missouri's 1st Congressional District isn't likely to change much, since any significant effort to lower the African American population could violate the Voting Rights Act.
A bigger impact to St. Louis could come if Democrats are able to marshal enough money and organizational power to place a ballot measure before voters next year giving a commission control of congressional redistricting.
That's because a bipartisan commission split evenly between Republicans and Democrats would almost certainly draw a map that includes a much more Democratic-leaning 2nd District.
Copyright 2025 St. Louis Public Radio
