While Missouri Democrats stage protests and push Republican leadership to engage with them, it appears that Republicans in the Missouri state House will ultimately be able to pass redrawn congressional district maps this week, bowing to pressure from the Trump administration.
Two weeks ago, Missouri’s Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe unveiled the new congressional map — which he called a “Missouri First” map, in MAGA fashion — and called for a special session for the map to be approved. If approved, the proposed map would drastically change the congressional district that currently sits in the Kansas City-area of Missouri, which has been represented by Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver — who was also the first Black mayor of Kansas City — for years. The map would, essentially, split up part of the city and add rural territory to that district, changing the contours of it so that seven of the eight U.S. House districts in Missouri would favor Republicans.
It’s all part of President Trump’s effort to force red state legislatures where Republicans have supermajorities to redraw their maps mid-cycle so that Republicans have a better chance of keeping the U.S. House in the 2026 midterms. Typically, state lawmakers or independent redistricting commissions redraw state congressional maps after each U.S. Census, rather than engaging in the mid-decade, highly partisan gerrymandering of the sort that Trump is encouraging in order to keep his hold on the federal government (and to avoid giving Democrats investigative and oversight power in the House).
While Republican state House members maintain that the map was drawn by staffers in the governor’s office, Democrats have argued that the map was likely drawn by the White House. They vocalized those beliefs when the map was voted out of state House committees last week.
“I think that everyone watching actually understands that the people who drew these maps are sitting in D.C.,” Democratic state Rep. Ashley Aune, the minority leader in the state House, said on Thursday. “It’s ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.”
Regardless of where the map was drawn, it is clear that the White House’s pressure campaign had considerable impact in Missouri. In 2022 there was some interest in trying to redraw the lines of Cleaver’s district, but Republicans in the state House and Senate rejected the measure, saying it could backfire. There is still, reportedly, some concern among the Republicans who support the redrawn map of the same problem this time around. Per St. Louis NPR station STLPR:
The decision to advance Deaton’s bill is a reversal from 2022, when many Republicans in the House and Senate rejected a map that targeted Cleaver. Some GOP lawmakers said that such a plan could backfire and make Alford and Graves’ districts more competitive. And even Republicans who back the plan now concede that the new version of Cleaver’s district, which connects Kansas City to a number of rural counties, could be winnable forDemocrats in a bad election year for the GOP.