Supreme Court Again Blocks Republican-Backed Missouri Voting Map
"The map had been drawn to give Republicans an advantage in the midterm elections. It was not immediately clear how Missouri would proceed.
The Supreme Court on Thursday once again prevented Missouri from using a congressional map in November that was redrawn to give Republicans an advantage in the midterm elections.
It was the second time this week that the Supreme Court waded into a dizzying legal fight over Missouri’s congressional map, and it came just two months before a general election that could determine control of the House.
The court’s brief order did not include any reasoning, as is often the case when the justices respond to emergency requests. There were no noted dissents.
It was not immediately clear how Missouri would proceed. Thursday’s ruling left unanswered how the state would swap congressional maps between a primary and general election.
The state’s Republican leaders had been insisting they would stick with their preferred map, which was used in last month’s primary, for the general election.
The Supreme Court’s ruling landed just as Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, was about to appear at a hearing before Missouri’s Supreme Court, which is considering whether to hold him in contempt for not using the voting boundaries that the state judges prescribed.
Redistricting opponents have suggested in court filings that candidates who won their primaries under the redrawn map might remain the nominees in the same-numbered districts under the old lines. Alternately, they theorized, state law allowed party nominating committees to select candidates for each district.
In response to the Supreme Court’s order, opponents of the new map said the justices’ decision had definitively settled the question of which map will govern the November election.
“The law is the law, the Missouri Constitution is clear as was the Missouri Supreme Court,” Richard von Glahn, the executive director of People Not Politicians Missouri, said in a statement.
Earlier in the week, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh had taken a similar action, as Missouri Democrats briefly appeared to have prevailed in a yearlong fight to preserve a House seat they hold in the Kansas City area. In that order, he deferred to Missouri’s Supreme Court, which had determined state officials should not have adopted the new map without a voter referendum. The state court ruling came even though Missouri voters already used the new map to nominate candidates in last month’s primary contests.
Instead, the state court said Missouri should use a map that had been in place since 2022 for the upcoming election.
But minutes after the justice’s order landed on Tuesday evening, Stephen R. Clark, the chief federal judge in St. Louis, ruled in the opposite direction, ordering the state to use the map that Missouri Republicans drew last year at President Trump’s request. That map was intended to help Republicans flip the seat in Kansas City.
Judge Clark’s ruling came in a different legal case, brought by a Republican congressman who is running for re-election and a G.O.P. candidate who won the primary under the new district lines. That ruling was then appealed again to the Supreme Court, resulting in Thursday’s action.
Judge Clark cited concerns in his ruling that using a different map for the general election would “wreak havoc on the fairness and orderliness” of the congressional election. He wrote that he was concerned a new map would lead to widespread voter confusion.
Mr. Hoskins, along with the governor and the attorney general, then quickly announced that they would follow the district judge’s ruling, rather than the State Supreme Court’s decision. That set off another round of court filings — and contempt proceedings against Mr. Hoskins before the State Supreme Court.
The G.O.P. map was drawn outside the usual redistricting cycle at Mr. Trump’s request, as part of an effort to improve the Republican Party’s chances of holding the House in the 2026 midterms.
The redrawn Missouri map, adopted by the State Legislature in September 2025, divided the core of Kansas City, the state’s largest city, into several districts in an attempt to unseat Representative Emanuel Cleaver II, one of two Democrats in the state’s congressional delegation. The new map did not significantly alter the partisan makeup of the other Democratic-held district, which is in the St. Louis area.
Democrats and state residents opposed to the boundaries last year collected hundreds of thousands of signatures seeking a referendum on the issue. But Mr. Hoskins said he did not believe that redistricting could legally be subject to a voter referendum, and he declined to add it to November’s ballot."
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