Another Win for the GOP in the Redistricting Wars
The new map is projected to give the party an additional seat in next year’s midterms, a gain that could prove pivotal as the GOP fights to preserve its majority.
The Missouri House of Representatives approved a new redistricting map on Tuesday in a 90–65 vote. The measure now advances to the state’s Senate, where a vote is expected by the end of the week. With Republicans holding a 24–9 majority in the Senate and Governor Mike Kehoe also a Republican, passage of the new map appears all but certain.
Currently, Republicans hold six of Missouri’s eight U.S. House seats. The new map is projected to give the party an additional seat in next year’s midterm elections, a gain that could prove pivotal as the GOP fights to preserve its majority.
Republicans currently hold a narrow 219–213 majority in the House. But the party that holds the White House typically loses seats in the midterms. If Democrats were to gain just four seats, they would take control of Congress for the final two years of Trump’s presidency — allowing them to block his agenda at every opportunity and likely even pursue a third impeachment.
U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, whose Kansas City-area district is targeted by the new map, told CNN, “This is one of the ugliest moments I’ve seen and felt in my lifetime.”
According to CNN:
The map targets Cleaver by splitting up his Kansas City district and merging it with rural and heavily Republican counties that spread into central Missouri.
Cleaver has pledged to fight the new lines in court. The map’s critics also are considering using another tool: deploying a provision of Missouri law that allows citizens to weigh in on legislation through a statewide referendum.
Dozens of Missouri residents testified against the plan at a public hearing last week, arguing it dilutes the political power of the state’s largest city and forces urban and rural communities with little in common into a single district.
🚨 BREAKING: The Missouri House has OVERWHELMING passed their new U.S. Congressional map, 90-65, cutting Democrats down to ONE SEAT
Republicans are set to gain ANOTHER seat in the US House
EVERY Republican state should be following suit! pic.twitter.com/lp2iLKPW6q
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) September 9, 2025
Kansas Republicans are weighing a potential redistricting plan that could eliminate the seat currently held by Rep. Sharice Davids, the state’s lone Democratic member of Congress.
Davids, a four-term representative, is a Native American and former MMA fighter who once studied under Prof. Jacobson and served as his research assistant.
Following Davids’ victory in the 2018 Democratic congressional primary, Prof. Jacobson took a jab at Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who was then facing criticism over her claims of Native American ancestry. He titled his post, “Dems excited about possibly electing first Native American woman to Congress (no one tell Elizabeth Warren).”
But I digress.
Although Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly is a Democrat, both chambers of the state’s legislature are controlled by Republicans who are hopeful they can override the governor’s veto.
Davids responded to the prospect of a new map in the following statement:
Politicians are once again focused on political games to benefit themselves and their extreme agenda, not hardworking Kansans. Voters should pick their representatives, not the other way around, and this unprecedented step would only further polarize this country and harm our democracy.
U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids blasts GOP interest in further gerrymandering Kansas congressional districts. https://t.co/21edxyFrjl #ksleg
— Tim Carpenter (@TimVCarpenter) September 5, 2025
Republican officials in the state fully support the new map. Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) told The Kansas Reflector, “Most of the blue states are gerrymandered to the point that … I don’t know what else they could do to change the ratio. The Democrats have always led in this gerrymandering.”
Former Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer, who hopes to return to the governor’s mansion next year, said, “National Democrats have gerrymandered Congress to make it more liberal than the real America. Kansas needs to lead the way in restoring sanity to our federal government.”
State Senate President Ty Masterson, a candidate for the 2026 Republican gubernatorial nomination, said he is “actively engaged in the battle for the heart and soul of America, helping the president to Make America Great Again,” he said.
Other Republican-led states are also reviewing their district maps to identify opportunities where they might be able to gain new congressional seats.
The redistricting battles began when President Donald Trump urged Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to consider redrawing his state’s congressional map. When Democrats learned the proposed changes could shift five previously blue districts into the Republican column, hysteria ensued, and the wars began.
Although Democrats have engaged in aggressive gerrymandering for years, the idea that Republicans might now benefit from the same tactics did not sit well.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom was incensed and ordered his staff to get to work on a new map immediately. The redrawn districts are projected to give Democrats five additional seats in Congress — offsetting the seats Texas Republicans are likely to gain through their redistricting efforts.
The new map faces several significant headwinds. First, California voters took redistricting authority out of politicians’ hands with Proposition 11 in 2008 and Proposition 20 in 2010, creating the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission (ICRC). The reforms stripped the legislature of its power to draw districts and handed it to the commission instead.
Newsom announced that California will hold a Nov. 4 special election, asking voters to temporarily return redistricting authority to the legislature for the 2026, 2028, and 2030 election cycles, after which control would revert to the ICRC. The proposed constitutional amendment is titled the Election Rigging Response Act.
So, it will be up to California’s voters to decide. But if early polling is any indication, most voters are not on board. A POLITICO-Citrin Center-Possibility Lab poll showed that “strong majorities in both parties prefer an independent panel draw the House district lines.” Respondents favored keeping the ICRC in charge of congressional redistricting by a “nearly two-to-one margin.” Only 36% of those surveyed support returning redistricting authority to state lawmakers.
If voters ultimately approve the proposed changes, California’s five new blue seats would effectively cancel out Texas’s five new red seats. In that case, the smaller gains in states like Missouri, and possibly Kansas, Ohio, Indiana, and Utah could take on outsized importance — potentially determining control of Congress itself.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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Comments
Rural and urban constituents mixed into a single district? Somebody should talk to the folks in Illinois, it’s been common there for decades. The Democrats always use the Chicago area urban vote to dilute the rural votes. Standard operating procedure.
A pie slice district connecting urban and rural can be done fairly, even if it rarely is.
From the map in the article it looks as though district 7 is the only pie slice. I think it should be balanced out with district 8.
For those who believe in the percentage-of-the-vote argument, in the last two elections Democrats have got 38% of the vote in Missouri, and yet they only have 25% of the seats, and now they will be reduced to 12.5%. If a party’s seat haul is supposed to bear some relationship to its share of the total vote, then how would this be fair?
Make no mistake, I am totally in support of this move. But that’s because I don’t think the argument from percentages is valid.
It’s not ‘fair’.
But guess what? Democrats started down this path. We’re not going to live in a world where Republicans are ‘fair’ and Democrats do whatever they want.
Now it will be equally unfair.
The sweetest part is it didn’t have to be this way 😂😂 Now democrats can enjoy what they created 😂
The argument isn’t that there ‘must’ be a relationship between redistricting CD and statewide voting. The argument is that the absence of something approaching the statewide voting % indicates naked partisanship and, very importantly, that d/prog controlled States have been doing this for decades. The GoP controlled States are by contrast playing catch up to the ‘rule set’ introduced by the d/prog. IOW what’s happening in Red States is the Find Out phase.
First you check for a radical difference in statewide % vs the delegation. Second you look for the cause. It could be gerrymandering, or not.
That map of Missouri appears to only show one or two districts that could be called gerrymandered.
“Politicians are once again focused on political games to benefit themselves and their extreme agenda, not hardworking Kansans. Voters should pick their representatives, not the other way around”
Sorry, guv. Democrat rules. How do you like ’em?
Wanna bet the Communist satraps do what they want regardless of the vote?
“ arguing it dilutes the political power of the state’s largest city”.
I mean that’s the whole point right 😂😂
Every Republican running in the midterms across the country should be using footage from Butler, PA, Orem, UT and Charlotte, NC in their ads. Keep the images of Democrat-supported (or at least ignored) violence against in the forefront. Make their Democrat opponents run on the record of what Democrats have supported and facilitated since the summer of 2020.
I’m pretty sure that the guys wearing white hoods used to vote straight democrat, too. A few scenes from those rallies might be a strong reminder. Maybe a before and after, comparing the bad old days with the bad new days.
by any means necessary