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Election Day looms – and the High Court has spoken. Missouri must use the congressional districts drawn up in 2022 for the general election this year, despite already completing its primary under the newer 2025 map. Now, with less than two months until Election Day – and even less time before early voting – as many as 23% of Show-Me State residents will vote in a different district than they did just over a month ago in the primary.
The Courts Have Spoken
Twice this week, the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of Democrats in the Show-Me State – after the conservative-led state supreme court did the same. The nationwide mid-decade redistricting push by Republicans and the Democrat counterresponse that followed has been one of the most litigated issues this year, and few cases were as convoluted as Missouri’s.
On September 3, 2026, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the GOP couldn’t use its 2025 congressional map – the one that was used for the primary in August – for the general election. As far as legal and historical experts can tell, this set up the Show-Me State to be the first in US history to hold a primary and general election using two different congressional maps. Missouri AG Catherine Hanaway posted on X at the time, calling the decision “unprecedented” and saying that “never before in American history has a court overturned a congressional map after a primary and before a general election.”
As Liberty Nation News reported at the time, “It was true, up until it wasn’t.”
Republicans quickly appealed to the US Supreme Court for an emergency stay of that order. Emergency appeals in the Eighth Circuit, which includes Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, go to Justice Brett Kavanaugh, an appointee of President Donald Trump. On Tuesday, September 8, he rejected the appeal, letting the state supreme court’s order stand.
But on the very same day, Chief US District Judge Stephen Clark issued a contradictory temporary restraining order that would have the state use the 2025 map. This led the full US Supreme Court to step in on Thursday, September 10, to issue an emergency stay against Judge Clark’s order and leave the state court’s decision in place.
There is another case currently before the Eighth Circuit that would examine Judge Clark’s temporary order, but because the Supreme Court already ruled on it, it’s unlikely the September 17 oral arguments at the circuit level will change anything. And even if it could or would, the clock has just about run out. The deadline for printing ballots was actually September 8, and the date overseas and military ballots ship out is September 19 – just a week from now. Early voting (with an accepted excuse) begins just days later on September 22, and no-excuse in-person early voting begins October 20. And other states move faster. Both North Carolina and Alabama have already mailed out their ballots. We often think of elections as coming in early November – but that’s just the deadline; the elections are upon us.
Electoral Morass in Missouri
Now, for the first time in US history so far as anyone can tell, a primary and general election will be held under different congressional maps – and the Show-Me State will show us all how it’s done, however it pans out.
There have been a handful of times other states came close – and some courts and state administrations took great efforts to avoid exactly this situation. Perhaps the closest was Alabama this very year. The Yellowhammer State’s congressional map had faced legal challenges for racial gerrymandering since 2021. A federal court found it diluted black voting power and issued a redrawn map with two black-opportunity districts for the 2024 election cycle. That same map was used in the state’s regular primary in May. Then came the Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which weakened the Voting Rights Act clause behind such changes and sparked another round of redistricting across the nation. Alabama narrowly avoided the situation Missouri is now in by holding a second primary in August just for the four affected districts.
North Carolina saw maps change right before the primary a few times – in 1998, 2016, and 2022 – and even had to delay the primaries to accommodate the changes. New York moved its June 2022 primary date into August that year to make room for a similar court-enforced map change.
Also in 2022, Ohio’s Supreme Court struck down the established congressional map as unconstitutional, but the ruling came after the May primary. Rather than do what now must be done in Missouri, courts allowed the same, already-ruled-unconstitutional map to be used in the general on the grounds that changing it would be too disruptive.
That is decidedly not the direction the courts went in this time, however. About 23% of registered voters statewide find themselves voting in a different district than they did in the primary. The new, now-canceled map split the Fifth Congressional District – a Democrat-held seat encompassing the Kansas City area – across half a dozen other districts for the primary election last month.
Meanwhile, the more GOP-friendly map will be on the ballot itself for the next election – so many Missouri residents will vote both in a different district from their primary and on which district they’ll be voting in come 2028.
Democrats Win – And Still Lose
There is no doubt these later rulings, as the clock runs out, are major victories for Missouri Democrats. If nothing else, they are likely to save Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, the Democrat in Kansas City, from unemployment.
The new, more GOP-friendly map from 2025 would have almost certainly caused his seat to turn red by splitting it among more rural districts. Having it struck down may have caused a historic amount of electoral chaos, but it’s a definite win for the Democratic Party. However, it’s just one battle won in a war largely lost already. The 2025 map would have likely resulted in a 7-1 Republican split for Missouri’s delegation to the US House, but even the old map still led to a 6-2 GOP lead.
And at the national level, Democrats are still losing the redistricting war, overall. New maps in Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio, Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana could net the GOP a handful of seats over Democrats, who only managed to successfully redraw the lines in California and Utah. Still, the hard-fought win in the Show-Me State mitigates the damage to the party’s chances of retaking the House, a fact Missouri Democrats can celebrate.
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