Rep. Emanuel Cleaver has had the most convoluted reelection campaign imaginable.
In early September, he was campaigning in a newly redrawn district meant to heavily tilt the seat to Republicans. Then, a state Supreme Court ruling reverted his seat to its previous boundaries, which overwhelmingly favored his campaign. Another court reversed that call.
And on Friday, following weeks of back-and-forth, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in for a third time to reverse that ruling, putting Cleaver back in a strong position to keep his seat, which encompasses nearly all of Kansas City.
He heard the news from Rep. Wesley Bell, the one other Democrat in the Missouri congressional delegation, and immediately pulled over on the side of the road. “Rev, we won!” Cleaver recalled Bell telling him on the phone.
Trending
Thanks to that order, Cleaver is likely to win in November. But he considers what happened in his state more of a cautionary tale than a victory in the broader redistricting fight.
“I think everybody should agree with no mid-decade redistricting, because if we do [it], we’re just going to continue to tear this nation apart,” Cleaver told The Washington Sun on Monday. “If Republicans do it, the Democrats are going to respond, and if the Democrats respond, then the Republicans respond again. Everybody then begins to fight fire with fire, but in the end, nothing is left but silt and ash and burnt cinders.”
“The rest of the nation needs to look at what happened in Missouri, and say, ‘That’s what we don’t want in our state,’” Cleaver said.
The legal battle over Missouri’s map was a nightmare come true for many of the people who warned that redistricting would set off an expensive and chaotic battle between the two parties for years to come.
The congressional map that Missouri Republicans drew up last fall would have split a compact, city-centered district into three. It would have made driving across the 5th Congressional District a multihour trek instead of a 45-minute one. And it would have turned Cleaver’s race, which he’s won with more than 51% of the vote each cycle since 2012, into one that he would have likely lost to state Sen. Rick Brattin, who is backed by President Donald Trump.
It was according to those redrawn lines that voters cast their primary ballots. Now, some voters will ctast their ballots in a different district in November than the one they did in August.
Missouri was the second Republican-led state that took action to redraw its congressional maps after Trump called on state lawmakers to make their districts more GOP-friendly last year. Republicans targeted Cleaver’s district, moving to make Troost Avenue — a street with a history of being a racial dividing line — into a district boundary.
After Gov. Mike Kehoe signed the new maps, the advocacy group People Not Politicians Missouri submitted a petition to Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins in December challenging the changes. Unlike many other states, Missouri allows voters to dispute laws by collecting enough signatures to force a statewide vote on a bill.
Hoskins, a Republican, waited until the last possible day to announce his decision not to certify the signatures challenging the maps. That coincided with the state’s primary elections on Aug. 4, which were set up according to the redrawn lines.
A flurry of state and federal lawsuits have been filed in the back-and-forth over the Republican-friendly maps — including two filed against Hoskins in recent weeks by voters seeking damages. People Not Politicians filed a lawsuit that would give voters a chance to approve the new maps this November while keeping the old maps in place in the meantime.
Two of the lawsuits escalated to the U.S Supreme Court, which three times set back the Republican efforts to implement their new map in the fall.
“The big picture from Missouri is that people are going to resist power grabs,” said Richard von Glahn, the executive director of People Not Politicians. “People understand what a power grab is, particularly one that is emanating from Washington, D.C.”
Hoskins, who at one point was found in contempt of court for proceeding under the redrawn maps, did not respond to a request for comment. Brattin, Cleaver’s Republican challenger, also did not respond to a request for comment.
As the court challenges played out, Missouri became the center of the broader conversation about the politics of redistricting clashing with the need for voters to know where they would cast their ballots, days into absentee voting. In early September, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) told The Sun that the state needed “clarity as soon as possible.”
When the ruling came, however, Hawley said he wasn’t surprised.
“Look, I was in favor of the 7-1 map,” Hawley said on Tuesday. “I’d love to have more Republicans.”
Asked if Republicans should continue to redistrict for 2028, Hawley said that “it’s totally up to the states.” “They can do it how they want to do it. I supported Missouri’s effort, and you know I’m sure blue states will keep trying to add blue seats, and red states will try to add red seats, and we’ll see. I mean, we’ll see this November, I mean, voters either way are going to have the say in the end,” he said, pointing to the measure now on the ballot in Missouri.
Meanwhile, Democrats have responded with their own map redrawing efforts elsewhere.
“We’re not going to unilaterally disarm,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told The Sun in early September. “This is not over. We’re just getting started until there is a national law that prohibits mid-decade redistricting.”
Many other states are already setting themselves up to redraw their lines ahead of 2028.
In Maryland and New York, Democrats were able to include ballot measures this year that would make it easier to redraw their state’s congressional lines ahead of the next election cycle. And a slew of Republican-led legislatures — including in Missouri and a handful of Southern states with majority-minority districts that were weakened by the Supreme Court’s gutting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act earlier this year — have made clear they’re looking into where they can keep redrawing maps to their advantage, too.
“We’re living in an era of perpetual redistricting,” John Bisognano, the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, told The Sun. “Republicans have shown no willingness to slow down, especially if Democrats do perform well in this midterm. Republicans are going to try and go back to the well and find everything they can. We’re preparing for that, and we’ll be willing and ready to engage and fight back against everything that they’re going to try and throw at us.”
There’s been talk of Congress taking steps to ban mid-decade redistricting, but they’ve gotten little traction. California Rep. Kevin Kiley, who announced in March that he was dropping his affiliation to the Republican Party and becoming an independent after Democratic redistricting in his state made his race more competitive, said redistricting is “mutually assured destruction” where “everyone loses.”
“It’s not benefiting anyone and most people agree with me on that,” Kiley told The Sun. “It’s just the leadership on both sides has been unwilling to do anything about it.”
After having such a close brush with getting drawn out of Congress, Cleaver told The Sun that he plans to introduce a ban on mid-decade redistricting — something that Kiley did last year after Democrats targeted his seat.
In Missouri, Republicans pushed until the last minute to be able to use their redrawn lines. Election officials began mailing absentee ballots to voters even as a court decision was pending, and the litigation continued as workers warned that further changes could cause irreversible chaos.
“Any further change inflicts additional vertigo on local election authorities—and the millions of Missourians who rely on them—after ostensibly-final resolution consistent with Missouri law,” a group of county clerks and election authorities wrote in a brief filed on Sept. 15.
Following Friday’s high court decision, Missouri voters will cast ballots based on the 2022 map and decide on whether they want to use the Republican redrawn map — the one that draws out Cleaver’s seat — in future elections, under a ballot measure known as Proposition A.
Cleaver thinks the ongoing redistricting efforts will continue to cause problems, even though he knows it’s unlikely to stop.
“I haven’t gone anywhere with Republicans or Democrats where I have heard people say, ‘Boy, this is really nice. This is really, really a good thing,’” he said. “Nobody likes this, and so why would we continue to do something that we know the American public finds distasteful, and it damages our ability to govern?”
Author
