SCOTUS Smacks Down MAGA Map of Missouri
The long and strange saga of Missouri’s redistricting battle is over. On Friday evening, the Supreme Court released a final opinion—with no noted dissents—that disallows Missouri Republicans’ ultra-gerrymandered congressional map ahead of November’s midterm elections. In 2025, at President Donald Trump’s urging, Missouri’s GOP-led legislature redrew its congressional map in an effort to give…
The United States Supreme Court has ruled against Missouri Republicans' ultra-gerrymandered congressional map, preventing it from being used in the 2026 midterm elections. In 2025, Missouri's GOP-led legislature redrawed the map to potentially give Republicans an extra seat by fragmenting the heavily Democratic Kansas City area.
However, the new map was met with widespread discontent, particularly in blue Kansas City and St. Louis. A group of Missourians gathered enough signatures to put the new map to a popular vote. Despite collecting 300,000 signatures, the state's Republican Secretary of State, Denny Hoskins, declared the referendum invalid on the day of Missouri's primary elections.
The Missouri Supreme Court later confirmed the map's invalidity, but this decision was short-lived. Two Republicans running for office and two individual voters challenged the map's invalidity in federal court, arguing that the same map should be used for the general election as it was for the primary. A temporary restraining order was issued, directing the state to use the newly gerrymandered map.
However, both the Missouri Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court disagreed, ordering the state to use the map from 2022. The Court also warned lower courts against any further interference, specifically prohibiting any use of the 2025 map in the 2026 congressional elections. This decision marks a clear divergence from the Court's earlier ruling in League of Women Voters v.
DHS, which allowed the Trump administration to use a modified Homeland Security database for monitoring voter rolls.
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