Editorial: The Missouri GOP is trying to steal a US House seat. Here's how to stop them

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Board, St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Oct 17, 2025

Published in Op Eds

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Now that the Missouri GOP has jettisoned any quaint notions of fair and equal representation and moved to blatantly disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Kansas City-area Democrats, what can responsible Missourians (of any political persuasion) do to stop them?

Plenty. Citizens can join the effort to put the issue to a statewide vote next year and potentially head off this partisan pilfering of a U.S. House seat.

First, a review of how we got here:

The Legislature’s Republican supermajority this year passed, and Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe signed, an unprecedented mid-decade redrawing of congressional district boundaries with the stated purpose of dividing one of the state’s two Democratic-majority districts so Republican candidates will be guaranteed to win there.

To be clear, since the MAGA disinformation machine is on full throttle here: This is not the routine gerrymandering that both parties use every 10 years to gain advantage in the states they control. Gerrymandering is indeed routine and inherently corrupt, essentially allowing parties to pick their voters instead of vice-versa. But it has always (until now) been undertaken within a fixed and necessary process: The new census each decade requires new congressional district lines to be drawn based on population trends.

True, the ruling party in any given state generally thumbs the scale during that process for electoral advantage. That’s why Missouri Republicans currently control six of the state’s eight House seats, instead of the five that partisan demographics should mathematically entitle them to. But at least it all happens within a putatively valid, census-driven process.

Until now. Missouri Republicans have re-gerrymandered the districts that were drawn after the last census just five years ago, even though no new census numbers will be available for another five years.

In fact, nothing at all has changed since the last redistricting — except that President Donald Trump picked up the phone and ordered Republican lawmakers in Missouri (as in Texas and other red states) to redraw the lines so the party will pick up more House seats in next year’s midterms.

Give Trump credit for at least being typically up-front about his contempt for the norms of democracy. Gov. Kehoe’s pathetic attempt to dress up this scheme as a nod to “Missouri values” is cowardly by comparison.

The map as re-gerrymandered all but guarantees that Missouri’s Fifth District House seat, currently held by Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Kansas City, will go Republican next year. That will leave one Democratic seat (Wesley Bell, of the St. Louis-based First District) out of Missouri’s eight House seats total.

Put another way: Democratic voters, who make up about 40% of Missouri’s voting population, will be represented by about 12% of the state’s House seats. Anyone who calls that “Missouri values” insults Missouri.

Trump’s gamesmanship on this front has (as this page and others predicted) opened up a national gerrymandering arms race. Blue states like California and Illinois are now looking to re-gerrymander their own maps to Democratic advantage in order to balance out the skewed red-state maps Trump has demanded.

It’s an understandable reaction — playing by the rules against this rule-breaking president is a sure way to lose — but what a sad development: Some states (including California) had moved to reform gerrymandering with nonpartisan redistricting systems, but now the whole grubby tradition is instead being supercharged by one man’s bald power-grab.

Here in Missouri, at least, residents have an opportunity to put the brakes on that power-grab. The nonprofit “People Not Politicians” is organizing a petition drive to let the entire state vote next year on whether to allow the new district boundaries to go into effect.

As the Post-Dispatch’s Kurt Erickson reports, the Democrat-aligned group has already raised some $2.6 million toward the effort of gathering the requisite 106,000 signatures to put it on the ballot.

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