After a fiercely contested legal battle over congressional lines drawn in Missouri at the behest of President Donald Trump, the electoral battle to retain the plan is a decidedly one-sided affair.
Proposition A will determine whether a 2025 congressional map will go into effect after the 2026 election cycle. If Missourians vote "yes," then the plan aimed at ousting Democratic Congressman Emanuel Cleaver of Kansas City will be in effect by 2028. If residents vote "no," then congressional lines from 2022 will remain in place.
While the "no" to Proposition A campaign is running television ads and doing canvassing across the state, the "yes" appears nearly nonexistent.
"To my knowledge, there has not been an effort organized to support the passage of Proposition A," said Michael Hafner, a spokesman for a group called Put Missouri First that supported the 2025 map.
Proponents, such as Congressman Eric Burlison, are posting supportive messages about the map on their social media accounts, while other prominent Republican elected officials don't seem too invested in the outcome.
"That's up to the people to decide," said Congresswoman Ann Wagner, R-Ballwin. "I'm going to leave it at that."
The GOP indifference over Proposition A's fate isn't necessarily surprising. Once it became clear the 2025 map wouldn't be in effect for the 2026 general election cycle, it became basically useless for national Republicans who were trying to carry out mid-decade redistricting to prevent the GOP from losing control of the House.
And it's possible that if Proposition A fails, Republicans could simply go forward with another redistricting plan in 2027 — especially since they may be emboldened to dismantle the historically African American 1st Congressional District in St. Louis after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling against majority-minority districts.
But Proposition A opponents are hoping for such a resounding victory that Republicans think twice about doing redistricting again anytime soon.
"I would not be shocked if the Republicans bring it back because it seems like they don't really read the room when it comes to the people of Missouri and what they actually vote for on referendums," said Webster Groves resident Sarah Richardson, who helped collect signatures to put the 2025 map up for a referendum. "But I also would not understand why they would feel the need to try this again."
Missouri and the redistricting wars
Trump pressured Missouri Republicans to redraw the state's congressional map in 2025. They joined GOP-leaning states like Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana and Florida and Democratic states such as California that overhauled their congressional lines before the 2026 election.
The biggest changes were in the Kansas City area, where Cleaver's 5th District was connected to solidly Republican territory in western and central Missouri. Other parts of Kansas City were split into the 4th and 6th Districts.
The new map also made substantial changes in the St. Louis area. Congresswoman Ann Wagner's 2nd District became more GOP leaning, while Congressman Bob Onder's 3rd Congressional District became more competitive since it includes, for instance, all of Democratic-leaning Columbia.
"In my own district, both St. Charles County and Warren County are split under the old map, whereas they're whole under the new map," Onder said last month. "I think it does more represent Missouri in that it has that partisan composition of sending seven Republicans and one Democrat to Congress."
But because Republicans did not have enough votes to make the new map go into effect right away, it was potentially vulnerable to a referendum. The group People Not Politicians announced its referendum drive the day the Missouri Senate sent the map to Gov. Mike Kehoe, and it ended up gathering roughly 300,000 signatures in a relatively short amount of time.
People Not Politicians Executive Director Richard von Glahn said several thousand people offered to volunteer to fight the 2025 map, including Republicans.
"The idea of politicians meeting behind closed doors to redraw maps and politicians picking voters instead of voters picking their politicians — that is an attack on voters' political power, and it doesn't matter what your ideology is," von Glahn said.
Legal battle ends with referendum victory
Secretary of State Denny Hoskins and Attorney General Catherine Hanaway engaged in an unprecedented and aggressive effort to stymie the referendum. The legal battle lasted more than a year and encompassed a number of separate lawsuits. It also involved Hoskins successfully pressuring local election officials to use the 2025 map for the primary election, even though the Missouri Supreme Court warned the GOP statewide official in May that the 2022 map would be in effect if the referendum was certified for the November ballot.
Ultimately, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled the referendum could go before voters — a decision that was kept in place by the U.S. Supreme Court three different times. And that meant the 2022 map, which included a safe Democratic seat for Cleaver, would be in place for November.
After the U.S. Supreme Court locked in the 2022 map for the Nov. 3 election, Kehoe told reporters he wasn't sure how Proposition A would fare at the ballot box.
"To tell you the truth, I have not seriously seen any data or polling on Prop A so far, so I'm not up to speed on what that might look like," Kehoe said last month. "I'm sure hopeful people do want a map that reflects Missouri's values. I've said all along, and that's what our legislature met to determine the Missouri First map was because they thought it represented us better."
But while People Not Politicians has taken in $5.2 million in donations of $5,000 or more since Oct. 10, there doesn't appear to be a comparable committee spending money to pass Proposition A.
"My read of what's happened is that you know there's national organizations that have been involved in this, both on the support side and the opposing side," Hafner said. "And they have made decisions nationally that really focus on how the most immediate impact of their funds are going to be directed. And the left has allocated significant funds into defeating the map, and Republicans nationally have other fish to fry."
When it became clear that Cleaver would likely survive the 2026 election cycle, von Glahn said the concerted effort to salvage the 2025 map evaporated. And he expects Proposition A to fail because the redistricting plan is unpopular with some in both parties.
"This gerrymander was dreamed about in D.C. by politicians and political consultants there," von Glahn said. "This has always been a DC-driven thing, And so no, I'm not surprised that there are not in-state parties that are trying to defend this."
Wait till next year?
Former Republican state Sen. Bill Eigel said there's another reason the Missouri GOP isn't going all out to prevent the permanent repeal of the 2025 map.
The Missouri Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that lawmakers can redraw districts whenever they want. And because of that, there's nothing stopping legislators from just drawing a different map in 2027. Hoskins called for the legislature to do that after the U.S. Supreme Court gave the green light for legislatures to dismantle majority-minority districts, such as the 1st District.
"I think that no matter what happens on Nov. 3, I think there's going to be an effort to go after the 2022 map and start this whole process again as we start to move towards 2028," Eigel said.
There are two potential complications to going back to the drawing board in 2027: The first is Amendment 6, which has language aimed at preventing lawmakers from undoing the results of referendums. Whether that affects redistricting plans, though, is likely to be decided in court if it passes next month.
But a more tangible problem for Republicans is that any effort to redraw districts in 2027 would be subject to a referendum. And if the GOP tries to dismantle the 1st Congressional District, opponents of that move could mobilize quickly to block the new lines since they could see it as an existential attack on Black political power.
"If I had to predict right now, I actually don't think the legislature or the governor will, of their own accord, decide to write or try to draw a new map," Eigel said. "We may see a court ruling at some point requiring the drawing of a new map."
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