The US supreme court again rejected a push backed by Donald Trump to overhaul Missouri’s congressional maps in an effort to hand Republicans an edge in November’s midterm elections.
Its latest ruling, after days of confusion, comes less than two months before the pivotal midterm elections in which control of the narrowly divided US House of Representatives could be determined by a handful of seats.
Following conflicting decisions that spanned four courts, Wednesday’s ruling appeared to set the stage for the state to use its old electoral maps this year.
The end result does not completely end confusion for Missouri’s voters, who cast ballots in primary elections using the new map, butwill vote in November on the older map.
“The state, the election apparatus, had no business going forward with the primaries under that bill, under that circumstance,” said David F Walbert, a storied voting rights attorney in Georgia, who has argued voting rights cases before the US supreme court. “The problem that we’re dealing with today is 100% the result of the state machinery that created this.”
At the behest of the president, Missouri’s Republican-dominated legislature redrew district lines last year to net one additional seat for Republicans in the US House of Representatives. The new maps carve up a district representing Kansas City, long held by Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat.
After Missouri’s governor, Mike Kehoe, signed new congressional district boundaries into law in September 2025, the legislation faced immediate challenges, including a push by People Not Politicians, a campaign group, which gathered more than 300,000 signatures to force a statewide referendum on whether to keep or repeal the new map. But Missouri’s secretary of state, Denny Hoskins, a Republican, sought to use the new map anyway.
The Missouri supreme court certified the referendum for the ballot on 3 September over Hoskins’s objections, ruling the new district lines would not take effect until 2027 – after the referendum vote – and that the 2025 redistricting did not comply with the law.
The legal argument over redistricting pitted Missouri’s court, which is “not exactly full of foreigners that are some kind of wild liberals from California or New York”, Walbert said, against state leaders auditioning for the president’s attention. The court’s unanimous decision speaks to the clarity of state law on referendums.
The law “suspends completely the effective date of the law that has been subjected to the referendum”, Walbert said.
The state attorney general, Catherine Hanaway, also a Republican, immediately appealed this decision.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who oversees emergency hearings from the eighth circuit, refused to stay the Missouri supreme court ruling on Tuesday.
But federal district judge Stephen Clark made a ruling only minutes later, in a separate federal case, requiring Hoskins to use the new Republican-friendly map – compounding confusion over November’s elections. Hoskins then said he would follow Clark’s order, and a federal appeals court panel declined to block that order.
On Thursday morning, Kavanaugh again ordered the state to comply with the Missouri supreme court ruling, blocking the new maps.
“Today’s decision ensures Missouri voters will not be forced to vote under a gerrymandered map pushed through by the state legislature last year and then cynically imposed on voters by the secretary of state, in violation of the state constitution,” said Mark Gaber, senior director of redistricting at Campaign Legal Center. “Voters deserve to have their voices heard and to have fair representation in Congress. The Missouri supreme court unanimously affirmed that principle, and now, so has the US supreme court.”
The Missouri supreme court meanwhile ruled on Thursday afternoon that Hoskins, the secretary of state, had been in contempt of court after continuing to use new maps that the judges had ruled invalid. But chief justice W Brent Powell also noted that Hoskins had purged himself of the contempt after declaring that the order by Kavanaugh had ended the controversy over which map to use in November elections, and would direct local election officials to use the 2022 map.
