The ruling concludes a yearlong legal clash that involved numerous lawsuits, conflicting rulings from both state and federal courts, and a sequence of appeals reaching the Supreme Court.
On Thursday, the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling in Missouri’s contentious redistricting dispute, affirming the Missouri Supreme Court’s conclusion that the state could not adopt a congressional map drafted by the Republican Governor Mike Kehoe the prior year.
The Court’s decision, which quashed a federal court order, dealt a setback to President Donald Trump’s push for gerrymandering, a momentum that began last August when the president urged a number of red states across the country to redraw their congressional districts to favor Republicans in the midterm elections. Kehoe promptly agreed, quickly crafting a new map that the Missouri Legislature approved during a September 2025 special session.
People Not Politicians, a group advocating against gerrymandering, promptly challenged the new map, mounting a signature drive and petition. They collected over 300,000 signatures from across the state and delivered them to Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins in December. Under Missouri’s state constitution, residents “reserve the power to approve or reject by referendum any act of the general assembly.” Thus, once Hoskins’ office had verified the signatures, the implementation of the new map would be paused pending a statewide vote in November to decide its fate.
People Not Politicians also filed suit against the state, contending that the Legislature had no authority to draw up new maps between census years and that the new map violated compactness requirements. The Missouri Supreme Court disagreed, ruling in March and in May that the revised map was valid.
With the group’s lawsuits failing, everything hinged on the referendum to overturn the map. Yet, months after the petition had been submitted, Hoskins had not yet certified all the signatures. The Missouri Independent reported in May that Hoskins “intends to use the entire window available” up to the mandated deadline—the primary election day—before recognizing the referendum as valid.
As anticipated, Hoskins waited until the final moment before the deadline to />conclude that “the referendum itself is null and void by virtue of the fact that it is unconstitutional.”
People Not Politicians filed another lawsuit challenging Hoskins’ last-minute declaration about the referendum’s constitutionality. But by then the August primary had already proceeded under the gerrymandered districts.
After a rapid appeals process, the Supreme Court of Missouri ruled against Hoskins on September 3, stating (with evident irritation) “the referendum petition was legal, sufficient, and timely, and the secretary misjudged the issue.” The court declared the old map to remain “in full force and effect for the November 2026 general election.”
The following day, Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, acting for Hoskins, appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, seeking a stay of the Missouri Supreme Court’s ruling—a move that former Missouri Solicitor General Jim Layton described as “unprecedented.”
In his new appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Hoskins argued that the state court could not discard the new map because a federal election had already taken place using it, and reverting to the old map would perplex voters and contravene federal law.
The U.S. Supreme Court refused Hoskins’ request for a stay on Tuesday, effectively endorsing the Missouri Supreme Court’s stance. Just minutes after the Court’s denial, federal Judge Stephen Clark, appointed by former President Trump, issued a restraining order in a separate suit banning Missouri from “using, publishing, distributing, or enforcing the use of any congressional district map other than the [new] map for the November [election].”
Opting for the order he favored, Hoskins notified Missouri election officials Tuesday night to approve the use of the new map. This prompted his appearance before the Missouri Supreme Court on Thursday to justify that his actions did not constitute contempt of the court’s order.
Moments before the contempt hearing commenced in Missouri, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed Judge Clark’s restraining order while litigation in the appeals court continued. The Missouri Supreme Court found that Hoskins’ past conduct had been in contempt of its order, but that his culpability would be excused if he ceased using the new map. Operational hurdles remained, but by Thursday afternoon, Hoskins’s office was “directing local election authorities to use the 2022 congressional map,” according to The New York Times.
Missouri’s gerrymander is not an isolated phenomenon, nor is it a strictly partisan issue. In the last two years, nine states have drawn up gerrymandered congressional maps. Eight of these states are governed by Republican legislatures. The ninth is California, which, under Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, approved a statewide gerrymander through a referendum.
While Trump has been a key driver of many of these moves, “the broader drift toward gerrymandering predates Trump and coincides with a general erosion of civic norms and traditions, coupled with politics turning into a strategy for crushing opponents,” observes Walter Olson, a legal scholar at the Cato Institute, in an interview with Reason.
This impulse to “crush the enemy” may reward ambitious politicians seeking to profit their party, but the losers are the voters, whose voices grow fainter with each additional gerrymander. Missouri’s redistricting plan may have been thwarted this year, yet eight other states will employ newly gerrymandered maps this coming November.
