by Alix Breeden, Daily Kos Staff | Thursday, December 11, 2025 at 3:30:10p CST
When President Donald Trump pressed Missouri’s GOP to help him rig the 2026 midterm elections, they passed a map that is expected to give the party one more seat in the U.S. House. But everyday Missourians have put their foot down.
People Not Politicians, a political action committee, swiftly began gathering signatures to force a statewide referendum that would allow voters to get the final say on the gerrymandered congressional map. And on Tuesday, the group showed up at Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskin’s office with 691 boxes containing the signatures of over 300,000 residents who want to put the referendum on next year’s ballot.
According to Richard von Glahn, the group’s executive director, getting residents to sign the petition didn’t take much convincing. All the group had to do was tell them it was an option.
“As soon as we brought up gerrymandering, they asked where they could sign,” von Glahn told Daily Kos.
The red state is no stranger to pushing referendums, he said. People Not Politicians has worked with Missourians on efforts like raising the minimum wage and instituting paid sick days. Locals are used to seeing the petitioners outside every two years, von Glahn said.
“It’s just something that our legislature has really trained us how to do,” he told Daily Kos. “We’ve had to take care of ourselves because they’ve been so unresponsive.”
And this time, von Glahn said, even Trump’s supporters rallied behind the largest turnout that People Not Politicians says it has seen to date.
Missouri Republicans’ new gerrymander is part of a nationwide push by Trump to fortify his party’s slim majority in the House. Texas was the first state to voluntarily dive down the mid-decade redistricting hole, and three others—Missouri, California, and North Carolina—have followed it. (Additionally, Ohio redrew its map because its previous one had expired after the 2024 elections, and Utah implemented a new map due to a court order.)
The Republican Party is clawing at any option to maintain its power in Congress, even if it’s legally murky. And for Missouri, von Glahn said that—according to the state constitution—it absolutely is.
Now, People Not Politicians has another legal fight on its hands. On Wednesday, Hoskins said the gerrymander would be enacted in spite of the referendum signatures—a shocking break from precedent.
But that won’t move forward without a fight, von Glahn insisted.
“If there needs to be more litigation, there will be,” he told Daily Kos, adding that the outcome will ultimately rely on whether or not Hoskins chooses to “do his job” and validate the signatures. In the case that Hoskins doesn’t, von Glahn said that they will see him in court.
Most importantly, von Glahn added, this fight against the referendum wouldn’t be happening at all if Republicans felt confident their efforts were community-focused.
“They’re terrified of [the referendum] because I think they know what they did was unpopular, and they don’t want to face the jury—in this case, their own voters—on what they did here,” he said. “That is the thing they fear the most.”
Read the article here: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/12/11/2357923/-How-Missourians-rose-up-against-gerrymandering-GOP-is-terrified