Facing pressure from President Donald Trump, the Missouri Senate on Friday passed a gerrymandered congressional map that dilutes the voting power of Kansas City.
The map, sponsored by Rep. Dirk Deaton, a Seneca Republican, carves Kansas City into three Republican-leaning congressional districts. The goal is to push out Democratic U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver and allow a Republican to win his 5th Congressional District.
“Despite tens of thousands of Missourians taking the time to call their state lawmakers and travel to Jefferson City to voice their opposition, Republicans in the Missouri Legislature followed the marching orders dictated by power brokers in D.C. and took the unprecedented step of enacting mid-decade redistricting without an updated census,” Cleaver said in a statement Friday afternoon.
In his own statement, Trump lavished praise on Republican lawmakers for their “FANTASTIC work” on the new map, which he said “will help send an additional MAGA Republican to Congress in the 2026 Midterm Elections.”
“It is wonderful to see Republicans in the ‘Show Me State’ standing up to Save our Country, and, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. THANK YOU MISSOURI,” Trump posted to his social media site.
The GOP-controlled Senate approved the map on a vote of 21 to 11 after it passed the House on Tuesday. It now heads to Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe’s desk for his certain signature.
“Today, the Missouri Senate chose to ignore overwhelming bipartisan opposition and the voices of thousands of Missourians who rallied at the Capitol, standing united against this illegal gerrymandering scheme and direct attack on majority rule,” said Elsa Rainey, a spokesperson for People Not Politicians, the campaign that organized against redistricting.
“This is nothing less than an unconstitutional power grab — a blatant attempt to rig the 2026 elections before a single vote is cast,” Rainey added. “It violates Missouri law, slices apart communities, and strikes at the core of our democratic system.”
The vote marked a pivotal moment in Missouri, potentially altering the political makeup of Kansas City for years. Kehoe called lawmakers into a special session to gerrymander the map and overhaul the state’s key process for direct democracy.
“I hope all of us understand that decades and decades will be damaged by what goes on here,” Cleaver told lawmakers on Thursday. “Chaos has found us. It has finally found us.”
Kehoe characterized the special session as a triumph in a statement shortly after it ended, promising to “review the legislation and sign it into law soon.”
“I want to thank the bill sponsors and handlers in the House and Senate, Republican leadership, and every member of the legislature for their work this week,” Kehoe said.
The unprecedented session came as the Trump administration has pressured Republican-led states to gerrymander their U.S. House maps ahead of the 2026 election. Trump wants to ensure Republicans maintain their slim majority in Congress.
Missouri’s map is an overt example of partisan gerrymandering, a term used to describe the practice of redrawing electoral district boundaries to favor one party over another.
Republicans currently control six of Missouri’s congressional districts while Democrats hold the 5th District in Kansas City and the 1st District in St. Louis, under maps lawmakers passed in 2022.
Congressional districts are typically only redrawn once every decade based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Splitting Kansas City
Voters in Kansas City would feel the most immediate impact.
Under the map, Kansas City voters would be split into the 4th, 5th and 6th Congressional Districts. Cleaver’s 5th District would extend more than one hundred miles east to central Missouri, while the 4th District would stretch from downtown Kansas City to the Ozarks region.
The voters in the Kansas City area’s Northland, including Clay and Platte counties, would be carved into the 6th District that stretches across northern Missouri to the Illinois border.
The map would use Troost Avenue, a historic symbol of racial segregation in Kansas City, as the dividing line between the 4th and 5th Districts.
Republicans have deployed numerous arguments defending the effort, saying the new map would be more compact and split up fewer communities. Many have chafed at the idea that they were redrawing the map mid-decade to appease Trump.
“Missourians are more alike than we are different, and our Missouri values, across both sides of the aisle, are closer to each other than those of the extreme Left representation of New York, California, and Illinois,” Kehoe said in a statement announcing the special session.
Cleaver and Kansas City Democrats have said that the map would silence the voting power of Kansas City, a city more diverse and politically progressive than the rest of the state. They sharply criticized the fact that Republicans were taking marching orders from Washington, D.C.
“What they are doing here is despicable,” House Minority Leader Ashley Aune, a Kansas City Democrat, told reporters.
The map is virtually certain to face a flurry of legal challenges that will seek to block its implementation. Legal experts have contended for weeks that the Missouri Constitution bars lawmakers from redrawing districts mid-decade, putting the state at risk of losing a long, drawn-out legal fight.
Unless blocked by a court, the new map would likely take effect in early December or 90 days after the Senate adjourned on Friday. That timeline also marks another key deadline for opponents.
Missouri state law allows voters to challenge and force a referendum vote on legislation passed by the General Assembly within 90 days. Rainey, the People Not Politicians spokesperson, said the group would initiate the referendum process Friday by notifying the Secretary of State’s office of its intent to collect signatures.
The Future of Missouri
The vote on Friday marked an end to Kehoe’s rapid-fire special session aimed at both representative and direct democracy in Missouri.
The two partisan issues, the gerrymandered map and the initiative petition overhaul, potentially altering the trajectory of both Kansas City and Missouri for years to come.
Critics argue the dueling efforts could solidify the Missouri Republican Party’s iron grip on state politics or provoke a staunch backlash from voters.
But the session also signified a major change in how business is conducted in the Missouri Senate, which may shape the future of legislation passed by lawmakers in the General Assembly.
Senators for decades have cherished the ability to filibuster, allowing extended debates on the floor that required legislators of both parties to compromise on legislation. Over the past year, that practice has become less common.
Senate Democrats attempted to block both pieces of legislation through multiple filibusters over the past several days. But Republicans deployed a series of rarely-used procedural maneuvers to shut them down and force a vote.
“I’m sad that we no longer have an institution of the Missouri Senate that’s willing to vet legislation on behalf of the Missourians, the constituents we serve,” said Sen. Maggie Nurrenbern, a Kansas City Democrat.
“It’s not about us as senators holding power. It’s about us as legislators being able to do what’s right for our constituents, and we no longer have that ability,” Nurrenbern said of the new tactics used to curtail debate. “We have literally now shrunk the power of the General Assembly into the hands of a few at the detriment of all of our constituents.”
The chamber, over the past several days, quickly descended into partisan fights.
Historically considered a nuclear option that risked destroying decorum in the Senate, Republicans also deployed the maneuver four months ago to force votes on an abortion ban and legislation that overturned a voter-approved sick leave law.
Senate Republicans’ casual use of the motion, called moving the previous question, could significantly curtail compromise over legislation in the future. Rising tensions in the chamber also risk upending much of Kehoe’s agenda over the next several years.
“This institution is destroyed,” Sen. Maggie Nurrenbern, a Kansas City Democrat, warned her colleagues on the Senate floor.
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