Who Won the Redistricting War?
The New Yorker · Jon Allsop ·
Jon Allsop on the current redistricting fights sweeping the country ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Fast forward a century and change, to September, 2025, and Missouri Republicans once again passed a gerrymandered map. They already enjoyed a significant advantage in the state’s congressional delegation, holding six seats to the Democrats’ two. But President Donald Trump and his allies were on a national mission to redraw electoral districts and pick off as many House Democrats as possible. One of their targets was Emanuel Cleaver, a veteran congressman whose district was packed tightly around Kansas City but would, in its new form, sprawl out into rural areas more than halfway across the state, loosely resembling the snout and head of a cartoon dog.
At the time, Richard von Glahn, the policy director of a local workers’-rights organization, had been looking for a new project. “I was a little bit of a skeptic on whether or not people were really gonna care about this,” von Glahn told me, of redistricting. But he and various allies organized town halls on the issue, and von Glahn found that attendees “were clued into the state of democracy in a way that I hadn’t really expected.” He helped establish a group called People Not Politicians, which aimed to follow the precedent set in 1922 and get a referendum on the ballot to reverse the damage. Just by taking place, the referendum would pause the new map for 2026—stymieing Trump for the midterms, at least.
By December, People Not Politicians claimed to have accumulated nearly three times as many signatures as they needed to force a vote, and had submitted them to the secretary of state, a Republican named Denny Hoskins, who had eight months to certify or reject them. An hour or so before the deadline, on August 4th, he declared that conducting a referendum would be illegal, whether or not People Not Politicians had gathered enough signatures, on the ground that power over redistricting belongs to the state legislature. August 4th also happened to be primary day in Missouri—and voting took place under the new map. A month later, however, the state Supreme Court ruled, seven to zero, that the referendum petition was valid, and that, as a result, the new map never really existed, in a legal sense. The opinion was withering, especially in the footnotes. One dismissed a key Hoskins argument—that reverting to the old map would be confusing, expensive, and practically difficult—as being “particularly misplaced given the secretary’s delay created the confusion, expense, and practical difficulties of which he complains.”
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