Missouri's Midterm Election Map Is in Limbo. What Happens Next? - Newsweek

The U.S. Supreme Court has stepped in to resolve the immediate chaos surrounding Missouri’s congressional map, pausing a federal judge’s order requiring officials to use Republican-backed districts approved in 2025.

The intervention appears to clear the way for Missouri to use its 2022 map in November, following a remarkable series of conflicting rulings that pitted the state’s highest court against a federal judge and left election officials unsure which boundaries to follow.

Here is a timeline of how Missouri’s midterm map battle unfolded and ultimately returned to the Supreme Court.

Earlier this week, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, appointed by President Donald Trump, rejected a bid that backed the 2025 map, leaving in place the Missouri Supreme Court's ruling that the newer districts had not taken effect.

A federal district judge subsequently ordered officials to stick with the newer map, prompting anti-gerrymandering activists to return to the nation’s highest court. On Thursday, the full Supreme Court granted their request to pause the federal judge’s order while the case is appealed.

“Good for the court!” Vikram Amar, a distinguished professor of law at the UC Davis School of Law, told Newsweek following the ruling.

Before the decision, Amar had said he expected the Court to “properly respect the Missouri Supreme Court’s power to resolve what is essentially a question of Missouri State law.”

The debate centers on whether Missouri should use its 2022 congressional map or the districts Republicans redrew last year. The newer map could give the GOP seven of Missouri’s eight House seats, rather than six.

After a petition by the group People Not Politicians, Missouri’s Supreme Court agreed to suspend the new map until a vote could be held. This came after the group gathered more than 300,000 signatures to force the map onto November’s ballot.

However, Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, did not rule on the referendum that would put the new map up for a vote until August 4, the day of the state’s primary election. Voters therefore selected the party nominees for November’s midterms using the newer, Republican-backed map.

Last week, Missouri’s Supreme Court said the 2025 map never officially became law because of the referendum petition, meaning the 2022 map would be in effect for the midterms. Missouri officials asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block this decision, a request Kavanaugh rejected on Tuesday.

Minutes later, Chief U.S. District Judge Stephen R. Clark ordered that Missouri continue using the 2025 map, arguing that switching from the one that had already been in place for the primary would "wreak havoc," force candidates to campaign in districts they had not already competed for, and effectively disenfranchise certain voters.

People Not Politicians filed an emergency plea with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit to overturn it, but the court denied it on Wednesday.

"I am surprised, as I think most knowledgeable scholars of federal courts are, that the Eighth Circuit left the district court ruling intact," Amar told Newsweek.

The group also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the federal court from forcing the state to use the newer map, and Missouri officials had until Thursday morning to respond.

Missouri’s Supreme Court has also ordered Hoskins to appear Thursday morning and explain why he should not be held in contempt for ordering election officials to continue using the 2025 map despite its ruling that this has never been law.

The question of which congressional map remains operative under Missouri law is testing the separation of powers within the state’s court system.

State supreme courts typically have the final say when it comes to a state’s law and constitution—this being why People Not Politicians say Clark cannot defy the Missouri Supreme Court's ruling—though federal courts retain the authority to decide questions of federal constitutional and statutory law.

Before the Supreme Court acted Thursday, election-law scholar Edward Foley said the federal order would need to be blocked to maintain consistency with Kavanaugh’s earlier decision.

And Amar called Clark’s ruling "indefensible, especially AFTER Justice Kavanaugh rejected a stay application that raised the exact same claims the district court embraced," and told Newsweek this created "a self-inflicted mess."

Those supporting the GOP-friendly map have argued in court that altering districts between a primary and general election could violate federal constitutional rights and create what Clark called "havoc" ahead of November’s votes.

"Using a different map for the general election would wreak havoc on the fairness and orderliness of Missouri’s congressional elections, calling into question the candidacy of those nominated in the primaries and the votes of those who voted in the primaries," Clark wrote on Tuesday.

However, in a statement shared with Newsweek, Richard von Glahn of People Not Politicians said the Eighth Circuit’s denial of their request to pause the use of the 2025 map left election officials with "no legal map to use."

"This confusion is the direct result of the delay orchestrated by Secretary Denny Hoskins," he added.

But despite the ongoing back-and-forth over which map will be used come November, and the tension between Missouri's supreme and federal courts, Justin Levitt, a constitutional law scholar and professor at Loyola Law School, told Newsweek that the issue was not yet "pushing Missouri toward a constitutional crisis."

"There’s a lot of bad behavior going around, but courts are addressing illegal behavior, which is how the Constitution anticipates dispute resolution," he said. "It may be bumpier than usual, but there’s no crisis here when there are adults in the room able to determinatively establish what’s in-bounds and out-of-bounds."

"Though there’s some legal uncertainty at the moment, I think voters will end up voting on the 2022 map, and that will probably be firmly established within the next 72 hours," he said ahead of Thursday's Supreme Court decision.

Update, 09/10/2026, 12:20 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.

Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Daniel Orton and Sam Wilson.