Clean Missouri gears up to fight Senate move against voter-approved redistricting

With Republican-led redistricting changes headed back to Missouri voters, efforts to defeat the proposal at the ballot box have already begun.

The legislative proposal cleared a major hurdle Monday night when the Missouri Senate passed its version of redistricting reforms that would roll back changes made through the 2018 Clean Missouri ballot initiative. If it passes the House also, voters would once again decide on a new method to draw maps.

Earlier in the day, the campaign that fronted Clean Missouri logged a $100,000 contribution from a nonprofit that has focused on reducing partisan gerrymandering.

“We have known that politicians were going to try to undo what voters passed,” Sean Nicholson, campaign director for Clean Missouri, said. “There were lobbyists talking about how they were going to try to undo this the day before the election in 2018.”

In November 2018, 62 percent of Missourians voted to amend the state constitution to enact a series of campaign finance and legislative ethics proposals, along with a new system for redrawing legislative districts following the U.S. Census.

Clean Missouri passed after a two-year campaign garnering hundreds of thousands of petition signers. Advocates included notable Republican names like Jack Danforth. About 1.4 million voted for the measure.

Among the changes to the redistricting process, the constitutional amendment requires that a state demographer use a mathematical formula to try to engineer “partisan fairness” and “competitiveness” in legislative elections.

An Associated Press analysis found that while the new method appears unlikely to impact overall control of the Missouri General Assembly, it will likely increase Democrats’ chances of winning elections and cut into Republicans’ supermajorities in the state House and Senate.

The new constitutional amendment backed by the Republican majority in the Missouri Senate, known as Senate Joint Resolution 38, would scrap having an nonpartisan state demographer and have commissions draw the maps. The members of the commission are nominated by the state’s Republican and Democrat political parties and appointed by the governor.

It prioritizes the compactness of a district over bipartisan fairness and competitiveness. It also could allow population counts for maps to exclude children and non-citizens, legal scholars say.

Senate Republicans have said SJR 38 will give voters another method of redistricting to weigh. It passed mostly along party lines, with a 22-9 vote.

The lone Republican who voted against the bill, state Sen. Lincoln Hough, said the legislature is worrying about a problem — non-contiguous districts — that has yet to happen. One ethics reform in the bill, the lowering of lobbyist gifts from $5 to a full ban, was “inconsequential,” he added.

About 70 percent of voters in Hough’s Springfield-centric Senate district voted for the 2018 ballot initiative. When the measure was proposed last year, Hough was one of three Republican senators who missed a procedural committee vote toward the end of session, essentially killing the bill.

“I don’t see the issue that we are out there trying to fix right now,” Hough said. “… I just think you let these things shake out.”

With Republicans garnering supermajorities in both legislative chambers, Democrats’ filibuster power was seen as SJR 38’s most meaningful legislative obstacle. Senate Democrats held the floor for almost 12 hours last week, but ultimately chose to let the bill come to a vote.

If the Missouri House chooses not make changes to the Senate-passed resolution, it will go to the voters. A resolution does not need the signature of the governor, though Gov. Mike Parson will choose whether the question will be placed on the August or November ballot.

Clean Missouri campaign

Clean Missouri will be “prepared for anything and everything,” Nicholson said.

The campaign has already launched the website cleanermissouri.com, mocking the name used by supportive lawmakers and deriding the new constitutional amendment as a “sham.”

The $100,000 contribution donated to Clean Missouri Monday was made by nonprofit Action Now Initiative, an original backer of the 2018 ballot initiative.

The nonprofit contributed nearly $1.2 million in direct and in-kind donations to Clean Missouri in 2018 and 2019. Marked with the tax identity 501c4, the nonprofit is not required to disclose its donors, and contributions are often referred to as “dark money.”

Senate Republicans have been critical of Clean Missouri’s “dark money” contributions, especially as the initiative purports to support transparency in government.

Nicholson said the funders of the nonprofit are documented.

The nonprofit was started by billionaires John and Laura Arnold in 2011. The Houston couple also contributed to ballot initiative campaigns that would create redistricting changes in Utah, Colorado and Michigan in 2018.

“Just because it is a (501)c4 doesn’t mean it’s dark money,” Nicholson said.

The $100,000 contribution adds to almost $25,000 Clean Missouri has on hand, as of Jan. 15.

The money will go toward talking to and mobilizing voters, Nicholson said.

He said he expects the coalition to beat the legislature’s effort to roll back Clean Missouri to be “even bigger” than last time.

“We are going to run a full-scale campaign,” Nicholson said. “It will be an all-of-the-above campaign, for sure.”

The Associated Press contributed to this story.