Aren’t Republicans are already overrepresented in Missouri? | Opinion

Missouri is a red state, but it’s not that red.

In 2024, 40% of the state’s voters cast their ballots for the Democratic candidate for president. That’s far from a majority, obviously, but it’s not nothing either. So it is striking that just 25% of Missouri’s congressional districts — 2 in 8 — are represented by Democrats in Congress.

Put the two numbers together, and it suggests that Republicans are already overrepresented in the Show-Me State’s congressional delegation.

The GOP wants even more.

Missouri Republicans, under pressure from Donald Trump, appear to be laying the groundwork for a special session of the General Assembly for a rare mid-decade effort to redraw the congressional maps and give their party an extra seat in Washington, D.C.

The likely target: the Kansas City district now represented by Rep. Emanuel Cleaver.

Cleaver’s a pretty popular guy: He won the district with 60% of the vote in 2024.

But Republicans in Washington aren’t sure they can hold onto their House majority in next year’s midterm elections unless they put their thumbs on the scale. Apparently voters don’t much like the GOP’s policy of handing out tax breaks for billionaires and paying for that with cuts to Medicaid. Who knew?

So Cleaver’s seat may have to go. And there probably isn’t much Missouri Democrats can do about it.

“Everyone I’ve talked to, especially on my side of the aisle, expects to go down and get steamrolled on the issue during a special session,” Missouri House Minority Leader Ashley Aune told The Missouri Independent.

Will of the people?

That’s terrible for Kansas City, a Democratic town that deserves to be represented by a Democrat in Congress.

But it is perfectly in keeping with the practices of the state’s Republican Party, which has made a habit of canceling out any votes it doesn’t like.

Missouri voters last year approved a ballot measure to legalize abortion. GOP officials have instead tried to block the law from going into effect via court challenges, as well as a new effort to put the issue back on next year’s midterms ballot.

Missouri voters also approved a sick leave measure last year. The Republican-dominated legislature simply rolled that one back.

And when voters approved Medicaid expansion in 2020, Republicans blocked the program’s implementation until they were overruled by the Missouri Supreme Court.

The “will of the people” doesn’t count for much in these parts, it seems. The effort to steal Cleaver’s seat and give it to a GOP candidate is just more of the same.

Republicans: Overplaying their hand

The looming redistricting in Missouri is overshadowed by a similar GOP effort in Texas, where the state’s Democrats have fled in an effort to block passage of a new map to give Republicans an extra edge in Congress.

It’s a real crisis.

How bad is it? Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, the normally mild-mannered chair of the Democratic Governors Association, is urging her party to fight back with redistricting in the states where it has power.

“Things are bad enough in Washington right now,” she said last week. “What it would look like if there’s even a greater majority that this president controls — God help the United States of America.”

If there is an upside — for Democrats, or for anybody who believes in fair play — it’s that Republicans could overplay their hand and end up making their own incumbents more vulnerable. Some of the GOP voters being added to Democrat-held districts will come out of congressional districts now held by Republican incumbents, after all.

“Anyone who thinks a Kansas City-area redraw is done easily without jeopardizing … a GOP-held seat in a strong Dem year doesn’t appear to know the city and suburbs here,” Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said Sunday on X. Missouri could end up with a delegation of five Republicans and three Democrats “rather than the 7-1 goal” Republicans have in mind.

“Common sense should prevail,” Lucas wrote. “If not, game on.”

A piece of advice to Republicans in Missouri and around the country: Pass laws and policies that people actually like and you won’t have to try to cancel out Democratic votes. You can redraw the map only so many times.

Joel Mathis is a regular Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle Opinion correspondent. Formerly a writer and editor at Kansas newspapers, he served nine years as a syndicated columnist.