Jeff Colyer wants to gerrymander Kansas for Trump. Can it work this time? | Opinion

Kansas is already gerrymandered.

That’s the first thing you need to know about former Gov. Jeff Colyer’s ridiculous call for a special session of the Kansas Legislature to redraw the state’s congressional map and put the Kansas City-area seat of Rep. Sharice Davids — the Sunflower State’s lone Democrat in Washington D.C. — in the hands of Republicans.

“Kansas needs to lead the way in restoring sanity to our federal government,” Colyer said Friday on X, the same day Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe called a special session of the Missouri General Assembly for a Show-Me State gerrymandering party. “This is what’s required to advance the America First Agenda and to Make Kansas Great Again.”

Colyer is running for governor again next year. (He was a brief caretaker after Gov. Sam Brownback left office early, then lost the 2018 GOP primary to Kris Kobach.) So his announcement should mostly be seen as a way for him to stand out from the rather crowded pack of GOP politicians already scrapping for the party’s nomination to succeed term-limited Gov. Laura Kelly.

“Leaders lead boldly from the front regardless of the critics,” he wrote.

Or maybe they simply jump on their party’s gerrymandering bandwagon and call it “leading boldly.” Whatever.

But also: Colyer’s proposal is pretty silly.

How gerrymandering failed

Here’s why: After the 2020 census, Republicans in the Kansas Legislature did their level best to give their party every possible advantage to win all of the state’s congressional seats.

That’s the reason they put liberal Lawrence — within shouting distance of the Missouri border in the east — in the “Big First” district that stretches more than 300 miles west to the Colorado border.

And that’s the reason they split up Wyandotte County county voters, leaving some of them in Davids’ 3rd District and moving the rest to the 2nd District now represented by Rep. Derek Schmidt, a Republican.

Treating the map like a ball of Silly Putty meant to be stretched and pulled apart was an obvious and “deliberate attempt to silence the political voices of Democratic and minority Kansans,” Sharon Brett, legal director for the ACLU of Kansas, said amidst a failed 2022 lawsuit challenging the new maps.

Brett was right. But Kansas Republicans ultimately failed in their mission.

Last year — despite the redrawn map — Davids won 53% of the vote in defeating her Republican challenger, Prasanth Reddy, by more than 10 percentage points.

That’s a pretty big margin.

Gerrymandering is tricky math

I am not going to say that Kansas Republicans cannot possibly redraw the map so that Davids’ margin would disappear. And I certainly wouldn’t put it past them to try. It’s a good bet there’s a wacky-looking proposal on some GOP strategist’s hard drive somewhere.

But the attempt would be hampered by two related challenges.

The first is that Johnson County — once a mainstay of the state’s GOP politics — has turned mostly blue, and it’s not clear there is a path for it returning to the Republican column.

The second is that Johnson County is growing, while most of the rest of the state — all those dozens of red counties on the map — is losing population.

The blue part of the state is getting bigger. The red parts are still dominant, and they still have a supermajority vote, but they’re getting smaller. That makes tricky math for a GOP that wants to sideline Democrats entirely.

Kansas Republicans already stared down that challenge once — just three years ago — and they failed. Do they really want to risk failure again, all for the glory of Jeff Colyer and Donald Trump?

This story was originally published September 2, 2025 at 11:22 AM.