The Supreme Court on Friday again blocked Missouri from using a congressional map in November that was redrawn to give Republicans an edge in the midterm elections.
It was the third time this month that the justices intervened in a topsy-turvy legal battle over Missouri’s voting map, and the court’s order landed less than two months before a general election in which a few seats could determine control of Congress.
Each time the court has issued orders that would achieve the same result, requiring Missouri to use an older map that would position Democrats to retain a seat in the Kansas City area. But the dispute over the map has continued in the lower courts, a possible preview of the hard-fought legal struggle that could erupt following the November election should control of Congress be in doubt.
The Supreme Court’s order was a win for opponents of redistricting, who had waged a yearlong fight against the new district lines, which were redrawn in 2025 at President Trump’s request.
In an unsigned decision with no noted dissents, the justices warned of “electoral chaos” if the state were to change course so close to the election and use the 2025 map.
“The election is not merely upcoming; it has already started. Ballots using the 2022 map have been printed and mailed. Absentee voting has already begun, as has military and overseas voting,” according to the five-page decision.
The order was another strong signal that the court had little interest in reversing a unanimous decision by Missouri’s highest court, which had earlier concluded that state law required using the older map.
The state Supreme Court’s decision came only after the state ran a primary election in August using the map drawn last year to benefit Republicans. The case returned to the U.S. Supreme Court this week after a federal appeals court ruled on Monday that it would be unconstitutional for Missouri to conduct a general election based on a map different from the one used in the primary.
The redrawn Missouri map, adopted by the State Legislature in September 2025, divided the core of Kansas City, the state’s largest city, into several districts in an attempt to unseat Representative Emanuel Cleaver, one of two Democrats in the state’s congressional delegation. It did not significantly alter the partisan makeup of the other Democratic-held district, which is in the St. Louis area.
Gov. Mike Kehoe of Missouri, a Republican who signed the redrawn map into law, said on social media that “voters deserved consistency and certainty, and not for the rules to be changed between elections.” He added: “Nevertheless, Missouri will follow the court’s order.”
The dizzying fight over Missouri’s map had already featured conflicting state and federal court rulings, as well as a short-lived contempt finding against Missouri’s top election official for not moving quickly enough to implement the state Supreme Court’s order to return to the older map.
Earlier this month, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh had taken a similar action. He deferred to Missouri’s Supreme Court, which had determined that state officials should not have begun using the new map without a voter referendum. The state court said Missouri should instead use a map that had been in place since 2022 for the upcoming election.
But minutes after the justice’s order landed, a federal judge in St. Louis ruled in the opposite direction, ordering the state to use the map that Missouri Republicans drew last year, which was in place for last month’s primary.
The case quickly bounced back to the justices. This time the full Supreme Court acted on Sept. 10 with the same result.
The order on Friday was a rebuke to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which on Monday had said that using the 2025 map was the way to cause “the least amount of confusion for voters subjected to a string of changes this month.”
The Supreme Court responded: “Given this court’s two prior orders in this litigation, our conclusion that this was error should come as no surprise.”
The justices also suggested state officials were in part responsible for the chaos and time crunch ahead of the general election. Democrats and state residents opposed to the boundaries had submitted hundreds of thousands of signatures seeking a statewide referendum on the new map in December 2025.
But Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican who is Missouri’s top election official, waited until Primary Day in August to announce his view that redistricting was not eligible for a referendum. The state Supreme Court disagreed.
“In the several-month period before the August primary election, the Missouri secretary of state was well aware that conducting the August primary election with the 2025 map carried significant risks,” the U.S. Supreme Court said. “The secretary nonetheless chose to proceed with the 2025 map for the primary.”
Mr. Hoskins said in a statement that the “ruling is a disappointing blow to representative democracy,” but said he would “of course comply with the law.”
Proponents of the older map praised the court’s action.
“We are done with corrupt politicians trying to force their map into effect outside the process outlined in the Missouri Constitution,” Richard von Glahn, executive director of People Not Politicians Missouri, the group behind the statewide referendum, said in a statement.
Missouri’s attorney general, Catherine Hanaway, a Republican, had urged the Supreme Court to affirm the appeals court ruling. Reverting to the older map, she said in a filing on Wednesday, would mean that “hundreds of thousands of voters in the primary election will be disenfranchised, and candidates will be forced to run in new districts they have not campaigned in over the past year.”
At the same time, she acknowledged that the state already sent ballots under the older map to military and overseas voters.
“The honest truth is that — regardless of what this court does — Missouri will not be able to run an orderly 2026 general election,” she said, adding that “no option is ideal.”
Under the older map, Democrats will be favored to retain two of the House seats, while Republicans will be favored in the other six. If Democrats have an extraordinarily strong year, they could also be competitive in a St. Louis-area district that Republicans carried by 12 percentage points in 2024.
