Here is a sentence I did not expect to write in September: Missouri held its congressional primary on one map and will hold its general election on another.
The state held its August 4 primary under districts the legislature drew in 2025, a map that splits the Kansas City seat held by Democratic Representative Emanuel Cleaver and was aimed at giving Republicans seven of Missouri's eight House seats. Then, on September 3, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a citizen referendum against that map was valid, which meant the map had never legally taken effect. A federal judge had ordered the opposite. On September 10, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a short unsigned order with no public dissent, left the state court's ruling in place. Missouri's secretary of state has told local officials to use the 2022 districts on November 3. The 2025 map will also appear on the ballot, as Proposition A, and voters will decide whether it can be used in future elections.
If that paragraph made you dizzy, that is the correct response. It is also the clearest window into the strangest story of this cycle.
Redistricting is normally a once-a-decade chore: after each census, states redraw their House districts, and the lines stay put until the next count. What made 2025 and 2026 different is that states redrew in the middle of the decade, with no census requiring it, because the House majority is narrow enough that a handful of seats could decide it.
It helps to sort the redraws by who held the pen. Legislatures drew most of them: Texas in August 2025, Missouri in a September special session, North Carolina in October. In Ohio, the redistricting commission passed a bipartisan map. In California, voters themselves approved a Democratic-drawn map in November 2025, by a 29-point margin, in response to the Texas redraw. In Utah, a judge adopted new lines after the state's courts found the legislature had violated the state constitution.
The failures are instructive too. Indiana's House passed a new map; its Senate rejected it, 31 to 19, in a bipartisan vote. Virginia's voters approved a redistricting amendment in April, and in May the state Supreme Court invalidated it because early voting had already begun when lawmakers first passed the proposal in 2025.
Then the spring brought a second wave. On April 29, the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais, 6 to 3, holding that Louisiana's second majority-Black district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and that complying with the Voting Rights Act does not by itself justify drawing districts by race. Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the decision "renders Section 2 all but a dead letter." Within weeks, Louisiana and Tennessee had redrawn, and the Court allowed Alabama to use a map a lower court had blocked as discriminatory. Florida passed its own new map in an April special session.
What does it add up to? In early June, NBC News counted ten states with new maps and estimated that Republicans could gain as many as 16 House seats from them and Democrats as many as six. Those are ceilings, not forecasts, and one of those possible Republican seats came from the Missouri map that will not be used. Several of the other maps still face lawsuits.
Whether any of this is fair depends on where you start. Neither party owns the argument: Texas and California are mirror images, and each side's defense of its own map sounds a great deal like the other side's complaint.
I promised to stand in the precincts. The precinct turned out to have a moving border. Before anyone casts a ballot on November 3, legislators, commissioners, judges, and in California the voters themselves, will already have voted on the shape of the ballot. Missouri's Proposition A, whatever its outcome, at least puts that question to the public directly.
The map is the first ballot of every election. Most of us never see it being cast.
