WASHINGTON — Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver keeps hearing Missouri Republicans will try to redraw his Kansas City-area district to get him out of office.
He’s starting to believe it.
“I hear that literally every day from somebody,” Cleaver said. “So I guess I have to, at this point, assume that it’s going to be a serious effort to alter the present construct of the 5th District.”
Democrats don’t have much power over the once-a-decade drawing of new maps for the state’s eight congressional districts. The Republican-controlled General Assembly, along with Republican Gov. Mike Parson, will approve new boundary lines.
That’s made Democrats fearful Republicans will attempt to gerrymander the 5th Congressional District to deliver a partisan advantage and shrink the number of Missouri seats held by Democrats from two to one. It is forcing them to do the only thing they can do, at this stage in the process: sound the alarm to raise attention about the potential for gerrymandering.
The 5th District includes the western half of Jackson County, a corner of Clay County and a chunk of rural western Missouri joined together by a strip of land along the southern part of Jackson. It’s an odd shape that makes the district a potentially attractive target for modifications.
Congressional redistricting, underway across the country, holds national consequences. Democrats have narrow control over the U.S. House of Representatives, which means both Republicans and Democrats who control their respective states could attempt to draw the maps to give their party an advantage in the upcoming 2022 election.
Republicans close to the redistricting effort in Missouri dismiss the notion they will aggressively redraw the lines to provide their party an edge.
“We are trying to go at this with a nonpartisan approach to draw what’s the best map for the state of Missouri,” said state Rep. Dan Shaul, an Imperial Republican who chairs the House Redistricting Committee.
State Sen. Mike Cierpiot, a Lee’s Summit Republican who sits on the Senate Redistricting Committee, predicted changes will be concentrated on the 1st and 8th districts. Those eastern districts, held by Democratic Rep. Cori Bush and Republican Rep. Jason Smith, are both more than 40,000 short of the federally required population, according to new Census data, and will need to be redrawn to include additional residents.
Beyond that, Cierpiot said, most of lawmakers’ work will consist of “moving the lines gently” to accommodate changing populations.
Still, single-party control of redistricting tends to lead to maps tilted in that party’s favor, said Christopher Warshaw, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University.
Unlike the redrawing of state legislative lines in Missouri, where a bipartisan commission is tasked with devising maps that will win 70 percent support, changes to congressional districts move through the regular legislative process, giving Republicans significant influence.
“When it’s just passed through normal legislation, there aren’t very many formal constraints on what the party can do,” Warshaw said.
Drawing the maps
The process of drawing the maps remains in the early stages, creating uncertainty over what they will eventually look like.
Parson has said he will not call a special session, after previous special sessions have proven chaotic or failed to yield significant legislative accomplishments. That means the legislature will approve maps during the regular session that starts in January, adding an element of volatility as redistricting competes with other priorities for attention.
“I haven’t found a lot of Republicans who are wanting to go to a 7-1 map,” said Senate Minority Leader John Rizzo, an Independence Democrat. “Having said that, this thing will morph a million different ways between now and the final product.”
One option for making the 5th district more competitive — slicing off parts of Kansas City — comes with the risk of what’s called a “dummymander.” That’s when a partisan attempt to carve up a district backfires, causing the other party to win.
If Republicans were to carve up the 5th Congressional District to get control of seven of Missouri’s eight congressional seats, it would increase the number of Democrats in other districts, potentially making them more competitive over time.
“When gerrymandering gets too aggressive, there is a chance of backfire,” said Yurij Rudensky, a redistricting counsel with the Brennan Center for Justice. “And we live in a time where the politics of the country are changing quickly and it’s not exactly clear how they will continue to evolve, especially as demographic changes keep playing out.”
Instead, some eyes are on what lawmakers will try to do to at the other end of the state. Bush said she’s concerned about how Republicans will try to move people around.
“We are calling on them to make decisions that are based on fairness, not what’s best for their party,” Bush said in an emailed response to questions from The Star. “Because let’s call it as it is: the laws we’ve seen passed by Republican state legislatures across the country are anti-democratic attacks on our most fundamental right to vote.”
Packing a district
Where Cleaver is concerned about Kansas City getting chopped into separate districts, he is uneasy about St. Louis for different reasons. The 1st Congressional District is likely protected from “discriminatory” changes by the federal Voting Rights Act because it is a majority-minority district, which makes it unlikely Republicans would be able to split it up.
Cleaver is instead concerned about attempts to “pack” the 1st with Democrats in an effort to make the other districts less competitive.
“What it does is it makes it easier for everybody else to win in the Republican camp because they’re removing the Democrats out of their district into this one district,” Cleaver said.
Packing Bush’s district could help someone like U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner, a Republican who represents the suburbs of St. Louis in the 2nd Congressional District. She won a relatively narrow victory in November, defeating Democratic state Sen. Jill Schupp by 6.37 percentage points — Missouri’s closest congressional race by far.
Wagner’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Greg Vonnahme, a political science professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, said he believes those St. Louis suburbs will be more of a priority for Republicans than Cleaver’s district in Kansas City.
“My sense is that shoring up District 2 will be the top Republican priority and then it’s just a question then of do they have enough Republican votes elsewhere to really make a run at district 5?” Vonnahme said. “And I’m pretty skeptical they’ll be able to do that.”
Population growth in the suburbs could make it harder for Republicans to be able to gerrymander congressional districts. As rural areas have grown more conservative over the past decade, the suburbs have become more of a battleground in elections.
That shift, Warshaw said, decreases the natural gerrymandering that comes with where people choose to live.
“The fact that the suburbs are more 50/50 has made it a little more challenging for Republicans to draw really aggressive gerrymanders,” Warshaw said. “If you sort of randomly draw maps, it’s made the sort of natural midpoint of those maps more neutral than it would have been a couple years ago.”
