Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh on Tuesday denied a request from Missouri officials to use a congressional map in November that was redrawn to give Republicans an edge in the midterm elections.
The justice’s order deferred to Missouri’s Supreme Court, which last week blocked the use of the new map even though it had been used in last month’s primary election. The state court had found that voters should first have an opportunity to vote on the new district boundaries in a statewide referendum.
Justice Kavanaugh oversees emergency requests from Missouri and acted on his own without referring the matter to the full court. He did not provide any reasoning as is often the case when the court responds to emergency filings.
Missouri’s map had been drawn to help Republicans try to pick up a Democratic-held House seat in the Kansas City area. The G.O.P. now holds six of the state’s eight House seats. The state court did not specify how Missouri should hold a general election using a different map from what was in place for the primaries.
The state’s emergency request had thrust the Supreme Court in the middle of another election-year legal battle in a heated campaign season, where control of the House could come down to just a handful of seats.
Missouri’s attorney general, Catherine Hanaway, a Republican, had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, requesting that the justices act quickly and allow use of the new map given a state-imposed Sept. 8 deadline for altering its general election ballot. She noted that 1.2 million Missouri residents had already voted in the August primary using the new map.
The state court “threw those votes into the dustbin,” she said, by requiring the winners to run in different congressional districts. In her filing, the attorney general said Missouri planned to comply with one aspect of the state court ruling and proceed with a November referendum on the new map.
But she argued the state should continue to use the map used for the primary until that referendum is held. The only question, she wrote, is whether the group of challengers who sued, led by Richard von Glahn, executive director of the advocacy group People Not Politicians Missouri, can “void a congressional map before he gets his vote.”
The new map was drawn outside the usual redistricting cycle at President Trump’s request, as part of an effort to improve the Republican Party’s chances of holding the House in the 2026 midterms.
The redrawn Missouri map, adopted by the state legislature in September 2025, divided the core of Kansas City, Mo., the state’s largest city, into several districts in an attempt to unseat Representative Emanuel Cleaver II, one of two Democrats in the state’s congressional delegation. The new map did not significantly alter the partisan makeup of the other Democratic-held district, which is in the St. Louis area.
Democrats and state residents opposed to the boundaries last year collected hundreds of thousands of signatures seeking a referendum on the issue. But Denny Hoskins, Missouri’s Republican secretary of state, said he did not believe redistricting could legally be subject to a voter referendum, and he declined to add it to November’s ballot.
Lawyers for Mr. von Glahn told the justices in a filing on Monday that Mr. Hoskins had waited until the last possible day to object to the referendum, doing so only after implementing the new map for the August primary. The state’s predicament, they said, was a “timing problem of his own making.”
Missouri’s Constitution has long granted citizens the power to override congressional redistricting legislation through a statewide vote, according to referendum proponents. Last December, Mr. von Glahn and People Not Politicians submitted 691 boxes of referendum petitions to the secretary containing more than 300,000 signatures — more than twice the required number.
“This court cannot and should not reward the secretary’s scheme to outsmart Missouri voters, Missouri law and the Missouri Supreme Court by granting” the state’s emergency request, Mr. von Glahn’s lawyers said in a Monday filing.
In addition, his legal team said the Supreme Court lacks jurisdiction to review a state court’s decision on a question of state law. Missouri argued that using a different map for the general election would violate equal protection guarantees in the U.S. Constitution, but Mr. Von Glahn’s lawyers rejected those assertions.
A voter’s primary ballot “does not carry an absolute constitutional entitlement to vote for that same nominee in November, even if other voters in the state will not see any change in the candidates available to them.”
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