Eric Leventhal knows he’s going to vote for a Democrat in Congress when he goes to the polls in Missouri this November – the problem is he has no idea which candidate is going to be on his ballot.

In the state’s August primary, he voted for Fred Wellman, a Democrat running in the state’s second congressional district. But after a long and complicated legal battle sparked by Donald Trump’s desire to gain every advantage in the upcoming midterm contest, the districts have changed for the general election that will determine which party controls Congress. Leventhal said he lived right near the border of the first and second congressional district, so now he’s not sure which one he’s in.

“It is dizzying and embarrassing, frankly,” said Leventhal, a 35-year-old stay-at-home father.

Leventhal’s experience crystallized the mix of anger and confusion felt in Missouri, where an effort by Republicans to redraw the state’s congressional map devolved into a saga that seemed to have as many twists and turns as the gerrymandered districts themselves. Republicans were able to use their redrawn map in the state’s August primary, but ultimately lost the battle in court – the map they wanted won’t be in place for the general election. And in an extraordinary development, they were rebuked four times by the Missouri supreme court and the US supreme court in the span of just one month. During one particularly volatile period, the map that was supposed to be used for the general election flipped three times in one week.

Now, some voters across the state are furious at Denny Hoskins, Missouri’s Republican secretary of state, and other Republicans who played key roles in allowing the chaos to unfold. They say the Republican effort could backfire against them, and energize people to come out.

“Everybody wants to motherfuck the secretary of state,” said Bernie Ryan, a 64-year-old electrician in St Louis.

Last summer, the Republican effort to redraw the congressional map in Missouri seemed to be a done deal.

US states usually redraw congressional districts once per decade, after the decennial US census. But last year, Trump made an unprecedented push to get Republican-controlled states to reconfigure their boundaries in the middle of a decade to add Republican seats. In total, more than half a dozen Republican-led states redrew congressional districts, a move that could have netted Republicans as many as nine additional congressional seats. But now, with Democrats poised to do well in the midterm elections, that strategy not go as planned, with at least one top Republican conceding the party isn’t going to win all the districts it redrew in their favor.

In September 2025, Mike Kehoe, Missouri’s governor, approved a new congressional map for the state that reshaped the partisan composition of Missouri’s eight congressional districts. With one signature, Republicans obliterated the Kansas City-based district held by longtime representative Emanuel Cleaver, cracking Democrats in the city into rural, ruby red districts. Republicans already controlled six of Missouri’s eight congressional districts. Now they would control seven of them.

There was a unique wrinkle in Missouri that posed an enormous challenge for Republicans. A provision in the state constitution allows voters to decide whether to repeal most laws the legislature passes if they can gather enough signatures to put it up for a referendum. Voters, led by a group called People not Politicians, turned in more than 300,000 signatures in December, more than enough to send the measure to the ballot.

But Hoskins refused to certify the measure for the ballot. On 4 August, the deadline to certify the measure, Hoskins announced that the effort could not move forward because the state’s referendum process could not apply to redistricting. Richard von Glahn, the executive director of People not Politicians, immediately sued to get the measure on the ballot. On 3 September, the Missouri supreme court unanimously overruled Hoskins, and said the referendum needed to go on the ballot. It also said the state could not use the newly gerrymandered map for the 2026 midterm elections.

Between 3 September and 25 September, Missouri Republicans undertook a frantic effort to get the US supreme court to overturn the state court’s ruling. Each time, the US supreme court rejected the effort. Now, the general election is moving forward with the map that was in place for the 2022 and 2024 elections. But it means that hundreds of thousands of voters are casting a ballot in a different district than the one they were in for the primary.

“My Office will of course comply with the law. I have every confidence in our local election authorities and that they will administer a seamless general election,” Hoskins said in a 25 September statement. “I am proud of the fight I put up to defend the virtues of our constitutional republic, upon which our Founding Fathers built this great country. I hope Missourians know I left nothing on the field-and I never will.”

“I think the rulings have energized people because it has reminded people that the game, while it can feel rigged at times, we can’t sit on the sidelines,” von Glahn said in an interview after speaking to a local Democratic club at La Fiesta Mexican restaurant in St Louis, where at least one attendee was consuming a goblet-sized margarita. Von Glahn, a stocky organizer with a salt and pepper beard and hair, was speaking at the meeting on his 19th wedding anniversary.

Last summer, when Republicans were moving ahead with redrawing the map, von Glahn saw the referendum process as a way to block the map from going into effect. He had worked on some pro-labor referendums and quickly understood how the process could be used to halt the map. But he never expected the effort to last this long.

Speaking in St Louis, von Glahn wore a black T-shirt with the words “informed plebeian”. The shirt is a joke poking fun at lawyers for the state of Missouri, who argued at one point that the referendum could not move forward because it would place control of redistricting in the hands of an “uninformed plebiscite”, von Glahn said.

“Actually, we’re not the morons that you think we are,” he said.

Cleaver, who was first elected to Congress in 2004, decided to stay in the race after Republicans redrew his district last summer, even though it was considered virtually unwinnable for a Democrat. Trump would have carried it by 18 points in 2024.

“This was so wrong that I felt like I almost had to do it. To not do it was a surrender, and that would speak horribly to my own children and others as well,” he said in an interview.

As he campaigned in a district that was designed for him to lose, Cleaver said some Republicans began to come up to him at events in rural areas far outside Kansas City and tell him they were supporting him. He speculated it was because of the Republican gerrymandering.

“People didn’t like mid-decade redistricting, and to many of them, it was like pure, undistilled cheating. I think they lost people on that level,” he said.

Cleaver’s decision to run was a bet that wound up paying off spectacularly. When the old map went back into place, candidates were forced to run in the same district they had won the primary in, so Cleaver is virtually guaranteed to win re-election to Congress.

Other than Cleaver, the biggest beneficiary of the new map is likely Wellman, a former army pilot who served as the executive director of The Lincoln Project, a Republican anti-Trump group. Wellman is the Democratic candidate challenging Republican representative Ann Wagner in Missouri’s second congressional district, which stretches from the suburbs of St Louis west into the state. Wagner was first elected in 2012, but the district has looked more competitive in recent years; Trump won it by eight points in 2024. When Republicans redrew the map last year, they shored up Wagner’s district, reconfiguring the boundaries so Trump would have won it by about 11 points in 2024.

Now, with the old map back in place, and Democrats with the wind at their backs going into the midterms, Wellman likes his chances. “Clearly I thrive on chaos,” Wellman said in an interview at a fundraiser at an Irish bar in Webster Groves, just outside St Louis, a pint of cider in his hand (he described himself as a “cider guy”).

Ever since the court ruling, he said, donations and volunteers have surged. He said Republicans were paying a “heavy price” for their maneuvering to block the referendum.

“The real political part of it is just how monumentally dumb it was,” said Wellman. “What they’ve done is all they’ve done is now put Missouri on the map. They’ve done more for my campaign right as far as New York, DC, people out there are paying attention.”

With the map on hold for this year, People not Politicians face one more task: convincing voters they should support the referendum and officially repeal the map Republicans passed last year. If history is any guide, they face good odds. Since the veto referendum process was established at the start of the 20th century, Missouri voters have been asked to use the veto referendum process more than two dozen times. In nearly ever instance, they have voted in favor of repeal.

Still, there’s some confusion. Defeating the gerrymandered map somewhat counterintuitively requires voters to vote “no” on the proposed referendum. This is because the measure asks voters if they want to approve the map that the legislature passed. The groups are working during the final sprint of the election to make sure it actually passes.

That was why Holly Swift, 48, rolled up in her grey minivan on a quiet street in Maryland Heights, a St Louis suburb, on a sticky night in early October. Joined by her 12-year-old daughter, Addie, Swift went door to door to make sure people knew about Proposition A and to explain why they should vote “no” on it. Holly did most of the talking to voters while Addie helped navigate the finicky phone app that told them which houses to go to.

“It basically allows the politicians to pick their voters, as opposed to voters picking and electing their politicians,” Holly told one voter. “My 12-year-old should be studying for a math test right now. But we’re out here trying to defend democracy.”

Over the course of about two hours, Holly and Addie knocked on about 30 doors – not a single person said they were voting in favor of the amendment. In the year or so since she’s been volunteering on the proposition, Holly said she hasn’t met anyone who supported the effort to redraw the maps.

“This is not a Democrat thing. This is not a Republican thing. This is not an independent thing. This is a Missouri thing,” she said at one door.

Even if voters successfully repeal the map in November, it doesn’t seem likely to faze Republicans. Just after the Missouri supreme court released its decision, a Republican state senator posted “8-0 2027” on X. Hoskins has also suggested Republicans will revisit the map, though a separate ballot measure this fall in Missouri could make it harder for lawmakers to do so.

“It’s gonna be done all over again,” Cleaver said. “This was initiated by the White House, and this is what the president wants. I have not seen any examples of Republicans not giving him whatever he wants.”