By MICHAEL A. SMITH
Insight Kansas
When Kansas Congresswoman Sharice Davids took office in 2019, her Missouri counterpart Emanuel Cleaver II offered to show her around.
Apparently wanting to check any potential condescension by the older Cleaver, Davids–a former MMA fighter–responded by offering to show Cleaver how to break someone’s legs. The two Kansas City-area representatives have been friends ever since. Today, it is not legs, but districts being broken.
Following the lead of Texas–and the White House–the Missouri General Assembly just passed a map eliminating the Kansas City-area Fifth District represented by Cleaver, dissolving Kansas City into three, predominantly rural districts, all majority Republican. Voters may still get to have their say on the map, and numerous lawsuits have already been filed.
Could it happen in Kansas?
Two Republican candidates for governor–Jeff Colyer and Ty Masterson–have already come forward in favor of mid-decade redistricting here. The target would be Davids, the only Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation. She represents all of Johnson County, the southern half of Wyandotte County, and all of Miami, Anderson, and Franklin Counties.
The addition of those three rural counties and removal of northern Wyandotte in 2022 appears to have been an attempt to make Davids’ Third District more Republican, but it did not work.
Davids’ base is in Johnson County. Once a Republican stronghold, JoCo has shifted blue, much like other suburban counties across the nation. Today, not only is JoCo one of the state’s only Democratic-leaning counties, it also avoided the national “red shift” from 2020 to 2024. Kamala Harris’ winning margin there was even higher than Joe Biden’s was, four years earlier.
Any successful redistricting to produce a 4-0 Republican map must break up Johnson County, where it will meet fierce resistance. The Overland Park Chamber of Commerce has already come out against it.
The map would have to be egregiously gerrymandered, not unlike the new Missouri map, which splits Kansas City along Troost Avenue, the city’s notorious, racial dividing line. In JoCo, the Democrats’ base lies mostly in the older, closer-in suburbs along the borders with Missouri and with Wyandotte County - the interior of the current district.
A mid-decade gerrymander would have to reach deep into the heart of the county, moving those precincts to a district which wraps around other districts and extends for many miles into Republican-voting, rural parts of the state.
Kansas does not have the same provisions for citizen referenda as Missouri, so putting the law on the ballot for voters to reject is not an option here. However, court challenges would be filed immediately.
The Missouri Fifth is (or was) a minority influence district, where African-Americans do not constitute a majority, but they do have certain legal protections under the Voting Rights Act, upheld by key court rulings. Likewise, Kansas’ Third District is its most diverse. Breaking it up may face scrutiny.
Critics in Missouri also argue that the state constitution does not even allow mid-decade redistricting, and the same argument could be made here – in court, of course.
Finally, many rural constituents may not want to share districts with their urban counterparts, fearing a dilution of rural influence in Congress.
Given all the drama that continues to unfold along the state line, Kansans may end up deciding that after all is said and done, mid-decade redistricting just isn’t worth the trouble.
Michael Smith is a professor of political science at Emporia State University.