Gerrymandered Missouri congressional map could push KC Mayor Quinton Lucas to run

Chris Higgins, The Kansas City Star on Sep 10, 2025

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. – A plan that would dilute Kansas City’s voting power to give Republicans an edge in the U.S. House of Representatives could push Mayor Quinton Lucas to run for Congress.

Amid pressure from President Donald Trump, Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe called state legislators to a special session this month to consider a proposal that would redraw the lines for Missouri’s eight districts to the U.S. House by splitting the Kansas City area into three different districts. The move comes mid-decade, which is extremely rare as districts are typically only redrawn every 10 years with new census data.

The state House approved the map on Tuesday and forwarded it to the state Senate. The push comes mid-decade, which is extremely rare as states typically only redraw districts every 10 years with new census data.

Currently, most of Kansas City is within the 5th District, which has elected Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat, by firm margins for the past 20 years.

The proposed map would join pieces of Kansas City’s urban core with vast sections of rural Missouri.

It would move Mayor Lucas into the 4th District, which is currently represented by Rep. Mark Alford, R-Lake Winnebago, and which he has said he’d consider running for.

Stopping Missouri redistricting plan would be first step

Mayor Lucas told KCUR this week that the first step to pushing back against the redistricting plan is in the legislature, and then pushing back in court. Legal experts have told The Star that the plan could violate the state constitution.

But if the Missouri redistricting plan does pass, Lucas told KCUR that the final step would be at the ballot box: keeping Cleaver’s seat, flipping the new 4th District seat to the Democrats and even fielding a competitive candidate in the 6th District.

“My goal is that we don’t have to talk about this. We have the 5th that keeps our communities together. We’re not segregating our community further, which is actually what President Trump’s map does,” Lucas told KCUR. “But if they proceed with this, part of my very clear message, what I said the day it happened, is we will fight, and I think we can win: not just in the 5th Congressional District with Emanuel Cleaver holding onto it, but in a reformed 4th District that has some of the most active political participants in the entire state of Missouri.”

Lucas has not officially announced a campaign for the U.S. House, but he said he would be “absolutely willing” to run. He insists that the redistricting plan could backfire for Republicans and give Democrats winnable seats.

“If it’s me, if it’s somebody else, we’ll get a strong candidate in this seat and someone who actually would say that this needs a test, instead of Democrats rolling over,” Lucas said. He also said in a statement after the special session was announced that he could be among the candidates running in the redrawn districts.

Lucas also name-dropped Jason Kander, who served as Missouri’s secretary of state from 2013 to 2017 and would live in the redrawn 4th District.

Mayor Lucas was elected to his second term as mayor in 2023 and is term limited, meaning he cannot run for a third term in 2027. If he ran for Congress in the November 2026 midterm election and won, he would have to resign during the last few months of his term.

The vacancy would be filled by the mayor pro tem; that is currently Ryana Parks-Shaw, who has announced her candidacy for mayor in the 2027 local election.

Lucas’ campaign finance account had over $580,000 in cash on hand as of the July reporting period, according to state documents.

Missouri redistricting plan would split KC

Missouri’s current congressional map was approved in 2022 after the 2020 Census and has two districts — based in Kansas City and St. Louis — where voters strongly lean toward the Democratic Party and six districts covering the rest of the state where voters strongly lean toward the Republican Party.

The proposal currently under consideration in the state legislature to redraw the map would instead carve Kansas City up into the 4th, 5th and 6th Congressional Districts, giving all of them an apparent advantage to the Republican Party as it looks to maintain its slim majority in Congress ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

If passed by the state senate and signed by the governor, Cleaver’s 5th District would stretch hundreds of miles from east Kansas City into central Missouri and past Jefferson City, while the 4th District would stretch from downtown to the Ozarks. The Northland would be entirely within a northern Missouri district.

The 4th and 5th Districts would largely be split at Troost Avenue, which has been a racial dividing line in Kansas City for generations.

The Missouri proposal comes as President Trump pushes states around the country to redraw their Congressional maps to give Republicans an advantage, following the lead of Texas this summer.

The state House of Representatives passed the plan this week and it now heads to the state Senate. All Democrats voted against the proposal alongside a handful of Republicans.