Sharice Davids

Kansas Republicans failed to gather enough support to call a special session for redrawing congressional maps.

House Speaker Dan Hawkins confirmed the effort lacks the votes this session.

Advocacy groups are organizing against the potential for mid-decade redistricting, which is also occurring in other states.

The effort by Kansas Republicans to redistrict U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, D-Kansas, appears to have failed but not for a lack of trying.

Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson, R-Andover, and House Speaker Dan Hawkins, R-Wichita, attempted to gather signatures to call a special session during the fall to execute a plan to gerrymander the state. The petition gathered the two-third majority of signatures needed to call a special session in the Senate but failed in the House.

At a press conference Jan. 5, Hawkins said the effort is unlikely.

"To say that redistricting wasn't high on my priority list would be wrong," Hawkins said. "I do not have the votes."

About 10 Kansas House Representatives were demoted from committee chairs or vice chair roles after the petition failed to get enough signatures. Hawkins said the margin is even wider than the 10 lawmakers who were targeted and is closer to 20 votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority to overcome a veto.

"I would not call it punishment," Hawkins said. "You serve at the will and pleasure of the speaker, and when you become a chair or a vice chair you're expected to support the procedural motions of the body, and those 10 people decided, and those six people who were in leadership positions decided not to support."

Though they lost roles for not supporting the petition to call a special session, Hawkins said he wouldn't have applied pressure for their votes.

"Their vote is their vote. I've never beat anybody up for a vote," Hawkins said.

Partisan redistricting battle

President Donald Trump called on the Texas legislature to redraw its congressional maps to give Republicans five more seats in Congress. The call for partisan gerrymandering from Republicans led to Democratic states also seeking to break precedent and redistrict in the middle of the decade, rather than after a new census is released.

California voters approved a new map through a ballot proposition that adds five districts with a Democratic advantage.

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson signed a new map into law in September adding an additional Republican district.

North Carolina created a new map that adds two more majority-Republican districts.

Other states are still considering changing their congressional maps. Florida, Maryland and Virginia took steps toward redistricting in 2025 but didn't pass a new map.

Advocacy effort

Though the momentum for a gerrymandered map in Kansas is waning, the movement against it is still ongoing. A group of advocacy groups scheduled a Jan. 14 rally at the Statehouse in protest of the maps.

"We're going to be there speaking out and saying, 'No new maps,'" said Laurel Burchfield, speaking on behalf of the Kansas Fair Maps coalition. "We're continuing to collect signatures on that petition because we really need our legislators to know just how many Kansans don't want them to do this."

Though the rally was originally focused just on redistricting, it's now more broadly focused on a handful of policy issues.

Kansas Fair Maps' petition accumulated 2,532 signatures, with a goal of 3,000.

What would maps look like?

The only requirements for districts at the federal level is that they have to have a close-to-equal populations, and that they can't racially discriminate.

"If a district looks very contorted on a map, the Supreme Court generally is not going to intervene unless it's a racial issue," said Michael Smith, Emporia State political science professor.

Problems can arise at the state-level, like in Missouri where a group is suing the state saying mid-decade redistricting violates the Missouri Constitution. Kansas limits redistricting to every decade for state legislative races, but it's not clear if its prohibition on mid-decade redistricting extends to federal congressional districts.

A map could be drawn a number of different ways to create four Republican-advantaged districts, but Smith said there's no way to do it without splitting Johnson County.

"There is no way to do it without cutting up Johnson County. It just can't be done, they did their best, I would argue, in 2022 with the current map because they split Wyandotte and they put all of three rural counties in the district, but then Rep. Davids turned around and won reelection by the same margin," he said.

Johnson County isn't racially diverse enough that its split would cause the Supreme Court to intervene. But what's done to one district could influence the votes in others, causing what's called a "dummy-mander."

"The bottom line is, there's quite a corridor of Democrats these days, that is Johnson, Wyandotte, Lawrence and Topeka. And those would have to be subdivided very carefully to avoid the dummy-mander scenario," Smith said.

Is redistricting popular?

There's no polling specifically on how Kansans feel about the mid-decade redistricting proposal. There isn't even a map for Kansans to consider.

Polling on the popularity of redistricting is mixed. A poll conducted by Noble Predictive Insights showed 60% of voters oppose mid-decade partisan redistricting.

Noble Predictive was rated highly for accuracy, according to the now-defunct FiveThirtyEight.

On the other hand, a Politico poll from November showed that partisan Democrats and Republicans support partisan map drawing to gain an advantage.

The most popular form of drawing a map, according to Politico and Noble Predictive, is an independent politically neutral process, followed by state legislatures with voter approval and state legislatures without voter approval.