Eighth Circuit Rules Missouri Must Use the 2025 Map — For Now

Four days after we covered the oral argument, the Eighth Circuit has ruled: Missouri must use the 2025 map (HB 1) in November, not the 2022 map the Missouri Supreme Court ordered. The ruling is 2-1, it's published, and one judge would have thrown the whole appeal out on a threshold question before ever reaching the map fight.

Published September 21, 2026. This updates our September 17 post on the oral argument. As with that piece, this is a factual explainer, not legal advice or an editorial endorsement of either side.

VERIFIED — based on our direct read of the court's published opinion, Nos. 26-2797 & 26-2827 (8th Cir. Sept. 21, 2026), except where noted.

The Bottom Line

A three-judge panel — Judge James Loken (appointed by President George H.W. Bush, 1990), Judge David Stras (appointed by President Trump, 2017), and Judge Justin D. Smith (appointed by President Trump, 2026) — held that Missouri's plan to use the 2022 map in November violates the U.S. Constitution. Only the 2025 map complies, the court held. It affirmed the district court's temporary restraining order and sent the case back down for a permanent injunction requiring Secretary Hoskins to use the 2025 map for the November 3 general election.

Judges Loken and Smith joined the per curiam opinion. Judge Stras concurred in part and dissented in part — more on that below, because it matters for what happens next.

Worth sitting with: the panel split 2-1, but not along the lines a purely partisan read of this case would predict. Two Trump appointees — Stras and Smith — landed on opposite sides. Smith joined the majority ruling in favor of the map Republicans drew; Stras, in the same seat, dissented and would have thrown the appeal out entirely. Meanwhile a Bush appointee, Loken, wrote the majority opinion himself. If your instinct is to guess how a judge ruled based on who appointed them, this case is a good reminder that instinct doesn't hold up well under actual scrutiny — which is exactly why we think the ruling itself, not the roster of appointing presidents, is what deserves your attention.

The Reasoning: Article I, Section 2, Not the Elections Clause

The panel didn't rule on the broad question we flagged after oral argument — whether Missouri's referendum process can constitutionally be used to block a legislature-drawn congressional map at all. Solicitor General Capozzi had asked the court to reach that question, leaning on the Elections Clause. The panel expressly declined: "it is unnecessary to reach the parties' arguments on the Elections Clause." That means the three-case precedent line we discussed in our last post — Ohio ex rel. Davis v. Hildebrant (1916), Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission (2015), and Moore v. Harper (2023) — was never actually tested here. It remains untouched, and could resurface if the case reaches the Supreme Court.

Instead, the panel decided the case on a narrower theory: Missouri ran its August primary under the 2025 map, and switching maps for the general election would put an estimated 1.4 million Missourians into different districts than the ones they voted in during the primary — including roughly 284,000 people who voted in one district's primary but would receive a general-election ballot for a different district entirely, with no say in who its nominees were. The court held that this breaks the constitutionally required "continuity in the constituency throughout all stages of a single election" under Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution. It also found the same facts would likely support an Equal Protection Clause violation, but didn't need to reach that claim once Article I, Section 2 resolved the case.

A Notable Reversal on Purcell

One of the more striking moves in the opinion: the panel takes the Purcell principle — the doctrine that courts should avoid changing election rules close to voting — and applies it against the side that's been winning on it so far. The panel frames the 2025 map, not the 2022 map, as the real "status quo": it was in place for roughly a year, more than 60 candidates filed under it, and 1.2 million Missourians voted under it in August. In the panel's telling, it's the Missouri Supreme Court's September 3 ruling that was the late-breaking disruption, not this federal case.

That's a meaningfully different read than the two prior U.S. Supreme Court orders in this case — on September 8 and September 10 — both of which had the practical effect of keeping the 2022 map in place. Whether the Supreme Court agrees with the Eighth Circuit's reframing, or sticks with its earlier posture, is now the central question.

The Dissent: Standing, Not the Merits

Judge Stras didn't address the map question at all. His view: People Not Politicians and Richard von Glahn never had standing to bring this appeal in the first place, so the court should have dismissed it without reaching the constitutional merits.

• PNP (the organization): Stras finds its only interest is enforcing Missouri's referendum law generally — an interest he says is "indistinguishable from the general interest of every citizen" in the state, which the Supreme Court has already held isn't enough for standing (citing Hollingsworth v. Perry).
• Von Glahn (individually): Stras notes that despite being a registered Missouri voter, nothing in the filings alleges how switching maps would concretely affect him — no claim of vote dilution, no claim he'd be unable to elect his preferred candidate. He calls the "if not us, then who?" argument made at oral argument "never... a reason to find standing."

This matters beyond this case: if Stras is right, the Supreme Court has a clean, narrow way to unwind the panel's ruling on jurisdictional grounds without ever touching the Article I, Section 2 question — a much lower-stakes off-ramp than deciding the constitutional merits either way.

What Happens Next

The ruling doesn't take effect immediately. The panel ordered its own permanent injunction administratively stayed until September 28, 2026, at 5:00 p.m. Central, specifically to allow time for Supreme Court review. If the Supreme Court hasn't acted by then, Secretary Hoskins and local election authorities must fully implement the 2025 map.

PNP has already said it will seek emergency relief from the U.S. Supreme Court — the third time this case will have reached the justices in three weeks. State officials have said they need final clarity by Tuesday, September 22, to meet ballot-printing deadlines, so expect this to move fast either way.

A Note on What We Don't Know Yet

We're working from the court's own published opinion, not secondhand summaries, so the reasoning above is what the judges actually wrote. What we can't tell you yet is what the Supreme Court will do with it. The two prior Supreme Court orders in this case both had the effect of keeping the 2022 map in place, which cuts against this outcome — but both were short, unexplained emergency-docket orders, so we don't actually know whether the justices were signaling a view on the merits or just applying caution about further changes this close to the election. Treat any confident prediction about the Supreme Court's next move — ours included — with real skepticism.

Sources

• Per curiam opinion and concurrence/dissent, Onder v. von Glahn & Onder v. State of Missouri, Nos. 26-2797 & 26-2827 (8th Cir. Sept. 21, 2026) — read directly by Act for Missouri.
• KCTV5, Sept. 21, 2026 — initial coverage of the ruling →
• Our Sept. 17 post on the oral argument, including the Elections Clause precedent question →