Republicans’ epic self-own thwarts gerrymander, humiliates conservatives
Karma.
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Last year, Republicans in Utah tightened what were already the nation’s most stringent ballot initiative requirements, in part to prevent the public from being able to weigh in on gerrymandering in the future.
It turns out they were a little too conniving for their own good.
A GOP-sponsored constitutional amendment that would have repealed the state’s fair redistricting law will not make the ballot in November after falling just shy of satisfying Utah’s new petition requirements. The failure sends Republicans back to the drawing board in their quest to re-rig Utah’s Congressional map, which a judge’s decision adjusted this year to include a safe Democratic seat in and around Salt Lake City.
Conservatives were attempting to qualify a repeal of Prop 4, an amendment passed by voters in 2018 that banned gerrymandering and created an independent redistricting commission. The GOP went ahead and gerrymandered the map anyway, splitting up the blue SLC region to give Republicans all four of Utah’s Congressional seats, only to have a judge replace it after giving the legislature a chance to draw a fair one. They’ve been scrambling ever since, filing appeals with the state Supreme Court and federal judiciary, both of which were rejected.
That made repealing Prop 4 the next best option, but in a bit of sweet irony, they were ultimately undone by their own antipathy for direct democracy.
First, they tried to repeal it by legislative vote, but that was deemed unconstitutional; the state Supreme Court ruled that if voters approved an amendment, they’d have to approve its appeal. And that’s where they trapped themselves.
Utah already had the most stringent signature-gathering law in the country, requiring among other things that organizers gather 4% of eligible voters in at least 26 of the state’s 29 Senate districts. Republicans doubled that specific standard in 2025, a move designed to thwart future progressive amendments, with Prop 4 still freshly in mind.
Requiring organizers to collect signatures from 8% of the voting population in counties all throughout the state meant that progressives couldn’t simply focus their efforts on the liberal-ish Salt Lake City — but as it turns out, it also meant that Republicans had to be wary of the liberals in Salt Lake City.
After pouring millions of dollars from a Trump-linked dark money group into signature-gathering and calling in conservative campaign professionals from Turning Points USA, the organizers behind Utahns For Representative Government thought it had collected enough petitions to qualify the amendment for the ballot. And it had, at least at first. But their campaign had been plagued by broad-based (and frequently substantiated) accusations of petition-gatherers misrepresenting to people what they were signing, and an anti-gerrymandering group launched a campaign to convince people to withdraw their signatures.
Over 9,000 people have requested to have their names pulled from the petitions, including nearly 1000 people in Senate District 15, which took activists below the 8% threshold. Time has expired on collecting new signatures, rendering the whole operation — they spent at least $4.3 million on signature-gathering alone — a failure. All the tweets and appeals from Donald Trump, JD Vance, Gov. Spencer Cox, and the state’s Republican legislators, all in vain, and all because Republicans made a cynical attempt to silence voters and only wound up silencing themselves.
There will likely be legal challenges, but even the chair of the Utah Republican Party (and founder of Utahns For Representative Government) had to admit at least temporary defeat on Thursday.
“Utahns spoke loudly in the face of an unprecedented onslaught of biased media coverage, outside influence and judicial interference,” GOP chair Rob Axson said. “Whether now or in the future, by litigation or initiative, we will Repeal Prop 4. This fight is not over, but just beginning.”
Republicans are working to expand and stack the state Supreme Court, so they may one day overturn the decision that their gerrymandered map was indeed gerrymandered. But this year, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that one of Utah’s four Congressional seats will be represented by a progressive Democrat, reflecting the will of a bipartisan coalition of voters.
In other redistricting news…
The future of Missouri’s newly gerrymandered Congressional map remains in flux, but the prognosis is not great at the moment.
It was a one-two punch this week. First, the state Supreme Court gave its blessing this week to the redrawn districts, rejecting a lawsuit over a plan that would likely give Republicans seven of the state’s eight seats in DC.
And then today, a Cole County judge dismissed a challenge to the implementation of the map, so as of now, it looks like the gerrymander is going to stay in place. If it stays that way, it’s likely to give Republicans an extra seat at the expense of longtime Rep. Emanuel Cleaver.
But here’s the thing: the judge who made the ruling today had to ignore a century’s worth of precedent to green light the gerrymandered map; notably, he rejected the lawsuit filed by the ACLU on standing, not merit. Because as I’ve covered here before, the new map should have been set aside once a group called People Not Politicians had collected enough signatures to qualify a ballot initiative that would repeal the gerrymander. That’s the way repeal initiatives work in Missouri.
So what gives? Not Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, who clearly doesn’t care about the law, because this whole mess is only happening due to his intransigence. Hoskins simply refuses to officially tally up the signatures and certify the initiative for the ballot, even though data from his own office indicates that activists filed enough valid petitions.
It’s a mess, to say the least, and the ACLU of Missouri has pledged to appeal the judge’s ruling today.
“This order defies over a century of judicial precedent while rendering Missourians’ constitutional right to the referendum process second to the will of politicians,” the organization said in a statement. “The ACLU of Missouri is committed to our state constitution’s founding principle that all power is derived from the people, not loaned from the government. We will immediately appeal this decision.”
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