Missouri’s local election officials have until Saturday to mail ballots to military and overseas voters, and since last Thursday they’ve known which map to print. Secretary of State Denny Hoskins told them to use the 2022 congressional districts once the Supreme Court acted. The August primaries ran on the 2025 map, so many voters who helped pick a nominee in one district will vote in another.

We’ve covered Wellman twice before, both times with the map unsettled. Our 1 August piece asked whether a primary run on contested lines would stand. When we covered the result on 7 August, he’d won that primary by 2,421 votes and the lines were headed to court. The courts have now answered. On balance, the answer favors him.

Missouri Republicans drew the 2025 map at President Trump’s urging to take Emanuel Cleaver’s Kansas City seat, and it did something quieter in the St. Louis suburbs. St. Louis Public Radio reported that the new lines made Wagner’s second district more Republican. A referendum campaign called People Not Politicians then collected more than 300,000 signatures to force a statewide vote on the plan.

Hoskins waited until the day of the 4 August primary to reject the referendum. On 3 September the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that he’d been wrong. It sent the referendum to the November ballot and held that the 2022 map governs this year’s election. Two Republicans who’d won primaries under the new lines, Representative Bob Onder and state Senator Rick Brattin, then went to federal court.

U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark sided with them on 8 September. He ordered Hoskins to use the 2025 map, reasoning that a general election held on different lines than the primary would violate equal protection. Earlier that same day, Justice Brett Kavanaugh had turned down the state’s own emergency request to use the new map. After the 8th Circuit declined to pause Clark’s order, Kavanaugh referred the next application to the full Supreme Court, which stayed Clark’s order on 10 September with no noted dissents.

Catherine Hanaway, Missouri’s attorney general, had defended the new map. Reporters asked her afterward whether any path remained for keeping the 2022 districts out of November.

Hanaway added that the case had taken too many turns for anyone to be certain, and Onder told reporters the fight isn’t finished. The 8th Circuit has scheduled a hearing on his case for Thursday, two days before the ballot deadline. But the Supreme Court’s stay holds while that appeal runs, and it would stay in place if the justices take the case. Chuck Hatfield, the referendum campaign’s lawyer, called the matter settled, and we think he’s probably right for this year.

The first change helps Wellman in a way his own primary made plain. Joan VonDras, a retired teacher who raised $356,615 to his $1.2 million, held him to 45.85 percent. In Jefferson County, one of the rural pieces the 2025 map attached to the district, she won outright, 52.88 percent to 31.16. Under the 2022 lines, that territory isn’t part of the second district.

The second change is the district itself. Wagner has held the seat since 2013 and won it by 12 points in 2024. She had $4.2 million banked in mid-July and took nearly 74 percent of the vote in her own primary. Cook describes its Likely Republican category as races that aren’t competitive yet but could become so, and David Wasserman wrote after the ruling that the seat is now worth keeping an eye on.

Put together, the map turns a seat Wagner didn’t need to think about into one she’s still favored to keep. That’s the honest size of the change. It’s a better race for Wellman. It’s still uphill.

Wellman grew up in Kirkwood, went to West Point, and spent 22 years in the Army as an aviation officer. His service includes a Ranger tab, Desert Storm and three tours in Iraq, and his campaign counts four combat tours in all. After the Army he built ScoutComms, an advocacy firm for veterans and military families.

His record has a second file. Wagner can read the same court documents VonDras did. Wellman has filed for bankruptcy twice and is still paying off tax liens. His July 2020 petition listed $715,129 in debts against $53,418 in assets. VonDras built her campaign around the argument that Democrats hadn’t examined him closely, and she came within three points of the nomination.

None of that disqualifies him. Wellman lost a business during the pandemic and has talked in public about rebuilding. Still, it means the general election won’t be only about the map or the uniform. In a seat where Wagner starts ahead, the debt story is an obvious line of attack.

The problem for us is obvious. Nothing about Wellman’s service changed in September. The district changed, and the district is what Cook rated. If he runs close to Wagner, the first explanations are the 2022 lines and a midterm year with a Republican in the White House, and his record comes a distant third.

The primary is harder evidence against us. A West Point graduate with four combat tours and a seven-figure budget won less than 46 percent against a retired teacher. Primary voters aren’t general-election voters, and the debt story did real damage, so we won’t overread that result. We also can’t claim it showed the service record carrying him.

A narrower claim can still be tested here. After New Hampshire, we said service seems to help most in general elections against Republicans. MO-02 is now one of those races, on better terms than it was a month ago. If Wellman cuts deeply into Wagner’s 12-point margin, that counts a little for the narrow claim. If he lands near it, that counts against it, and we’ll say so.

The 8th Circuit hearing can’t lift the Supreme Court’s stay on its own. That’s why both Hanaway and the referendum campaign’s lawyer expect the 2022 districts in November, even while Onder keeps pressing the appeal. Unless the justices themselves change course, voters in the second district will choose between Wagner and Wellman on the old lines.

They’ll also vote on the referendum over the 2025 map, on the same ballot. That’s an odd pairing. The voters of MO-02 will decide the fate of a map that would have made their own House race safer for the incumbent. Cleaver, the map’s main target, is again heavily favored in Kansas City, St. Louis Public Radio reported.

For Wellman, the next marker is money. His third-quarter report, due in October, will show whether the new lines move donors toward a race Cook now calls Likely Republican. We’ll come back to this seat when there’s polling or new filings to report, and after the vote we’ll say plainly whether his result tracked the map or ran ahead of it.