In Lee’s Summit, Missouri, activists with Indivisible Kansas City went searching for an open wall and found one outside a bank. Organizer Krista Mann connected a portable projector to her computer and displayed a presentation on the brick facade, creating what the group called a “guerrilla projection.”

The presentation targeted Jon Patterson, Speaker of the Missouri House of Representatives, who is seeking a state Senate seat against Democratic state Rep. Keri Ingle. The activists also distributed flyers in the downtown entertainment district as they worked to reach voters.

Mann’s slides focused on Patterson’s longtime support for data centers. They said he personally blocked votes on transparency measures and supported legislation allowing Missouri power companies to charge ratepayers for electricity infrastructure “to provide the power that we need for the data centers.”

Lee’s Summit is a purple Kansas City suburb, and the battleground seat is important to Democratic efforts to deny Republicans a supermajority in the Missouri legislature. Yet much of the conversation among activists and passersby centered not on the legislative race, but on the state’s crowded ballot.

“As a woman I need my rights back,” activist Cheryl Cheek said. A former Republican from a Republican family, Cheek was new to political activism but spending considerable time sending messages, distributing flyers, speaking with voters, and taking part in resistance efforts.

Cheek acknowledged that canvassing frightened her, though she readily approached people and started conversations. “I’m not in good health … but I don’t stop moving,” she said, explaining the determination that kept her involved.

Many of those conversations eventually reached Amendment 3, the most prominent measure in Missouri’s radio and television advertising. The amendment represents a direct attempt by state legislators to reverse abortion protections that voters placed in the Missouri Constitution in 2024.

That 2024 vote ended an abortion ban enacted after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling. Amendment 3 would reinstate a different version of the ban, with exceptions for rape, incest, medical emergencies, and fetal anomalies, while also banning gender affirming care.

Lawmakers added the restrictions on gender affirming care as part of their attempt to overturn the abortion rights vote. The move placed transgender people and women’s constitutional rights within the same bitter ballot campaign.

Since 2020, Missouri voters have legalized abortion and recreational marijuana, accepted Medicaid expansion, increased the minimum wage, and established paid sick leave. Republican lawmakers later reversed the sick leave policy and repeatedly sought ways to curb policies approved directly by voters.

In August, legislators advanced Amendment 4, which would have made ballot initiatives virtually impossible to pass. Voters decisively rejected it, leaving lawmakers to pursue individual efforts against approved policies, including the abortion protections targeted by Amendment 3.

Polling on Amendment 3 showed a dead heat, with support for passage well below 50%. Foot traffic in Lee’s Summit was unusually light, which activists attributed to families attending “Trunk or Treat” events at churches, but several people still raised the amendment while accepting flyers.

One person said he planned to canvass against Amendment 3 the following day. The intensity surrounding that measure had largely overshadowed Proposition A, the referendum on the legislature’s gerrymandered congressional map.

That map attempted to eliminate Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s seat by breaking apart his Kansas City district. Citizens fought Republican officials for a year to place Proposition A on the ballot, but Republicans supporting the new map had exhausted their funds and were not advertising during the final two weeks.

The citizen referendum appeared positioned to win and preserve Cleaver’s district. Two additional legislature backed measures, Amendments 7 and 8, offered voters still more reasons to scrutinize what Jefferson City Republicans had placed before them.

Amendment 7 would direct tax revenue into a “prosperity fund” intended to build an endowment large enough to eliminate all state taxes over time, though the mechanism was unclear. Amendment 8 would authorize the state attorney general to remove elected sheriffs, but not county prosecutors.

One man accepting a flyer summarized his skepticism with a slogan familiar to the activists: “Yes on 6, the rest are tricks.” Amendment 6 would prevent legislators from weakening initiative or referendum powers and would require an 80% supermajority in both chambers to repeal laws enacted through initiatives.

The activists hoped that legislative meddling with voter approved policies would change how Missourians viewed the officials responsible. Their tactics included protests, yard signs, banner drops, flyers, and projections designed to put Republican actions directly in public view.

Another projection later that weekend delivered an especially blunt message: “The G.O.P. Allowed This Dumb Iran War.” For Cheek, the activism also offered solidarity while she coped with political divisions inside her own MAGA family.

Before Cheek’s Fox News watching father died, he once took a swing at her while she was serving as his caregiver. Now in her first election cycle as an activist, she explained why she kept working: “I found a community here … We can’t be silent anymore.”