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Where should Missouri Democrats go from here? • Missouri Independent [1]

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Date: 2024-12-05

The 2024 election was yet another devastating one for Missouri Democrats.

In fact, the party hasn’t had a truly successful cycle since 2012, when former U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill won re-election and Democrats captured nearly every statewide office.

Lucas Kunce lost by 14 points last month to U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, and he still came the closest of any statewide Democrats to knocking off their GOP opponent. The rest of the slate lost by at least 19 percentage points.

And in a cycle where legislative Democrats were expected to finally break the Republican supermajority in the House and Senate, the end result was the GOP margins held exactly where they were when the campaign began.

Missouri Democrats may or may not have hit rock-bottom, but after the 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2024 election results, what seems clear is that it will take a miracle for any Democrat to win statewide anytime soon.

I began describing these trends in 2012, focusing on Republican state legislative gains. In more recent years I’ve expanded on that 2012 thesis to encapsulate statewide politics — a few examples are here, here, here, and here.

In a nutshell: the national Democratic brand is in shambles throughout rural and exurban Missouri, and there aren’t enough Democrats in the major metro areas to offset huge Republican margins in roughly 100 of 114 counties.

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So what should Missouri Democrats do next?

First, we must rebrand.

Fifteen years ago, select Missouri Democrats were still able to carve out identities distinct from national Democrats. Some genuinely stood smack dab in the ideological middle of the state’s electorate (think Jay Nixon and Chris Koster); some were uniquely talented political communicators (think Claire McCaskill and Jason Kander); some just kept their heads down and focused on governing in the most effective, nonpartisan way possible (think Clint Zweifel).

But the broader trends caught up to almost all of them. Nixon retired from office with an approval rating mired in the 30s; Zweifel left politics for the private sector; and the others lost hard-fought general election battles.

Any successful statewide Democrat simply must dominate moderate voters. There is no way around that in a state where self-identified conservatives constitute roughly twice the percentage of self-identified liberals.

Former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once lamented, “You go to war with the army you have, not that army you might want or wish to have.” Likewise, Missouri Democrats must realize that they are going into political battle facing the electorate they have, not the one they might wish they had.

This is neither unique nor complicated; it’s what pretty much every state 1,000 miles from salt water looks like.

The challenge for Missouri Democrats is that, having lost so many legislative seats outside of the major metro areas, there aren’t many moderating forces within the party. That has led more progressive party factions to dominate primary nomination battles, producing more progressive representation at both the municipal and state levels.

That said, Congresswoman Cori Bush and former St. Louis City Prosecutor Kim Gardner will both soon be out of public life. Bush, recently defeated by St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, was a polarizing figure due her rhetoric on domestic and foreign policy issues; Gardner was a polarizing figure due to her mismanagement of the office, for which she herself was recently prosecuted.

Missouri Republicans adroitly leveraged controversies related to them to stain other Democratic candidates.

For instance, attorney Joe Pereles was a moderate businessman and attorney running in a west St. Louis County swing Missouri Senate district. As a 70-year-old who had spent decades serving as general counsel for a large hotel company and someone whose civic engagement had focused on nonpartisan causes like humanitarian relief and Jewish community support, Pereles was anything but radical.

Unfortunately for Pereles, he’d donated $200 to Congresswoman Bush in 2021. This came back to haunt him, as this donation was highlighted in direct mail attacks on him for supporting Bush’s “radical agenda to defund the police.”

There aren’t many elected Democratic centrists left to lead a rebrand, but shed of Bush and Gardner, Democrats have an opportunity to create new images of effective and reasonable urban governance.

If St. Louis and Kansas City, the state’s bluest jurisdictions, can pull that off and become the models of efficient service delivery and public safety, it could change perceptions of the Democratic Party across the state.

That doesn’t require the abandonment of core principles. It requires a relentless focus on management and performance in our largest cities and counties that gives not only their citizens, but visitors from around the state, the sense that Democrats can govern effectively.

It’s a microcosm of the Democrats’ challenge nationally. As long as Fox News and other conservative media pump images of disorder in some of the nation’s bluest cities (Seattle, Portland, San Francisco), it’s difficult to convince large swaths of voters that Democrats can govern.

In that sense, Gardner was the political gift that kept on giving for Missouri Republicans, who spent years hammering away at the exodus of attorneys from her office, the legal travails of her contractors, her nursing school shenanigans while on the clock, and most consequently, the violent crimes committed by people her office should have put away.

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A second and related imperative will be to cultivate figures who can communicate with voters in exurban and rural areas, because Democratic turnout in the cities is nearly maxed out. It doesn’t mean that Democrats will win these areas, but in order to become a competitive statewide party again, they have to start losing them 60-40 instead of 75-25.

Democrats can begin to address this by looking to models they currently have who can help improve the party by modeling images, languages and policy proposals more likely to resonate in rural and exurban areas.

Image is important because most voters have busy lives and don’t pay close attention to politics. Fielding state legislative candidates whose presentation defies easy caricature as liberals – such as AFL-CIO political director Stephen Webber, who recently became the first Democratic Senate candidate to win a race outside the Kansas and St. Louis regions since 2006 – is one way to begin a rebrand.

While Webber’s district is dominated by a college town, the former Marine showed during his tenure as state party chair during the 2018 cycle that he has the chops to connect in the sorts of counties where Democrats have hemorrhaged votes for two decades. His appearance at events in hoodies has occasionally vexed colleagues who arrive at panels in tailored suits, but there’s a reason U.S. Sen. John Fetterman won in a state Trump has won twice: vibes matter.

Democrats often lament the contradiction of their populist ballot initiatives (i.e., Medicaid expansion and minimum wage hikes) passing even as the statewide Democrats who run on them lose. That’s happened in part because Republicans have leveraged the polarizing policies and personal foibles of prominent Democrats like Bush and Gardner to damage the Democratic brand.

Until the average Missouri voter is culturally comfortable with generic Democrats again, they won’t hear or trust their economic message, despite its popularity.

Democrats must speak the language of the normal voter, not the language of the faculty lounge. We need more of former state Sen. Wes Shoemeyer explaining why meatpackers owning livestock means higher beef prices and state Sen. Karla May quoting Scripture as she pushes for a higher minimum wage. More of state Sen. Tracy McCreery talking right to repair, and state Rep. Steve Butz pushing for tougher penalties on gun-wielding St. Louis teenagers.

Rhetorically and substantively, we must meet people where they are. Elections aren’t about what candidates want them to be about. They’re about what voters want them to be about.

To be sure, this wasn’t my strength as a politician; as a poli sci prof, I often fell into academic jargon.

In fact, I was terrible at it — I struggled mightily to connect with working-class rural and exurban voters in my first race, and with conservative-leaning urban Catholics in my second race.

I remember some of the mistakes vividly, such as the first time I visited striking workers on a picket line in fall of 2003 and brought a mix of donuts and bagels.

Nobody wanted the bagels and orange juice, and I quickly ran out of donuts and coffee.

Democrats need to identify and recruit more candidates who intuitively know these things.

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Finally, Democrats need to be more practical in their electoral strategy.

For instance, Democrats should swear off spending millions on statewide races for a full four-year cycle and focus on swing legislative districts. Democratic resources are limited; given Republican legislative supermajorities, the GOP dramatically outspend Democrats in most targeted races.

Instead of spending their limited resources on races that are currently unwinnable, Democrats should start by focusing on winning the roughly five legislative districts that Biden and Harris won where Republican incumbents won by single digits last cycle. Democrats can then gradually build up the strength and political infrastructure to contest statewide races again.

If Democrats do want to contest a statewide race while their brand is in tatters throughout rural Missouri counties, we should consider the approach that nearly worked for independent U.S. Senate candidate Dan Osborn approach in ruby-red Nebraska: back a compelling independent candidate and keep any Democrat from filing.

Without a broader political realignment or perhaps a disastrous Trump presidency, it won’t be easy for Missouri Democrats to make the state competitive again. But in order to do so, we must first recognize the problem and take practical steps to remedy it instead of going for moonshots.

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[1] Url: https://missouriindependent.com/2024/12/05/where-should-missouri-democrats-go-from-here/

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