Chad Garrison is a former editor-in-chief of the St. Louis alt-weekly The Riverfront Times.

You know who matters in the 2018 midterms? Donald Trump! But not just Donald Trump. Control of the Senate rests in part on what voters think of the president of the United States, but it will also be determined by local disputes and regional quirks—demographics and issues, but also myth-making and self-conception. In this series of articles—this is the third—Politico Magazine asked an expert on a state with a crucial statewide race to explain what matters there that doesn’t matter anywhere else.

The thing to know about Missouri is “it makes no sense.” That’s the caveat Dave Robertson, a keen observer of the state and a leading authority on its elections, offers when discussing Missouri politics. “You’ve got all these different groups and geographies,” says Robertson, the chair of the political science department at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.


“Southwest Missouri is hardcore Republicans. Kansas City is the nation’s easternmost cow town. St. Louis is its westernmost Rust Belt city. There’s the Delta region in the southeast, wealthy agriculture in the center and the northern part of the state acts a lot like its neighbor Iowa.”

Not only is Missouri a weirdly perfect microcosm of America’s geopolitical tribes, it’s also a state that represents almost precisely one-fiftieth of the U.S. population. Missouri is what Robertson calls “relentlessly average”: It’s in the middle of just about everything you can think of.

For decades, that averageness made Missouri one of the nation’s most reliable bellwethers. With the lone exception of choosing Adlai Stevenson in 1956, Missouri voters successfully picked the winner of a century-worth of American presidents. Then came the 2008 election, when John McCain squeaked the narrowest of victories (winning by 0.13 percent) over Barack Obama.

Missouri has been trending further to the right ever since. While Missouri's demographics once reflected the nation’s, today the state is whiter, older and less educated than most of the country. Missouri has also lagged the nation in adding Hispanic residents. Mitt Romney enjoyed a 9-point margin over Obama in 2012. Four years later, Donald Trump walloped Hillary Clinton, taking the state by an 18.5-point margin. Today, just two Democrats—Auditor Nicole Galloway and Senator Claire McCaskill—hold statewide office. And even that is misleading as Galloway, who’s currently up for election, was appointed to her current term, and McCaskill cruised to victory in 2012 only after her Republican challenger Todd Akin notoriously capsized his campaign with his “legitimate rape” comment.

So what does it take for a Democrat to win a statewide election in an increasingly red Missouri? Will the state’s Republicans continue to gain ground in this year’s midterm, or will this average state revert toward its 20th-century mean? The tight Senate race unfolding between McCaskill and her Republican challenger, Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley, provides clues into how both parties hope to win the state now and into the future.

“The challenge in any midterm is for the party in power to turn out voters in substantial numbers because you know the other side is going to be energized,” says John Hancock, a Republican strategist and former chair of his party in Missouri. “Job No. 1 for Josh Hawley is to ensure he hits historic or better than historic turnout in the GOP parts of the state he needs to win.”

Those areas include much of rural Missouri with its evangelical and socially conservative voters, and particularly the 7th Congressional District in the state’s southwest corner. In the 2008 general election, Missouri’s high-water mark for voter turnout, nearly 2 in 3 people in the 7th District cast their ballot for McCain. In 2016, Trump carried parts of the district with more than 80 percent of the vote.

Yet the Republican Party can show weakness in the county that matters most in the 7th: Greene County, which includes Springfield, the state’s third-largest city. A big reason is that Springfield is home to Missouri State University, the second-largest public college in the state with approximately 25,000 students and 4,000 faculty.

In 2012, McCaskill garnered more votes in Greene County than Akin did, and Hawley can’t afford a similar breakaway this year. “It’s still Republican territory,” Hancock says. “But it’s not the 65 to 70 percent—or higher—performance you have elsewhere.”

In a move that shows just how much Greene County matters, Trump touched down last month in Springfield for his fourth visit to Missouri in support of Hawley. “The president’s numbers have been consistently better in Missouri than nationally, and that’s still the case,” Hancock says. “He is a benefit to Hawley here.”

Though just how much Trump’s endorsement—or any endorsement—can move the needle these days is questionable. Missouri got its nickname, the Show-Me State, because of its constituents’ supposed reputation for demanding to see results and not being told what to think. Jane Dueker, a lawyer, political consultant and the former chief of staff for former Democratic Governor Bob Holden, says the days of kissing a party official’s ring to run for office ended in 2008, when Missouri got rid of contribution limits to candidates. “Once that happened, the candidates didn’t need the party,” she says. “They could get the money on their own and raise it more easily.”

Missouri has since reinstated some contribution limits, but there are ways big donors can maneuver around the law. And over the past decade, two GOP megadonors in St. Louis—financier Rex Sinquefield and Joplin businessman David Humphreys—arguably have done more to steer Republican issues in Missouri than any politician. Humphreys, CEO of Tamko Building Products, and his family spent $4.5 million to get Hawley elected as attorney general in 2016 and have also supported his Senate campaign by funding the pro-Hawley Super PAC Missouri Rising Action.

But Humphreys, who has donated more than $15 million to conservative causes in Missouri over the past two years, may now be a liability for Hawley following a disastrous August primary. Proposition A on that ballot would have made Missouri the nation’s 28th right-to-work state. Instead, a near-record number of primary voters showed up to defeat the measure by a margin of 2 to 1. Humphrey had been a chief financial backer of the anti-labor initiative, and Democrats hope voters remember that when they return to the polls in November.

“One thing Democrats have going for them in Missouri is their pie can get bigger, and that’s evident in the recent primary,” Dueker says. “We saw then how many new registered voters came out, and they came out as Democrats.”

McCaskill, despite an estimated net worth of dozens of millions of dollars, has proven in the past she can speak to the working-class voters who sunk Prop. A in a state that trails the nation in median household income. In ’06 and ’12, she won numerous counties in southeast Missouri that have historic ties to mining and construction. Jay Nixon, Missouri’s last Democratic governor, won both his terms (in ’08 and ’12) thanks in large part to blue collar voters in his “hometown” region of southeast Missouri.

Yet increasingly for both parties, the key to winning Missouri has been to focus less on rural areas and more on the handful of counties that hold most of the state’s voters. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won just three small regions within Missouri that, on a map, look like Orion’s belt stretched across the state’s midsection. What they lack in geographic size, the three dots—four counties that are parts of metro St. Louis, Kansas City and Columbia (home of the University of Missouri)—make up for in votes, with 37 percent of the electorate.

St. Louis County by itself accounts for nearly 1 in 5 Missouri voters and has been trending more and more Democratic. It and Jackson County (home to Kansas City) hold the state’s greatest number of African-Americans, who represent around 11 percent—right around the national average—of Missouri’s electorate.

Whether McCaskill can count on that vote in a non-presidential election, however, is uncertain. She has been criticized this year for taking the black voter for granted. In September, two political committees—one tied to Chuck Schumer and the other to Obama—committed funds to help bring Missouri’s African-Americans to the polls. More recently, a North Carolina-based PAC called Black Americans for the President’s Agenda has begun running ads on urban radio stations intended to scare those same voters away. One of the spots crudely suggests that, if reelected, McCaskill will return Missouri to the days of lynchings.

If African-Americans do turn out for McCaskill, Republicans can make up the difference in collar counties such as St. Charles and Jefferson counties, Hancock says. Those communities have steadily gained population thanks in part to white flight from St. Louis (which is its own municipality separate from St. Louis County). St. Charles County now holds the second-highest number of registered voters after St. Louis County, and they tend to reliably back Republican candidates. Nearby Jefferson County, like suburban Clay County north of Kansas City, can go both ways. Together, Jefferson and Clay counties represent 11 percent of the state’s registered voters. “As goes this county, so goes this state,” Hawley told supporters during a recent campaign event in Jefferson County.

Rhetoric aside, he may have a point if female voters in Jefferson County—and in other swing and suburban counties—prove to be as motivated by the #MeToo movement as voters were in defeating Prop. A in August. The Kavanaugh hearings may have energized women voters nationally, but in Missouri they came after what Dueker calls “the Greitens stuff,” referring to Missouri’s former governor, Republican Eric Greitens, who resigned from office in May amid allegations he assaulted and blackmailed a woman with whom he was having an affair. “There is a pattern here that is coming together in a way that’s empowering women and Democratic women,” Dueker says.

“There are a lot of riled up women voters in pretty well-off suburbs of Missouri who used to be moderate, John Danforth-type Republicans but are now swinging to the left,” agrees Robertson, who recently met some of those voters at a speaking event at Ladue Chapel, a Presbyterian church in a conservative St. Louis suburb where median household income exceeds $180,000 a year.

“I mentioned that we could have 100 women elected to the House by the end of the year, and they broke into applause,” Robertson says. “This wasn’t a crowd of left-wing radicals, either. To me that tells you something.”