Scrimshaw Spotlight: Show Me, Don't Tell Me, About Missouri

Could The Show Me State Be Competitive in 2022?

(Why are we breaking this gimmick out on a Monday? Because Roy Blunt retired, and because when you make stupid rules you can change them.)

"Can Democrats win a statewide, federal election in Missouri?" is a question that a lot of people are going to be asking in the next few days and weeks, given the announcement of an open Senate seat there next year. I suspect the answer many will give is a simple "no", but since when have I ever accepted the conventional wisdom at face value? The case for Democratic optimism is theoretically interesting, but it relies on an idea that just isn't coming back, at least not as it currently stands.

Trump won Missouri by 15% last time out, and that number is probably not indicative of partisanship in a year without Trump on the ballot, but it's certainly a bad sign for Democrats. "Ah, but Claire McCaskill lost by 6%," I hear someone saying. In a D+8 as an incumbent, sure - neither of which a Democratic challenger this time are likely to have the benefits of. Missouri is sufficiently red as of now that the act of winning the state would need to be about radically transforming the partisanship of the state, if only for one race on one day in 2022.

Could Democrats get lucky and get former Governor and alleged perpetrator of a sexual assault Eric Greitens? Possibly. Would it help? Sure - and if the current Missouri 2nd remains intact after redistricting, then the GOP could suffer downballot from running a candidate who will push away well-off white social liberals. Would it be enough to win this incredibly Trumpy state? Against anyone who has not publicly denied a candidacy, no.

The problem for the Democratic Party is that the last 8 years has been a rapid deterioration in their prospects in all parts of Missouri that don't have a Major League Baseball team in it. Outside the twin metros, the Democratic vote is in free fall, and there's little reason to believe the bottom has necessarily fallen out. Can Democrats reverse the trend? Probably not, at least not with a normal candidate.

Take a look at this map, graciously created for me by Jackson Bryman, which compares Jason Kander's 2016 performance and Hillary Clinton's on the same day, and you'll see the areas where Kander outperformed Hillary the most are the areas where Democrats are bleeding the most. The southeast corner of the state especially shows the Democratic decline, and the areas where Hillary really collapsed in 2016. What you would need to win is Kander-esque margins in rural and regional Missouri and much better than Kander margins in Kansas City and St Louis, which is one of those things that seems more plausible than it actually is. There is no Democrat who could pull the trick off, except maybe - and I do mean maybe - one.

…

Yes, this column was always going to get into a discussion of whether or not Jason Kander runs again. I've literally written before that Kander is the best candidate of the 2010s, a rare political breed whose very candidacy shifts a race substantially. I'm at Safe R if it's not-Kander as the Democratic nominee, and I think investments - of either time, money, or both - are a mistake. But if he runs, man, this gets interesting, in my view.

I'm aware of the fact that he has in the past, and has even again today, denied any interest. He has done so in a strong, clear, unequivocal way, and I mostly believe him. But I also remember when Marco Rubio was retiring from the Senate in 2016, and when Steve Bullock had no interest in the Senate in 2020, and when Evan Bayh came into the 2016 Indiana Senate race after 538 had put out their initial Senate model. I never take a politician's denial at face value until they are legally stopped from running by filing deadlines. Kander has been extremely candid about his struggles with his mental health stemming from PTSD in war service, and I obviously wish him nothing but the best in both health and happiness.

The question of whether Kander could win statewide in Missouri is in some ways divorced from the question of whether he will ever do it again. Could Kander win? Maybe. Would he? I really can't see a statewide victory, for a few reasons, no matter how good of a candidate he is.

No matter how good of a candidate Kander is, 2022 is not 2016, and there has been four years of realignments and partisan changes. The US gets more polarized every cycle, and the chances of a very countercyclical Senate gain goes down every time. The last time we saw Democrats make such a countercyclical gain in a normally scheduled election was 2012, in Indiana, but the problem was that wasn't about a Democratic candidate being good as much as it was about Richard Mourdock being an unbelievably bad candidate and making unbelievably terrible comments about abortion and rape. Obviously Alabama 2017 also exists, but that was about not electing a pedophile more than anything. In both cases, those seats held for a cycle, as did the last gasp of the Colorado GOP, their 2014 gain.

Kander - or any Democrat - winning Missouri would really defy everything we know about demographics, trends, polarization, and partisanship, and these sorts of races aren't happening anymore. They're just not, as much as we get very, very, very excited by the possibilities of them. We don't get the sorts of partisanship defying stunts of fate in the way that a candidate could catch fire and be rewarded for great campaigning. It's just not there anymore.

White cultural conservatives are not willing to vote for the Democratic Party in the numbers required of them to pull off the trick. Just as the GOP can't bank on some amount of suburban reversion while keeping the rurals blood red, Democrats can't wind the clock back in the southeast of Missouri to 2012 or 2008 and expect to keep Missouri 2nd a very pale shade of blue, as it was in the 2018 Senate race.

If I can't even say with a straight face that the state would be a Tossup with Kander in the race, then I don't think any Democrat can win the state. The lesson of 2020 is in many ways that you can run good candidates in red states and get close - or, closer - but you can't win. I'm not falling into the trap again this year. If Kander runs, he'll lose by 5%. Anyone else, we'll be lucky to hold the margin to under 10%.