It's not over for Democrats in Missouri, new party chair says
JEFFERSON CITY • For a Democratic Party leader in a state that Donald Trump won by 19 points, Stephen Webber isn’t much for doomsday talk.
He’s well aware that Gov. Eric Greitens led a Republican sweep of statewide offices on Nov. 8, carrying every area except for St. Louis and St. Louis County, Boone County and Kansas City. He’s watched Democratic caucuses in the House and Senate dwindle to afterthoughts in his eight years as a representative from Columbia. And he readily admits he’d rather be a state senator — Webber lost a two-point race to Sen. Caleb Rowden last year — than the state’s Democratic Party chairman.
But ask the new chairman of the Missouri Democratic State Committee if the Missouri Democrat is an endangered species and he offers a history lesson.
“You go back to the 1970s and 1980s, every four years you could write a story about how Missouri had gone Democratic, was always going to be Democratic, or gone Republican and always going to be Republican,” Webber said. “But in 1988, (Republican) Gov. John Ashcroft wins a second term in a landslide and it looks like Democrats are in serious trouble.”
Four years later, Democrats swept every statewide office.
Webber, 33, also points out that Republicans have controlled everything before, in 2004, only to lose every statewide office except the lieutenant governorship four years later.
But a return to 1992 — or even 2008 — might be a stretch: Even with Ashcroft as governor, Democrats held majorities in both houses of the Legislature until 2002. And Missouri was still a bellwether state in the 1990s, going for Bill Clinton twice.
In a state carried by John McCain and Mitt Romney before Trump, Webber will have to measure success in small steps, starting with helping Sen. Claire McCaskill and Auditor Nicole Galloway keep their seats.
He’s hoping for an assist in the re-election fights.
McCaskill won her last contest by nearly 16 points, but she trailed Republican Rep. Todd Akin in polls before he made infamous comments about “legitimate rape” and pregnancy. This time around, McCaskill already has declared herself an underdog.
But Webber doubts the Republicans have learned from the Akin fiasco.
“It’s a tough state and she knows it’s going to be a fight,” he said. “But Republicans always underestimate Claire McCaskill and they have a tendency to nominate the most extreme candidate they have, so I expect she’ll face someone like Todd Akin again and get it done.”
Just show up
Winning statewide elections won’t change the state much if Democrats can’t get votes outside their urban strongholds. Only Rep. Ben Harris of Hillsboro and Rep. Pat Conway of St. Joseph won districts outside the state’s four largest cities last year.
But the party’s outstate woes are a relatively recent problem.
Just six years ago, Democrats held seats in places like Linn and Audrain counties and hailed from towns with names like Eminence and Vandalia.
Webber put some of the blame for the losses on gerrymandered districts after the 2010 census, which drew a court challenge that the Missouri Supreme Court declined to indulge. But he emphasized that Democrats could make a great deal of progress simply by showing up on the ballot.
Seventy Republicans, including 66 representatives, were elected to the Legislature without a Democratic opponent in November. That gave the GOP lots of easy wins and the appearance of being the only party that cares to show up in rural Missouri.
“When people don’t see us on the ballot, they end up picking whichever Republican they feel most comfortable with,” Webber said. “Do that for a couple cycles, and you end up considering yourself a Republican.”
Running unopposed also gives the GOP the flexibility to pour extra money into the tougher races.
“It ended up hurting me,” Webber said. “For example, Sen. Gary Romine, R-Farmington, was unopposed in a state Senate race and was able to donate money to my opponent.”
Webber is banking on revived House and Senate campaign committees to stop the bleeding there.
They’ll be an essential backdoor in newly passed Amendment 2, which among other things banned donations between lawmakers, and Webber says they’ll also help recruit candidates in rural races in 2018.
Message and voters
But then there’s the other question, one Webber has a harder time answering: Can Democrats, whose national identity has moved left on social and moral issues in recent years, deliver a message that resonates in areas where traditional values still reign supreme?
House Minority Leader Gail McCann Beatty, D-Kansas City, thinks it can if it eases off “rural vs. urban” ideological wars and instead pushes issues that hit people in their pocketbooks.
“We support working families and living wages,” she said. “We support public education, which should win votes in rural areas where schools are the center of the community that would be hurt by (Republican) charter and voucher programs.”
Jason Kander, the former secretary of state who lost a close race to Sen. Roy Blunt in November, described a similar campaign approach to former advisors to President Barack Obma on a political podcast last month.
“Whether it was in a rural area or in an urban area, I didn’t have to change my message.” he told Keepin’ It 1600. “I would be in downtown Kansas City, doing a press conference with janitors who deserved a raise, talking about the minimum wage, and then I would go to a very rural part of the state and I’d still talk about the minimum wage.”
Even some Republicans agree with the potential potency of such a strategy.
“The Democrats are fiscally in a good spot with rural Missouri,” said former state GOP chairman John Hancock, who passed the reins to Kansas City lawyer Todd Graves on Saturday. “They have a message that can resonate. If they go out and recruit candidates that fit the state and fit the districts, they could pick up a couple seats.”
But between redistricting and the GOP’s advantage in getting out the vote — Republicans gained 67 percent more votes for presidential candidates from 1996 to 2012 against the Democrats’ 19 percent — Ken Warren, a political scientist at St. Louis University, doesn’t see red districts turning blue for a while.
“We’re almost like a Southern state now and we have been for a while,” he said. “Democrats could win statewide office every once in a while, but they’re going to be very conservative in a Southern Democrat-type way.”
That’s why Webber is modest about how much the state party can do.
He believes in his party and its message. He thinks raising more money and recruiting and training candidates in toss-up districts will reap rewards. But he thinks much of 2018 will depend on what Republicans do with their unified power.
“Republicans control everything now, here and at the federal level, and they’re finally going to get everything they want,” he said. “We have a party that cares about working people and I think our policies are objectively better for working people, and we’re going to have to point that out in these next two years.”
No comments:
Post a Comment