Missourians voted Tuesday night to protect abortion rights, raise the minimum wage and guarantee paid sick leave for workers.
They also voted by wide margins to send Republicans to Jefferson City who vehemently oppose those proposals and may try to roll them back.
It’s become a familiar pattern in Missouri — progressive ballot measures like Medicaid expansion and marijuana legalization finding success in a state where Republicans have dominated for more than a decade.
Exactly why this seems to play out cycle after cycle is a matter of debate.
Eljah Haahr, a former GOP speaker of the Missouri House, believes Tuesday’s split decision, in line with years of similar outcomes, can best be explained by money.
“Missouri is a conservative state,” Haahr said. “But if you have the money, you can build a winning campaign.”
The coalition that successfully campaigned for the abortion-rights amendment raised more than $31 million, while abortion opponents raised just a fraction of that amount.
Proposition A, which will gradually raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour and guarantee paid sick leave for hundreds of thousands of workers, was supported by a campaign that raised $6 million and faced little organized opposition.
Six years ago, opposition to a ballot measure expanding Medicaid never managed to get off the ground while the campaign in support raised $10 million.
In each case, out-of-state progressive groups that aren’t required to disclose their donors cut massive checks to support the ballot measures.
“They had the resources to present their side,” said James Harris, a longtime GOP consultant. “Opponents lacked the money to educate voters in any meaningful way.”
Chalking up the success of initiative petitions to money oversimplifies the situation, said Stephen Webber, a former chairman of the Missouri Democratic Party who won a seat in the state Senate on Tuesday.
“The money might impact the margins,” Webber said, “but it doesn’t explain a voter casting a ballot for Amendment 3 and then voting for Mike Kehoe (for governor). If the money would make a difference to the outcome, the money would have been there.”
Voters are complex, Webber said, and pick candidates based on a combination of issues. And thanks to the initiative petition process, he said, Republican lawmakers are shielded from consequences when they stonewall voter priorities.
“Voters don’t seem to punish them for it,” he said, “they just seem to fix it through the ballot initiative process.”
Beyond money, Haahr said, is that the Democratic brand is tarnished in Missouri.
“Missouri Democrats’ brand is inextricably tied to the national Democrats,” he said “When they won in Missouri, the national Democratic brand was not considered as far left.”
Democratic candidates in Missouri are indeed getting “caught up in national noise,” said Claire Cook-Callen, director of campaigns with the liberal advocacy group Progress MO.
Conversely, ballot initiative campaigns “are conversations between Missourians,” Cook-Callen said. “It’s an ability to cut across a party line and talk to somebody about something that directly impacts them in their life.”
Peverill Squire, a professor of political science at the University of Missouri-Columbia, said the recent success of liberal ballot measures shows that Missourians are comfortable with the Democrats’ positions on many issues.
But rural Missourians, Squire said, have become “uncomfortable with Democratic candidates for the General Assembly who they often see as talking down to them and unable to relate to their problems.”
“Being popular in St. Louis, Kansas City and Columbia isn’t sufficient,” he said.
Many Democratic candidates this year had hoped the abortion-rights amendment would have coattails that would help them claw back into relevancy in the legislature.
Webber said that sort of short-term thinking isn’t going to rebuild the party.
“The path back for Missouri Democrats is going to be a long road,” Webber said. “If anybody thinks there’s a shortcut, it’s an ambush. If anybody thinks that there’s a shiny object, it’s a trap. There’s no one race we can win. There’s no one thing we can do. We are going to have to slowly chip away over the next decade.”
Meanwhile, Republicans are faced with a quandary of their own.
After years of watching voters go around the GOP-dominated legislature through the initiative petition process, the party has become determined to make it harder to amend the state constitution. Year after year, however, Democratic resistance short circuits that push.
Yet now abortion has been enshrined in the Missouri Constitution, and a litany of Republican officials are calling for lawmakers to put another constitutional amendment on the ballot rolling back those rights.
“For years,” Harris said, “we’ve been discussing making it more difficult to put something in the state constitution. That’s something that Republicans need to have a discussion about in the coming months.”
This story was originally published by the Missouri Independent.
