As Missouri moves right, it’s no longer a mirror of national voting, but rather national polarization

The attempts to unseat Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are over, but it’s worth noting that both of the senators who will represent Missouri next year, incumbent Senator Josh Hawley and Senator-elect Eric Schmitt, wanted to remove him as head of the Republicans in the Senate.

It’s no secret that Missouri has moved from being a bellwether state — one that closely mirrored national trends — to being a strongly Republican state. That’s a major change for Missouri, which for many generations was viewed as a microcosm of the national political environment with a mix of urban, suburban, and rural, as well as northern and southern voters, which therefore served as a good reflection of Republican and Democratic voters nationwide.

What’s less obvious is that Missouri’s Republican majority and Democratic minority are themselves internally changing. The state’s Republican Party was once typified by men such as former US senator and former state attorney general John Danforth, and by outgoing Senator Roy Blunt, also a former Missouri secretary of state and former US congressman from Springfield. Whether people love or hate Sen. Josh Hawley, it’s patently obvious that he’s very different from most previous Republican senators from Missouri. Eric Schmitt isn’t even in the Senate yet, but he ran a campaign based on criticizing Mitch McConnell and what he viewed as an overly moderate Republican leadership.

On the Democratic side of the aisle, who can dispute that Congresswoman Cori Bush is not only very different from former Gov. Jay Nixon, widely regarded as one of the most conservative Democratic governors in the country, but also very different from former Rep. Lacy Clay, a longtime fixture in St. Louis Democratic politics? Cori Bush, a leader in the Black Lives Matter movement, entered the political fray with the response to the Ferguson incident. Again, whether people love her or hate her, it can’t be denied that she mobilized many Democrats to defeat Congressman Wm. Lacy Clay, part of a political dynasty that was a pillar of institutional Democratic politics in Missouri.

Missouri may no longer be a reflection of national trends in the ratio of Republicans to Democrats — we are now a deep red state by any statistical measure of who gets elected, both to the legislature and to statewide offices — but we are a reflection of national trends in how Republicans have moved to the right and Democrats have moved to the left.

It’s unlikely that a young Jay Nixon or Ike Skelton could get nominated today in a Missouri Democratic primary, and the same could be said for a young John Danforth in a Missouri Republican primary, but it’s overly simplistic to say that Republicans and Democrats are driving out their moderates and becoming ideologically radicalized.

Why?

While true, the ideological explanation is incomplete. A better explanation is to say that both parties have elected anti-establishment leaders to office who campaigned against the existing leadership of their own parties.

As the attached article in the Washington Post says with regard to Hawley:

“Six senators — Marco Rubio (Fla.) Rick Scott (Fla.,) Josh Hawley (Mo.), Mike Lee (Utah), Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Cynthia M. Lummis (Wyo.) — have called for delaying the vote, scheduled for Wednesday, in which McConnell was expected to be reelected in a secret ballot. Hawley suggested waiting until after the Dec. 6 Senate runoff in Georgia, a delay of weeks…. Hawley quickly endorsed the idea, writing on Twitter, “I don’t know why Senate GOP would hold a leadership vote for the next Congress before this election is finished.” In addition to the Georgia runoff, ballots are still being counted in Arizona and Nevada…. The rebellion represents the most serious challenge to McConnell’s lengthy leadership tenure and comes after Republicans spent millions of dollars on losing Senate races in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, along with saving GOP candidates in Republican-leaning states like Ohio.”

And from POLITICO: “But the election may be different this time. In addition to the trio circulating the letter, Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) also want to delay the elections. Hawley says he will vote against McConnell as leader, and Sen.-elect Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) has said the Senate GOP needs new leadership.”

It’s not likely that Hawley, Schmitt, and Cori Bush share much other than being Missourians, but all three have become critics, often quite serious critics, of their own party’s leadership. Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other members of “The Squad” seem to be successful in pushing their party leftward; it remains to be seen whether Hawley and others like him will push the Republicans rightward.

What is clear is that Hawley and Schmitt are ending whatever deference remained among Republicans toward the party leadership. Not that many years ago, it was a Senate tradition that a newly elected senator would not speak on the Senate floor for his first year of service, during which time that newly-elected senator would learn Senate traditions and come to understand the collegiality of the Senate and how what was sometimes called “Washington’s Most Exclusive Club” worked. It would have been unthinkable for someone like Schmitt, before even taking his oath of office, to publicly attack the Republican minority leader of his own party in the Senate.

People can legitimately argue about whether this new anti-establishment attitude among Republicans is good or bad. Democrats on the national level are used to having an internally fractured caucus; that’s relatively new for Republicans.

Missouri Republicans, despite having a supermajority in the Missouri legislature, have seen conservative groups tie up the legislature with serious internal fights. At the national level, Senator Mitch McConnell survived his leadership battle, but it remains to be seen whether the House Freedom Caucus will derail the efforts by current House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to succeed Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House.

With a one-vote Democratic majority in the Senate and not much more of a majority for Republicans in the House, the leadership of both parties have no choice but to listen to every member of their caucuses, including those who like their leaders the least.

Time will tell what will happen to Republicans and Democrats in both chambers. What does appear clear is that whoever becomes the next Speaker of the House will have great difficulty leading a fractured group of Republicans, and the Republicans in the Senate will make life quite difficult for McConnell as well.

Here’s a link to the Washington Post article referenced above: Some Republicans call for delaying Senate GOP leadership elections — The Washington Post

Here’s a link to the Politico article referenced above: Top Senate Republicans push forward amid calls to delay leadership elections — POLITICO