In my last commentary I noted that as many as four incumbent Republican congressmen will give up safe seats if they run for the open Senate seat. Perhaps they understand that Greitens is going to win the nomination and they are just getting a statewide campaign under their belts so they’ll have better name recognition when they run for governor in 2024. Or challenge Sen. Hawley, who will be up for reelection then.
I talked with my two political insiders about the race. My Republican source thinks Hawley is a shoe-in in 2024, but you never know.
For the GOP, Missouri will be a major test of the post-Trump hypothesis. Several candidates are actively seeking Trump’s endorsement; others are taking Trumpian positions on the issues. Greitens will again claim “outsider” status and, like Trump, run a grievance-based campaign. He’ll certainly have plenty of money. It is possible, though not likely at this point, that the candidate who goes the Liz Cheney route and repudiates Trump will catch lightning in a bottle. And there may be no such Republican candidate.
Am I leaving something out? Oh yes – there is another political party in Missouri – barely. The only announced Democratic candidate who is known by more than his immediate family is Scott Sifton, a St. Louis area state senator. Former Gov. Jay Nixon may run, but he’s old news. Kansas City mayor Quentin Lucas may run, but he’s unknown and big city mayors don’t do well in statewide elections in Missouri. Blunt’s 2016 opponent Jason Kander is not running. The only Democratic statewide office holder, Auditor Nicole Galloway, is still nursing her wounds from getting trounced for governor in 2020 and has announced she will not seek reelection as Auditor. Lucas Kunce is running as a populist outsider and is raising decent money, but may have residency problems.
Pundits are saying that the only Republican nominee who could lose the general election to a Democrat is Greitens. Sorry – I don’t see it. Both insiders think Nixon could beat Greitens, but in my opinion that would require Greitens to campaign like Todd Akin did in 2012, when he lost to Claire McCaskill. No one, and especially Eric Greitens, is going to run a campaign that clueless. And my Democratic insider thinks Nixon might have trouble getting past the primary because he is out of favor with the leftists in the party.
I’m not sure that Harry Truman or Stuart Symington or Tom Eagleton on their very best days could win a Senate seat in Missouri in the 2020s. Maybe Chief Wana Dube, who came in third in the 2016 Democratic Senate primary, could pull it off. But he died in 2017, so he’d have trouble campaigning.
Democrats can take consolation that it’s fourteen months until the primary and a lot can happen. For example, Trump could declare that he is running for the presidency in 2024 – as a Democrat, which he was registered as for much of his adult life in New York. That might shake things up. He’s done more ridiculous things than that. For example, he continues to claim he was reelected in 2020 and that he will be “reinstated” as president in August.
And of course, when Carl Edwards enters the race, all bets are off.
Dr. Terry Smith is a Columbia College Political Science Professor, and a regular commentator on KBIA's Talking Politics