Exgovernor announces Senate bid
O’FALLON, Mo. — Eric Greitens, the former Navy SEAL officer who rose quickly to become Missouri governor before scandal forced him out of office just a year and a half into his tenure, announced this week that he will run for the Senate seat being vacated by fellow Republican Roy Blunt.
The announcement by Greitens, 46, came 14 days after Blunt said he would not seek a third term in 2022.
But Greitens had been laying the groundwork for a return to politics even before Blunt’s announcement, with increasingly frequent appearances on conservative radio and television appealing to supporters of former President Donald Trump, who carried Missouri with 57% of the vote in 2020.
A number of other Republican candidates initially showed interest in replacing Blunt in heavily Republican Missouri, but the GOP field is narrowing.
Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe and early favorite Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft have both said they won’t run, leaving Republican Attorney General Eric Schmitt and several of Missouri’s U.S. representatives as potential Greitens opponents.
“My sense is that the Republican Party has probably sent a clear message to all potential candidates for Blunt’s seat that they want to consolidate their efforts behind one candidate, and a candidate that will be successful,” Webster University political scientist Bill Hall said.
Blunt was the fifth Republican senator to announce he will not seek reelection, a retirement wave that might lead to an ugly campaign season next year and give Democrats fresh hope of preserving their Senate majority.
Greitens was a political outsider when he ran for governor in 2016, but his resume was impressive. In addition to his role in the elite military outfit, he was a bestselling author, a Rhodes scholar and had started a successful charity for veterans.
Greitens defeated establishment Republicans in the primary before winning in November. By the end of his first year in office, Greitens was getting buzz as a potential future presidential contender.
It all began to fall apart in January 2018 when a St. Louis TV station aired a report about an extramarital affair with his hairdresser in 2015, before he was elected. A month later, a grand jury indicted Greitens for invasion of privacy, accusing him of taking a compromising photo of the woman and threatening to use it as blackmail if she ever spoke of the encounter.
Greitens admitted to the affair (he and his wife, Sheena, divorced last year) but denied criminal wrongdoing.