Missouri slips from political bellwether status
Now considered ‘leans Republican’
Missouri has been a bellwether state for more than 100 years, with presidential candidates lavishing attention on Show Me State voters and spending millions on field operations, glossy campaign mailers, and TV ads. But this election? Not so much.
This year, Missouri isn’t on the list of top swing states — those vote-rich battlegrounds that political experts and campaign strategists say will determine who wins the White House on Nov. 6. Most political handicappers instead have Missouri in the “leans Republican” column.
So even though Barack Obama lost Missouri by fewer than 4,000 votes in 2008, the president’s re-election campaign isn’t expected to make a major investment in Missouri this time
“Missouri is not on the presidential TV radar screen right now.”
Elizabeth Wilner, CMAG vice president
around. And Mitt Romney probably won’t be tromping through the state either.
Other states have bumped Missouri aside as an electoral battleground, because of demographic changes and political shifts within their borders. Virginia, for example, has seen a spike in affluent and politically moderate residents, particularly in the suburbs outside Washington. And Colorado and Nevada have seen increases in their Hispanic populations, giving those Western states a purple hue.
Recent TV ad spending, tracked by Kantar Media’s Cam- paign Media Analysis Group, illustrates just how far off the political screen Missouri has fallen. From April 10 to May 29, ad spending clocked in at $8.4 million in Ohio; $4.3 million in Virginia; and almost $4.1 million in Pennsylvania. Down the list were Nevada, North Carolina, Iowa, and Florida.
“Missouri is not on the presidential TV radar screen right now,” says Elizabeth Wilner, who conducted the analysis and is vice president at CMAG.
Missouri hasn’t undergone any major demographic changes, but has seen a few subtle political shifts.
“Clearly it’s slightly more right-of-center today than it has been over the past 20 years,” says Richard Martin, who ran Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill’s 2006 Senate race. “More and more Missourians who are concerned about their own balance sheet are also concerned with the country’s balance sheet, and that just tends to shift voters” rightward.
Still, several statewide Democratic candidates, including incumbent Gov. Jay Nixon, are expected to win in November, and Missouri’s U.S. Senate contest is in the “tossup” column on most political pundits’ lists.
Some political experts even say that Obama and Romney’s advisers are making a mistake in bypassing Missouri, arguing the outcome on election night could be a nail-biter. Polls taken so far, on average, give Romney only a 3-percentage-point edge, according to RealClearPolitics, a website that tracks polls.
“Missouri is probably more competitive than a lot of the pundits think,” says Peverill Squire, a political science professor at the University of Missouri. “The electorate that shows up in 2012 won’t be very different from the electorate that showed up in 2008.”
In that election, Obama and Republican nominee John McCain competed fiercely for Missouri, and the Arizona senator eked out a win with only 49.4% of the vote, to Obama’s 49.2%.
But in 2010, Republican Vicky Hartzler ousted Rep. Ike Skelton — a 17-term incumbent Democrat — and Republican Roy Blunt trounced his Democratic opponent, Robin Carnahan, in the U.S. Senate contest.
"It’s not that Missouri is a tremendously Republican state,” says Jeff Roe, a Missouri-based GOP political consultant who worked for Rick Perry’s presidential campaign. But “Obama can’t afford to spend any time in a state that he didn’t win last time, so that alone takes Missouri off the map,” he said.