Is Missouri still a swing state?
Is Missouri still a swing state?
A rare state where "demographic destiny" is in favor of Republicans.
Topline Takeaways
While Missouri was once swing state, the disappearance of conservative Democrats has turned the state into a Republican stronghold.
Republican success in Missouri was jump started by the introduction of term limits in the late 1990s. This led to major turnover in the state legislature and the ousting of many Democrats who had served for decades.
Missouri’s electorate is getting older and staying more heavily White than most other states in the US, making things difficult for Democrats among the state’s electorate.
In-Depth Insights
Donald Trump’s win in Missouri is part of a decades-long shift of the state’s rural voters away from the Democratic party and toward Republicans. For much of the state’s history, Missouri was known as a bellwether state as it supported the winning candidate in every single presidential election between 1904 and 2004 (with the 1956 election being the only exception.) After giving John McCain the win by a minuscule ~4,000 vote margin in 2008, Missouri increasingly favored Republican presidential candidates, eventually voting to the right of Republican strongholds like Texas, Georgia and South Carolina. The state’s rightward lean is due in part to the defection of conservative Democrats to the Republican party throughout the 2010s.
These were Democrats by nature of their heritage, not necessarily their views on policy. As the decades passed into the new millennium, the national Democratic party embraced liberal positions on social issues like abortion, gay marriage and gun rights that alienated more conservative Southern Democrats. While Republicans began making inroads among this coalition in the late 20th century an important fault line was opened in Missouri with new legislation that enforced term limits on state legislators.
In 1992, Missouri voters approved a ballot initiative that prevented state legislators from serving more than eight years in either the state House or Senate. The new law took effect in 2000 and had drastic impacts on the legislature. In 2002, a near majority of representatives were removed and nearly two-thirds of the state senate was prevented from running for office again by 2004. This all happened at a time when the state Republican party was making gains through clever partnerships with groups like Missouri Right to Life and the NRA. These groups helped show conservative Democrats that the new faces of the Democratic party largely sat at odds with voters’ sentiments on social issues and helped foment fear around topics like gay marriage and stem cell research. Together, these political shifts produced resounding, repeatable success for Missouri Republicans. By 2005, Republicans were able to flip both houses of the legislature in their favor and retook the governorship with the election of Matt Blunt, son of Sen. Roy Blunt. This lurch to the right stood as a warning sign for liberal transplants looking for new places to live and likely influenced the state’s demographic trajectory.
While Democrats used to regularly score county wins across the state, the last two decades have seen their base consolidate into three hubs: St. Louis in the east, Columbia in the center of the state and Kansas City to the west. The urbanized centers of these three cities comprise slightly more than a third of the state’s voters and slightly more than half of Missouri voters live in one of these three expansive metropolitan areas.
While the nation as a whole was becoming more diverse throughout the new millennium, Missouri’s population remained heavily White: the White population only dropped by 7 percentage points between 1990 and 2020 while it dropped by nearly 20 points for the nation as a whole. St. Louis also stands as one of the few cities in the United States that has seen consistent declines in its population dating all the way back to 1960. While many Democrats believe that demographics are destiny as most of the nation’s growing demographic groups regularly vote for their party, Republicans in Missouri have found a way to press pause on these shifts, extending their own successes among Missouri’s largely White, working class electorate.
Forecasting the Future: Republicans have cemented their success in Missouri alongside the rise of Donald Trump as four of the state’s executive offices flipped to Republicans following the 2016 election. Even better for the GOP, rural areas that have traditionally favored Democrats are still shifting towards Republicans with nearly 13 counties voting for Trump in 2020 at higher margins than they did in 2016. Slivers of hope are scattered about for Democrats and they’re struggling to put the pieces together. The party has been rebuilding their base in the suburbs of the state’s cities, some of the only places seeing consistent growth within the state. Voters have also approved several ballot initiatives over the past few years that align more closely with Democratic priorities than Republican ones: including legalizing medicinal marijuana, raising the minimum wage to $12/hr and supporting Medicaid expansion. Despite these optimistic signs, the path ahead for Democrats is likely to be a long, uphill battle. In a state where demographic change is trending in the opposite direction from the rest of the country, Democratic destiny is defeat.