So w/r/t Eric Greitens, the governor getting scandaled pretty hard in Missouri rn \u2013 a thing is going into the \u201916 cycle Republicans weren\u2019t expected to have a chance at that office, especially after their leading prospect committed the major gaffe of shooting himself in the goddamn head.
But Greitens won, running like all his Republican primary opponents on a promise of \u201cNo More Fergusons\u201d. By which was not meant reforms to police practices that led to the shooting death of Michael Brown, or the revenue-oriented policing that added fuel to the ensuing protests. What was meant was that he would have firmly suppressed them with force, in contrast to his indulgent Democratic predecessor Jay Nixon, whose forbearance allowed them to drag on.
This resonated with residual concerns about the racialized protests at the flagship University of Missouri in 2015-6, at that time overseen by a Nixon-appointed Board of Curators, which resulted in the resignation of the President and Chancellor. In following years, attendance numbers declined. A line of attack came together \u2013 Democrats\u2019 indulgence was allowing black protesters free reign to degrade the state and its institutions.
Missouri isn\u2019t a \u201cDeep South\u201d state but a borderland between Mississippi Dixie and the Great Lakes Midwest. At 11.49% of total population, it\u2019s the 20th-blackest state, behind Delaware and New Jersey. Missouri\u2019s congressional delegation, state legislature, and electoral votes went firmly red in the early 2000s, but Democrats were still considered competitive, alternating in statewide offices and holding a US Senate seat. I looked at the website of Chris Koster, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, and remember one banner \u2013 of a white female teacher bending over to help a black student at their desk \u2013 that for all its stock photo look summarized the state Democratic coalition pretty well \u2013 women, blacks, public employees, union members, providers and recipients of social services.
This was a pretty standard coalition for the Democratic \u201csolid south\u201d in the wake of the Voting Rights Act (plus farmers and holdover local power brokers) \u2013 this was Bill Clinton\u2019s base in Arkansas, it was the base George Wallace was serving later in life when he renounced Jim Crow. And in the interest of maintaining this coalition, Nixon and the Missouri Democrats acted under the need to satisfy their black base (not only are engaged black voters key to statewide races, but as white voters turned Missouri red at the legislative level in the early 2000s, the party\u2019s internal power structure became blacker through evaporation \u2013 both Missouri Democrats in the US House are part of the Congressional Black Caucus), while hopefully not alienating their white base.
And it seems they didn\u2019t quite pull it off \u2013 Greitens won by 6%, coming in 5% behind Trump but a significant improvement on the previous Republican gubernatorial margins of -12% and -19%.
With Trump sucking up all the air there\u2019s a tendency to attribute political shifts to his agency \u2013 \u201cthe party realignment of the midwest on the Dixie model, with the white working class to the Republicans\u201d \u2013 is regarded as the thing Trump did, but seeing it play out in Missouri independent of his influence, it might be better to think of it as the thing that did Trump.
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