Photography by AP Photo/St. Joseph News-Press, Jessica Stewart
If there’s anything sacrosanct in Missouri politics, it’s the virtue of small-town life.
There’s no more important line on Gov. Jay Nixon’s résumé than “I grew up in a small town.” When we think of small towns, romantic images spring forth about America the way it once was, with kindly neighbors and peaceful, tree-lined streets, with houses and cars that don’t need locks.
It’s all Norman Rockwell, all the time. As Nixon likes to say, small towns embody “the common values we all share.”
But I’ve got news for Nixon: If that were true, you wouldn’t be governor. And while Gov. Dave Spence readied his State of the State speech, we’d be looking forward to the agendas of Sen. Todd Akin and Attorney General Ed Martin.
A county-by-county analysis of 2012 election returns reveals a stunning divide between urban and rural voters, one that hardly indicates “common values.” The smaller counties voted against Nixon and his fellow candidates, while the larger, more urban counties supported them.
You’d never know this by observing the statewide candidates—especially the Democrats—as they go to such great lengths to bolster their outstate bona fides.
It’s fine that they pay homage to small-town Missouri’s values, its character, its moral fiber. But have you ever heard similar rhetoric about city residents, or for that matter, suburbanites? Instead, St. Louis and Kansas City are extolled mainly when a sports team is involved.
When you look at who voted for whom (and what) this past November, it’s hard to understand why Nixon and other elected officials are so unfailingly respectful of the guns-and-God, pro-smoking, antitax, homophobic, puppy mill–coddling agenda of country folk. But they are.
With that in mind, I decided to break down the vote by county size, and the results were fascinating. There are lots of ways to define “small town,” but for this purpose, I found a natural breaking point at the 53 counties that have populations under 18,000. Here are some results:
• Spence carried 72 of Missouri’s 115 counties, winning the 53 smallest counties by a sizable 6 percent margin. Nixon still beat him by 333,000 votes, or 12.5 percent.
• Akin carried 62 counties. Despite his legitimate 15.7-percentage-point thrashing by Sen. Claire McCaskill, he won the smallest counties by a margin of 4 percent.
• Even Martin, a ridiculous candidate, won 55 counties and would have beaten Attorney General Chris Koster by 1 percentage point, had the results been confined to the smallest counties. Instead, Koster won overall by more than 400,000 votes.
• The presidential totals were really something, as Mitt Romney carried 112 counties, winning the smallest counties by an astounding 38 percentage points. President Barack Obama garnered 270,000 fewer votes than three candidates below him on his own ticket. One bright spot for him: St. Louis County, where he won 57 percent of the vote.
• The smallest counties gave a 20-percentage-point margin to Republican Shane Schoeller over Democrat Jason Kander for secretary of state, and a 16-percentage-point margin to Republican Cole McNary over Democrat Clint Zweifel for treasurer. Both Kander and Zweifel won narrowly.
One takeaway might be that St. Louis and Kansas City voters wielded great power in getting five of six statewide Democratic candidates elected. But this wasn’t a matter of metro versus outstate Missouri: Counties with midsize cities didn’t vote like the small counties. The divide is urban versus rural, big towns versus small towns.
In Boone County, dominated by the University of Missouri and the city of Columbia, overwhelming wins were scored by McCaskill (65 to 35 percent), Koster (63 to 37 percent), and Nixon (61 to 39 percent). Even Obama won. In outstate Buchanan County (where St. Joseph is located), the three statewide Democratic candidates also won with ease.
More surprisingly, McCaskill, Koster, and Nixon all eked out narrow wins in conservative Greene County, home of Springfield. Maybe geography mattered more than political party in many instances.
But the most telling election result didn’t involve a candidate. It was the narrow defeat of Proposition B, the measure to raise tobacco taxes and end Missouri’s dubious distinction as the nation’s lowest-cigarette-tax state. Missouri doesn’t merely rank last in how it taxes a pack of cigarettes. At 17 cents per pack, it’s 43 percent below the next-lowest state, tobacco-growing Virginia, and at a rate of less than one-eighth of the national average.
Given that the state ranks at or near the bottom nationally in how it compensates its state employees (that lovely 48th-place ranking among public-school teachers leaps to mind), and the estimate that Proposition B would have brought more than $280 million annually to a cash-strapped state—while reducing teen-smoking rates, tobacco-induced cancer deaths, and the attendant healthcare costs and suffering that precede same—you’d think it might pass easily.
Not so, thanks in large part to rural Missouri. The tax hike failed in 105 of the state’s 115 counties. Among those 53 counties with fewer than 18,000 residents, it failed by a staggering 30-percentage-point margin. That’s almost as much as they hated on Obama, which is saying something.
If this seems a little strange to you, perhaps it’s because you’re one of the 61 percent of St. Louis city voters or 59 percent of St. Louis County voters who supported the tax increase. Here again, it wasn’t just about St. Louis and K.C. (where 62 percent were in favor) getting pitted against the entire state: Prop. B carried in such Republican bastions as Greene and St. Charles counties, as well as Boone, Platte, and Adair counties.
There wasn’t much of a middle ground on this one: Rural and urban voters each had their big majorities, and the small-town passions prevailed by just 40,000 votes—1.5 percent of the total cast.
There was plenty of irony in the defeat of Proposition B. Just two years earlier, another Prop. B had torn the state asunder between rural and urban interests: a measure to crack down on animal abuses in the state’s notorious puppy mills.
In that one, the urban side won a narrow, 64,000-vote victory of its own.
So it was win one, lose one—an even split for the divided state. Right?
Not exactly. And herein lies the problem with politicians’ worship of small-town values.
In 2011, the General Assembly wasted no time in tending to the wounds of rural Missouri. In a stunning display of audacity, the legislators flatly nullified the will of the people with “corrective measures.” It was as if the vote hadn’t happened. Nixon brokered something he called the “Missouri solution,” a political compromise that addressed only the most egregious conditions while allowing the state to continue its reign as the nation’s puppy-mill capital. A cruel industry—no, a way of life—was preserved for small-town Missouri. And that was that.
So as we enter 2013, with another Proposition B, how about some “corrective” action on this one? Far be it from me to suggest the sort of nullification move that legislators performed on the puppy-mill Proposition B. But why not a “Missouri solution” on this one?
The legislators could enact a 12-cent increase in the tobacco tax, one that would bring Missouri’s tax to 29 cents per pack. This would mean that Missouri could continue to maintain its insane status as the state with the lowest cigarette-tax rate in America, but it would at least rise to the bottom of the national rankings.
Such a move would raise up to approximately $64 million per year, a sizable amount, but one small enough to be done by the legislature on its own. It would fall below the amount for which a public vote is required under the oppressive Hancock Amendment. That could provide a nice boost to Medicaid expansion, for example, while adding less than one-sixth of the tax hike that voters so narrowly turned down.
I suggested this to a progressive legislator, who politely inquired as to whether I’d lost my mind. The measure wouldn’t make it into a legislative committee, much less out of one, she said. And she was a big supporter of Proposition B.
The tale of two Proposition Bs tells you all you need to know. When the rural side loses, the politicians shift into full apology mode. When the urban side loses, why, the people have spoken. How dare we question that?
Don’t elections matter?
Didn’t we, the urban voters, just see to it that statewide Democratic candidates won five out of six seats? Does our 60 percent margin favoring a tobacco-tax increase not matter to legislators?
The answers are obvious, and so is this: Missouri’s small-town narrative has a real downside to it. For all of their well-documented virtues, rural residents don’t have the most cosmopolitan of worldviews. They aren’t fans of nuance. They don’t want to hear about statistics on state services. They want government out of their lives, except when they need it. They want their guns and God, farm subsidies and disaster relief—and more money for the troops. Now go away.
Their reflexive reaction on the tobacco-tax debacle is a real problem here. This isn’t 1954, and this isn’t Mayberry. This is a state of 6 million people—the nation’s 18th most populous—with a $23 billion budget competing in a global economy. There are serious challenges, and some of them are complicated.
Quaint is lovely, and quaint is much to be admired. But small-town values don’t always solve big-city problems.
Don’t take my word for it, though, governor. Try listening to the voters who elected you.
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
