Illustration by Danny Elchert
Bellwether: 1. a male sheep, usually wearing a bell, that leads the flock. 2. a leader, esp. of a sheeplike crowd. 3. anything suggesting the general tendency or direction of events, style, etc. —Webster’s New World College Dictionary
In American elections, a state’s political reputation is only as good as its latest showing at the polls. New Hampshire once boasted that no candidate could win the presidency without first wooing the Granite State—until, that is, Bill Clinton did it in 1992. Once a minor player in national elections, Iowa has lately seen its political scratch jump off the charts. These days, a win in Ohio or Florida usually means the election is over, whereas a win in Alabama means only that a Republican was running. For Missouri, on the other hand, national elections have given us the reputation of being a “bellwether” state—or at least they did.
If it hasn’t already been pounded into your head by CNN, Missouri is a bellwether state, in that it has sided with the winning candidate in every presidential election since 1904, save 1956 and now 2008. At the heart of Missouri’s bellwether-ness has been the idea, comforting to the nation’s pundit class, that within our cities and towns could be found the perfect analog of the country as a whole—north and south, rural and urban, black and white—a kind of folksy distillation of the political zeitgeist.
We believed it, too, because deep in the heart of every Midwesterner is the common-sense belief that if people in Missourah won’t cotton to your ideas, the rest of the country won’t buy them either. For a long time, that narrative seemed to fit. But the truth is, Missouri has been losing its bellwether mojo for some time. The only difference now is that the rest of the country has finally taken notice.
Democrats are quick to point out that McCain won Missouri by only the slimmest of margins—less than one-tenth of 1 percent, or about one vote per precinct. But it was a victory, nonetheless, and given the amount of resources the Obama campaign poured into the state (140 full-time paid staff vs. McCain’s 12), the loss stings more than a little for the Show-Me Democrats.
“We were the only targeted state that didn’t vote for Barack Obama in what was clearly a national Democratic phenomenon,” says Jared Craighead, head of the Missouri Republican Party. “It tells you how clearly conservative the voters are here.”
What’s more, our “clearly conservative” state is driving deeper toward the red. As Josh Goodman points out on his Ballot Box blog (ballotbox.governing.com), during the last several presidential elections, Missouri has skewed consistently—and increasingly—more conservative than the country as a whole.
During the 1996 election, for instance, Bill Clinton thumped Bob Dole nationally by an 8.5 percent margin. In Missouri, however, Clinton bested Dole by only 6.3 percent—a gap of 2.2 percent. In 2000, when Al Gore won the national popular vote but lost the election, a majority of Missouri voters sided with George W. Bush. Out of step with the country’s popular will, Missouri retained its bellwether status only after Bush secured the presidency in the Electoral College. The gap increased again in 2004, when the incumbent Bush beat challenger John Kerry by a margin of 2.4 percent in the national popular vote. In Missouri, meanwhile, Bush pounded Kerry by 7.2 percent, creating a gap between the Show-Me State and the rest of the country of 4.8 percent. By the time the 2008 election rolled around, the gap between Missouri voters and the rest of the country had reached a full 6.9 percent—an electoral tipping point of sorts that finally placed Missouri on the losing side of the ballot.
One of the most ready explanations for this trend is the state’s relatively small immigrant population—a disparity that became all the more evident in 2008, when immigrant voter rolls swelled across the country. Whereas the Latino vote grew to comprise about 9 percent of all ballots cast nationally—voting more than 2-to-1 for Barack Obama—Missouri Latinos account for only 2.8 percent of the state’s total population. Further, it’s estimated that less than half of that population is eligible to vote.
But while the rest of the country’s Latino population is booming, it’s hard to imagine Missouri’s immigrant population growing anytime soon. Tough new immigration laws such as HB 1549, which, among other things, empowers state patrol officers to enforce federal immigration law and levies stiff fines against state contractors that employ illegal workers, have made many immigrants say they do not feel welcome in the Show-Me State.
“It sends a clear signal that Missouri is not interested in our presence here—legal or otherwise,” says Jorge Riopedre, president of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan St. Louis. “If I was thinking of relocating [my family or business], Missouri would not be on my list.”
But racial demographics were by no means the only factor keeping Missouri out of joint with the national mood. Six years of war in the Middle East coupled with a double-barreled economic crisis were enough to raise serious concerns among right-leaning voters about GOP leadership. In Missouri, by contrast, census data indicate that nearly 40 percent of voters identify as evangelical or born-again Christian (the national average is 26 percent). It’s a demographic that tends to vote on the basis of moral issues and remains loyal to the GOP.
In the state’s evangelical stronghold of Springfield—home to the conservative Baptist Bible College and Evangel University—Pastor John Lindell presides over the James River Assembly, an evangelical megachurch with a Sunday attendance of 9,000. Unlike his Pentecostal forebears Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggart, Lindell says he doesn’t take a hard-line approach to sermonizing
about politics.
“I see my role as informing the congregation on those issues that have moral ramification—abortion or gambling,” says Lindell, who concedes that most of his congregation is probably Republican, but insists his church maintains an “apolitical posture.” He notes, “We would speak on the moral issue and encourage them to vote in a way that will uphold Biblical morality.”
For Matthew Patterson, the 30-year-old executive director of the Greene County Democratic Central Committee, however, the region’s singular focus on moral issues and distrust of big-city politicians is a supreme challenge when it comes to engaging with voters on issues like the economy.
“It could be very frustrating,” says Patterson. “No matter what their economic situation is, or what their bread-and-butter needs were … It just came down to issues like guns, abortion or the persistent belief that he [Obama] is a Muslim.”
Patterson freely admits that he thinks racism played a part in Obama’s Missouri defeat. Others have put the issue on the table as well, and in the days after the election, Saint Louis University political scientist Ken Warren drew the ire of then-Gov. Matt Blunt for saying as much.
“Ken Warren’s claim that Missourians who supported Sen. John McCain for president are racists is abhorrent and should be condemned by officials in both political parties,” said Blunt in a widely circulated prepared statement.
But despite its fall from bellwether grace, Missouri is hardly likely to align itself with the likes of, say, Alabama or Utah. Democrats fared quite well in statewide races, with Gov. Jay Nixon swamping challenger Kenny Hulshof by a whopping 17 percentage points. Democrats also picked up high-profile spots in the attorney general’s and treasurer’s offices, as well as held the secretary of state’s office.
Meanwhile, Missouri Republicans grouse that their problems stem in part from Blunt’s unwillingness to seek a second term, which forced a bitter and divisive primary.
“I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that either party is dominating Missouri,” says former Gov. Bob Holden. “It’s very much a tossup state.”
Clearly, one can be elected to statewide office as either a Democrat or Republican, but a quick look at our brand-name Democrats—Carnahan, McCaskill, Holden and Nixon—shows that it clearly doesn’t hurt to be white or from a rural part of the state.
So maybe we have lost our bellwether status, but one person’s broken bellwether is another’s independent streak. Missourians are notorious “ticket-splitters,” which means the state will always be in play during national elections. Likewise, our 11 Electoral College votes aren’t chump change, and the state’s geographic location—with lots of crossover between neighboring states—makes us a prime target for campaigns looking to get a lot of bang for their advertising buck.
Nonetheless, these days pundits are talking about places like Ohio and New Mexico as the new political bellwethers. These states may be less conservative and more diverse than Missouri, but if our bellwether experience teaches us anything, it’s that a state’s political leanings often fall in and out of sync with the national mood.
Honestly, though, hasn’t the whole bellwether story always seemed a bit outmoded and showboaty for Missouri? After all, it’s a pretty crude indicator—one that has never sufficiently reflected the complexity of the country’s population. Perhaps now that the 2008 election has expanded the electorate to more accurately reflect our country’s diversity, the nation is finally waking up to a reality that has always been there: We are much more complicated than liberal vs. conservative, red vs. blue or black vs. white. So, really, it’s not Missouri’s fault that our bellwether seems broken. It never rang true to begin with.
