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On Tuesday, Missouri voters took to the polls to cast their ballots for the state's next U.S. senator, U.S. House representatives in districts 1, 2, and 3, and legalizing recreational marijuana, among other issues. Voters in St. Louis and St. Louis County also voted on a new Board of Aldermen president and in the county executive race.
The first race the Associated Press called, around 9:20 Tuesday evening, was the result of the U.S. Senate race. Republican Eric Schmitt, currently serving as Missouri's attorney general, was projected to beat beer heiress Trudy Busch Valentine, a Democrat, with 456,703 votes and 26 percent of precincts reporting. Schmitt will be taking Sen. Roy Blunt's seat; Blunt was elected to the Senate in 2010. Sen. Josh Hawley is now Missouri's senior senator.
Schmitt is perhaps most well-known for suing Missouri school districts for enforcing mask mandates during COVID-19. The attorney general also filed a lawsuit against China for its role in the pandemic's outbreak.
In May, St. Louis Magazine senior editor Nicholas Phillips wrote a profile of Schmitt in which Phillips asked: "Does being a fighter for certain constituents now mean that you need to strongarm others?" More from that profile by Phillips:
Yet Schmitt announced in his third week on the job that he was the state’s “chief law enforcement officer.” “I cannot stand idly by as communities and lives are torn apart by violence,” he said at a press conference—and indeed, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department had just reported the previous year’s totals: 186 homicides and 350 carjackings.
Thus he launched the Safer Streets Initiative. It may’ve been a first nationwide, says Jeff Jensen, who was then the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Missouri. Schmitt’s idea was to cross-designate his state-paid assistants to help Jensen’s office go after violent federal crime. After a year, they’d indicted 131 defendants in that district alone. Jensen remembers it as a “tremendous” boost and Schmitt’s motivation as sincere. This was just a start: Schmitt would later direct subordinates to help clear the state’s backlog of untested reported-sexual-assault kits—a push that’s resulted in at least three prosecutions—and to set up a cold-case homicide unit.
As the evening went on, Rep. Ann Wagner, a Republican and the U.S. Representative for Missouri's 2nd Congressional District, declared victory over challenger and Democrat Trish Gunby. After 10 p.m., the Associated Press still had not called the race, but returns showed Wagner leading with 56 percent of the vote and 58 percent of precincts reporting.
Congresswoman Cori Bush, a Democrat who represents Missouri's heavily Democrat 1st Congressional District, was expected to easily win re-election. With 40 percent of precincts reporting, returns showed that she led Republican challenger Andrew Jones with 73 percent of the vote.
Elsewhere in the city, Alderwoman Megan Ellyia Green won the special election for Board of Alderman president and will serve in that role for five months, until the municipal election that will determine who serves as board president for the next four years. Green was running against fellow alderman Jack Coatar in the special election to fill former president Lewis Reed's seat. Reed resigned in June amid charges of bribery.
In the county, Sam Page held on to his role as St. Louis County Executive, besting opponent Mark Mantovani with 50.9 percent of the vote and 86 percent of precincts voting. Mantovani has run for county executive before, but as a Democrat. After the winner of the Republican primary dropped out of the county executive race, local leaders selected Mantovani to run as the Republican candidate.
Finally, in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Amendment 3 passed with 53 percent of the vote, legalizing recreational marijuana in the state of Missouri.
