Dude, who even knows.
Post with 13 notes
So w/r/t Eric Greitens, the governor getting scandaled pretty hard in Missouri rn – a thing is going into the ’16 cycle Republicans weren’t 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 “No More Fergusons”. 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 – Democrats’ indulgence was allowing black protesters free reign to degrade the state and its institutions.
Missouri isn’t a “Deep South” state but a borderland between Mississippi Dixie and the Great Lakes Midwest. At 11.49% of total population, it’s the 20th-blackest state, behind Delaware and New Jersey. Missouri’s 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 – of a white female teacher bending over to help a black student at their desk – that for all its stock photo look summarized the state Democratic coalition pretty well – women, blacks, public employees, union members, providers and recipients of social services.
This was a pretty standard coalition for the Democratic “solid south” in the wake of the Voting Rights Act (plus farmers and holdover local power brokers) – this was Bill Clinton’s 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’s internal power structure became blacker through evaporation – 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’t quite pull it off – 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’s a tendency to attribute political shifts to his agency – “the party realignment of the midwest on the Dixie model, with the white working class to the Republicans” – 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.