“Friendship trumps politics,” said Michael Graham, a Democrat, right, who poses for a portrait with his long-time close friend Rich Lowe, a Republican, in front of his house in De Soto on Friday, Jan. 28, 2022. Photo by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
JEFFERSON COUNTY — When Jeff Allen finds a thought-provoking news topic trending on YouTube, he challenges himself to do more research until he finds middle ground. Sometimes it’s hard to do, but the former car salesman said he knows a snake oil sales pitch when he hears one.
It often involves politics.
“A lot of people just want to live a simple life, and they are used to living the old-fashioned way,” said Allen, 43, of House Springs, taking a break from burning trash in the back yard to explain. “If you are a politician, you are going to cater to that mindset.”
In these parts, he said, Republicans are really good at telling people what they want to hear. They affirm faith in Jesus, even among nonvoters, and stoke fear that the Democrats want to take their rifles away.
“People are used to being led along,” Allen said.
As Missouri readies for what’s expected to be a hotly contested race to replace U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt, a Republican, quick-fix sales pitches are starting to resurface. So is a head-scratching conundrum that Allen and others are trying to better understand.
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Every day — sometimes all day — they are told how polarized the country is. It’s so bad anymore that there’s not even a center aisle to reach across in the spirit of compromise. Maybe so for elected leaders in Jefferson City and Washington, but people whose only official interaction with politics is the voting booth tell a more complex story.
They say, through their referendum votes, that blue still exists on the color wheel. That there indeed is common ground.
In 2018 and 2020, Missouri voters were asked a number of “Yes” or “No” questions:
• Do you want to raise the minimum wage from $7.85 to $12 by 2023?
• Do you want to legalize medical marijuana?
• Do you support unions and their call to reject a “right-to-work” open shop law?
• Do you want to expand Medicaid to those whose incomes are less than 138% of the federal poverty level?
• Do you want to redraw state legislative district boundaries in a nonpartisan way?
The majority of voters statewide answered “Yes” to each of these questions typically championed by Democrats. All the while, they elected and reelected swarms of Republican lawmakers who have tried to derail popular vote decisions.
“It’s counterproductive,” said Allen, smoke drifting from the burn pile. “You have somebody fighting against you, not for you.”
For the U.S. Senate race, this argument likely won’t go far in deep rural areas, where Republican candidates are all but guaranteed significant vote tonnage. In many circles, the Aug. 2 primary race will determine the ultimate winner because none of the Democrats has a chance.
It’s less clear in places like Jefferson County, which borders one of the last bulwarks of the Democratic Party in Missouri. The county starts out in Arnold, as a southern extension of the St. Louis suburbs, then drops off into a rugged backdrop suited for the “Call of the Wild.”
Yes, the red tide has lifted a lot of johnboats. Democratic candidates continue to change party affiliation to Republican. But many voters here, and in other parts of the state, don’t fit neatly into a box. Keep going one more county south, in Ste. Genevieve, and the leader of the Democratic Party says he opposes abortion and COVID-19 mask mandates. Union support makes him stay put.
Some voters here not only remember when they, their parents or their grandparents voted for Democrats, a bunch of them still do.
While the majority of Jefferson County voters didn’t want to expand Medicaid in 2020, they overwhelmingly supported unions in the 2018 primary, with 78% of 59,847 total votes cast against Prop A. They also chose to raise the minimum wage and legalize medical marijuana.
“It’s not that people don’t like Democratic ideas in this county,” said Robert Butler, chairman of the Jefferson County Democratic Party. “They just don’t like Democrats.”
Why is that?
"Twenty years ago you had to be a Democrat to win a political seat. Now to win, you have to be a Republican," Clayton Henry, owner of Henry & Sons Guns & Ammo in De Soto, says Friday, Jan. 28, 2022. Henry, a long-time union worker, says he's an Independent but leans Republican. Photo by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
‘A big shift to the right’
Not long ago, Jefferson County was staunchly Democratic. U.S. Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-St. Louis, represented the county. The county is now part of three Congressional districts, all held by Republicans.
Gephardt, the former House majority leader, ran for president in 1988 and 2004, and was often touted as a possible candidate for vice president. Missouri Democrats don’t have that kind of firepower anymore to swoop in and help garner votes for fellow politicians.
Statewide, Auditor Nicole Galloway is the highest-ranking Democrat. She’s stepping down after this term, licking her wounds from a loss to Republican Mike Parson for governor last election. Jefferson County produced former Democratic governor Jay Nixon, who left statewide politics in 2017.
U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-St. Louis, has a loyal following among Black voters, but not among rural and suburban whites. Yet in 2008, Jefferson County voters supported Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden for president and vice president over Republicans John McCain and Sarah Palin. Four years later, local voters favored Republicans Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan at the top of the ticket, and incumbent Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, in Congress. In 2018, voters supported Josh Hawley over McCaskill.
Butler, chairman of the Jefferson County Democratic Party, said a notable shift happened in 2016, when Hillary Clinton ran for president against Republican Donald Trump.
“Donald Trump appealed to people in this county,” he said. “But I think more so, Hillary Clinton did not.”
She’d previously been first lady of Arkansas, where rural poverty is similar to pockets of Jefferson County, but Butler said many people here saw her as a “New York liberal” who didn’t even try to connect.
“A symptom of that mood created a big shift to the right,” said Butler. “I think this county will recover in a period of time. I don’t know if 2022 will be the year it shifts.”
He said poor messaging from the “defund police” movement caused further setbacks at a time when many people can agree that police shouldn’t be overly militarized. He said the Black Lives Matter movement has been both misunderstood and exploited by some in Jefferson County.
“They are not saying Black lives matter more,” he said. “They are saying, ‘We matter, too.’ In the city, it makes, to me, very good sense. That message is twisted by people who know better and accepted by those who don’t.”
The last time Blunt’s seat was up, Jason Kander, running as a Democrat, came within 3 percentage points of beating Blunt statewide, or within 78,258 votes. Blunt carried Jefferson County, but Kander landed 46,975 votes here. In one political ad that left a mark, Kander, an Army veteran, put a rifle together blindfolded, explaining why he supported background checks.
Kander declined to be interviewed by phone for this story. Asked by email what he recommended to Democrats running this time around, he wrote: “Voters will forgive you for believing something they don’t, so long as they can see you believe it because you care about them.”
But what about those ballot issue votes that signal Missourians have more shared beliefs than appears to be so?
In response, he wrote, those issues have one thing in common:
“Getting them done makes it more likely that our kids will be able to raise their kids here. Rural or not, we’re all just worried our kids will move away for opportunity. The Democratic message in the South and the Midwest has got to be that we make it so that your family can be happy, healthy, safe and nearby. It’s the nearby part that progressives on the coasts tend to overlook, even though we have a fantastic case to make.”
‘We all want the same things’
Filing for the U.S. Senate race opens Feb. 22. More than a dozen people have already announced their campaigns in Missouri. Several people interviewed across Jefferson County couldn’t name any of the candidates.
Michael Graham, 62, of De Soto, said he had heard rumblings about the Missouri attorney general “being a thorn in the side” of school districts by filing lawsuits over mask mandates. Other than that, he’s been busy, helping take care of his wife and little dogs. He retired in July, after working 33 years at ABB in St. Louis, lastly as a $26-an-hour die setter making electric motor parts.
“That’s a good place to work,” he said.
Though he wasn’t part of a union, he said, organized labor throughout St. Louis helped keep wages up. Enough to motivate his commute from Jefferson County many of those years.
Graham is representative of voters who don’t fit into one neat box. He voted for President Biden but likes some of the things that Trump was able to accomplish when he was in office.
“I know there’s a lot of division,” he said. “But there is a lot of unity, too.”
Many of his friends are Republicans. They look out for each other.
“I don’t hate them,” he said. “We all want the same things, but have a different way of going about it.”
A few blocks away, Kristine Martin schlepped laundry at a De Soto laundromat. She works as a neonatal intensive care nurse in St. Louis. Her husband is a technician. After taxes and paying for programs for their four children, she said, they don’t have enough money to afford their own washer and dryer.
She said her Christian faith typically leads her to Republican candidates, but she did support raising the minimum wage. One caveat, though.
“You need to work for your money,” said Martin, 42. “It shouldn’t just be handed out. There are circumstances when people do need help, others who are just working the system.”
She said politicians eventually turned COVID relief payments into a “free for all.”
“It’s irritating,” Martin said. “Get to work. Go to work. Places have to go out of business because they can’t get help.”
Julie Graves, 53, who works in Hematite, a small unincorporated community where nuclear fuel used to be produced along Joachim Creek, said many people get blinded by hype. Of the sampling of interviews with the Post-Dispatch, she knew the most about the progressive ballot issues that Missourians passed.
“I don’t understand why they vote for the candidates they do when a lot of the issues faced would be helped from the other side,” she said.
She said Republicans are probably better presenting themselves differently than what they really are. She said she’s going to vote for a Democrat in the Senate race, but she already feels defeat.
Democrats aren’t making noise. The only thing close in Hematite is a large Biden sign with an expletive starting with the letter “F.”
“They gotta get out there first and be as loud as the former president with what they can do for people,” she said.
Heather Neal, 62, of Cedar Hill, said Republicans have done an effective job targeting one- and two-issue voters.
“Democrats need to get the message across somehow that they are not after their guns, that they are not after killing full-term babies,” said Neal, who does home repair. “That’s what most people care about here.”
Neal tends to support Democrats, but she may vote in the Republican primary for the upcoming Senate race.
That way she’ll feel like she has more control over who doesn’t end up in office.
Table: Jefferson County votes on progressive referendums
Jefferson County voters rejected Right to Work to 2018, supported an increase in the minimum wage, legalization of medical marijuana and the “Clean Missouri” amendment that addressed lobbying, campaign finance and redistricting. But support for Medicaid expansion lagged the rest of the state. Source: Jefferson County Clerk
| Date | Ballot issue | Summary | Yes votes | No votes | Yes pct. | No pct. | Vote margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug. 4, 2020 | Amendment 2 | Expand Medicaid under the ACA | 18,991 | 22,063 | 46.26% | 53.74% | -7.48% |
| Nov. 6, 2018 | Amendment 1 | Address lobbying, campaign finance, and redistricting | 52,858 | 35,157 | 60.06% | 39.94% | 20.11% |
| Nov. 6, 2018 | Amendment 2 | Legalize marijuana for medical purposes | 60,381 | 29,406 | 67.25% | 32.75% | 34.50% |
| Nov. 6, 2018 | Proposition B | Increase minimum wage to $12 | 52,910 | 36,431 | 59.22% | 40.78% | 18.45% |
| Aug. 7, 2018 | Proposition A | Approval would uphold a right to work law | 12,896 | 46,951 | 21.55% | 78.45% | -56.90% |
Table: Missouri votes on progressive referendums
Missouri is considered a red state that tends to support Republican candidates, but the majority of voters recently have supported issues promoted by Democrats. Source: Jefferson County Clerk Source: Missouri Secretary of State
| Date | Ballot issue | Summary | Yes votes | No votes | Yes pct. | No pct. | Vote margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug. 4, 2020 | Amendment 2 | Expand Medicaid under the ACA | 676,687 | 593,491 | 53.27% | 46.73% | 6.55% |
| Nov. 6, 2018 | Amendment 1 | Address lobbying, campaign finance, and redistricting | 1,469,093 | 899,613 | 62.02% | 37.98% | 24.04% |
| Nov. 6, 2018 | Amendment 2 | Legalize marijuana for medical purposes | 1,583,227 | 830,631 | 65.59% | 34.41% | 31.18% |
| Nov. 6, 2018 | Proposition B | Increase minimum wage to $12 | 1,499,002 | 905,647 | 62.34% | 37.66% | 24.68% |
| Aug. 7, 2018 | Proposition A | Approval would uphold a right to work law | 453,283 | 939,973 | 32.53% | 67.47% | -34.93% |
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If this county is an indication, Missouri voters don't fit into easy categories - St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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