Eric Greitens may or may not make a political comeback in Missouri.
The race to replace the retiring Roy Blunt in the Senate should not be one that causes Republicans to lose a lot of sleep. Missouri, a competitive state at the presidential level in 2000 and 2008, has been a blowout in recent years; Mitt Romney carried it by a nine-point margin in 2012, and Donald Trump’s margins were 18.5 points in 2016, 15.4 points in 2020. After two terms of Democrat Jay Nixon, the state turned to Republican Eric Greitens by a 51-46 margin in the 2016 gubernatorial race, and his GOP successor Mike Parsons won 57-41 in 2020. Democrat Claire McCaskill, reelected to the Senate by double digits against the unfortunate Todd Akin in 2012, lost 51-46 to Josh Hawley in 2018 in a Democratic-wave year.
Blunt, on the other hand, won by only a 49-46 margin against Jason Kander in 2016 after running up double-digit margins in 2004 and 2010. The 71-year-old Blunt is powerfully placed as Chair of the Senate Republican Policy Committee and ranking member of the Senate Rules Committee, having previously spent a decade in House Republican leadership between 1999 and 2009, but he was first elected to public office in 1973, ran his first statewide campaign in 1980, and was elected Missouri Secretary of State in 1985; he represents the old guard. The state’s populist turn suggests that his successor is likely to be another Hawley-style populist.
Who will that be? There are at least eight declared candidates, and there has been a fair amount of amusement that one of them is Mark McCloskey, an attorney and former McCaskill donor who ended up as a 2020 Republican convention speaker after he was criminally charged for brandishing a rifle at protestors from just outside his house. There are four serious candidates. One is Greitens, who rode a sterling resume to his post as governor only to resign a step ahead of impeachment amidst a nasty tangle of scandal involving sex, money, and extortion. Greitens, who claims that he was railroaded by the state’s political establishment (including Hawley, who was one of the first to call for his resignation) for being too MAGA is now playing the victim for all it is worth after the criminal case against him collapsed. He has taken to associating with precisely the sorts of Trump-world figures who see a sex scandal and a criminal indictment as good things to have on a candidate’s resume.
Then there is Eric Schmitt, Hawley’s successor as Missouri Attorney General and very much in Hawley’s pugilistic populist mold (I previously covered his legally flimsy COVID lawsuit against China, which is grinding along slowly; it took until May 2021 to complete the cumbersome and costly international process just for serving a copy of the complaint). In addition, two members of the House, both originally elected in 2010, are running: Vicky Hartzler and Billy Long. Hartzler only entered the race in June; Long jumped in two weeks ago. A third House member, Jason Smith, has not yet ruled out a run.
Democrats, for their part, lost their major shot at recruiting a top-tier candidate when Nixon passed on the race by late July; Kander also declined to run, as did McCaskill, who is done pretending to have anything in common with Missouri voters. The likely nominee among the six Democrats vying for the job is former state legislator Scott Sifton, best known as an ardent abortion advocate who defeated a female pro-life Democrat in a primary to gain his seat in the state senate. Sifton is champing at the chance to face Greitens.
There is a lot of race ahead; the August 2, 2022, primary is still almost a year away, and the deadline for more candidates to file does not even run out until the end of March (which gives some of the current candidates time to reconsider and go back to their current jobs). About the only polling done so far has been by Remington, a Republican polling firm that is reasonably well-regarded in ratings of partisan pollsters by the New York Times and FiveThirtyEight, but remains a partisan pollster of the sort you hate to rely on for the only information in the field. A March poll by Remington found Greitens up 40-39 on Schmitt; a June poll found Greitens leading Schmitt 34-25, with Hartzler at 14 and McCloskey at 7. The field has not been polled yet with Long as a candidate.
That may sound like good news for rehabilitating the ex-governor. There are, however, trouble signs for Greitens. One is that Remington polled general-election matchups and show Greitens, while ahead, being more potentially vulnerable against Sifton. He led 49-41 in a head-to-head matchup in February, 49-42 in April. Schmitt, by contrast, led 51-39 in the April matchup. Given the baggage that Greitens uniquely brings to the table, most Republican observers feel that this would be a safe race with Schmitt, Hartzler, or Long as the nominee, but a potential rerun of the Akin fiasco with Greitens.
That is reflected in his fundraising. Reports for the second quarter of 2021 were filed in July, and the news for Greitens was grim:
Eric Greitens was last among major Republican candidates for Senate in second quarter fundraising, underscoring fears that the disgraced former governor will make Democrats competitive for the seat if he secures the nomination. Greitens’ campaign brought in about $449,000, well behind Attorney General Eric Schmitt, the fundraising frontrunner with $1.3 million. The latest campaign finance filing shows that major Missouri Republican donors continue to view him as toxic after he resigned in 2018 amid multiple scandals, including allegations of violent sexual abuse and blackmail…Greitens obscured his fundraising numbers by releasing a statement that combined campaign dollars with funds raised by a super PAC supporting him. The combined figure, he said, is $3.1 million….Rep. Vicky Hartzler raised about $893,000. Mark McCloskey…collected $589,000…In terms of cash on hand, Hartzler leads with $1.4 million. Schmitt has $1.1 million, McCloskey has $167,000 and Greitens reported $135,000.
McCloskey’s presence in the field is also bad news for Greitens, as he offers a second choice for voters seeking the ultra-populist frisson of voting for the transgressive bad boy in the race.
The case for pessimism, if you take an anyone-but-Greitens view, is that he already has high name recognition, and his odds of winning go up the more crowded the field becomes. That is precisely how Akin won his nomination, in what was effectively a three-way field against John Brunner (the favorite of the state’s conservative political establishment and the Chamber of Commerce) and Sarah Steelman (the favorite of Sarah Palin, pro-life groups, and many Tea Party groups); Akin was backed by the likes of Mike Huckabee, Jim Jordan, Steve King, and Michele Bachmann. If next August rolls around and Schmitt, Hartzler, Long, and maybe Smith are all in the race, the Democrats’ dream of running against Greitens could yet become a reality.