In Missouri, Greitens and Blunt ride wave of distrust for other guy and gal
Polls showing Donald Trump winning Missouri with ease were less optimistic about the two Republicans running for governor and U.S. Senate. In the end, their races broke the same way the battleground states went for Trump.
Eric Greitens, a political neophyte who literally blasted through the Republican primary, beat Attorney General Chris Koster in the governor’s race. Roy Blunt, meanwhile, won a second term in the U.S. Senate, holding off a challenge by Secretary of State Jason Kander.
Greitens and Blunt brought very different resumes to their respective races. Greitens positioned himself as an outsider; Blunt entered politics in 1973. Greitens was a Navy SEAL; Blunt received three draft deferments during Vietnam.
Though they have dissimilar backgrounds, Greitens and Blunt are alike in one important way: They are not Democrats. Both men’s campaigns tapped into the intense partisanship now baked into our political system. Greitens and Blunt did not run on ideas as much as they ran against Hillary Clinton and Obamacare. They were counting on what Ezra Klein calls Republican voters’ “structural” distrust of the opponent. In a prescient article published Monday, Klein noted that Clinton’s 4-percent approval rating among Republicans “isn’t so far off from the six percent Obama registered at the end of the 2012 election.” These numbers explain why Clinton and other national Democrats were prominent in Greitens’ and Blunt’s campaigns ads.
Koster lost by a bigger margin, suggesting that Kander’s riflemanship and attempt to frame Blunt as a Washington insider resonated with some independent and Republican-leaning voters. But as many Democrats learned Tuesday, conservative populism is a powerful force.
