How Democrats won where they weren't supposed to

By Jason Hancock | Editor-in-Chief

Good morning,

Suzanne Luther has already picked out this year’s Christmas card.

It’s a campaign mailer, sent to Jefferson City voters by people who wanted to keep her out of the Missouri House. It used what appears to be an AI-generated photo and accused her of supporting data centers. Three other Democrats, she said, were targeted using the same template.

A TV ad, she said, was worse.

It featured an unflattering photograph of her (this one was real) set against what she described as the "flames of hell." Then an operating room, and a push to tie Luther to surgeries on transgender children.

Finally, the ad cut to her Republican opponent, Shane Kampeter, enjoying a park with his family.

Luther wasn’t particularly intimidated.

“It was irritating,” she told me Thursday. But with Election Day approaching, “I had a checklist of what I needed to do and wasn’t going to get distracted.”

Luther went on to defeat Kampeter by 189 votes in a district Republicans won by 25 points just two years earlier.

Her victory was among the more surprising results of an election that saw Democrats flip 16 Missouri House seats, shatter Republican legislative supermajorities and win in places where their party has struggled for decades.

Make no mistake, Missouri experienced a blue wave. The national backlash against President Donald Trump and the Republican Party was enormous, and unlike previous elections, it didn’t lose much strength when it reached Missouri.

But waves don’t automatically produce victories.

For years, Democrats struggled to recruit candidates who could compete in Republican territory. Some seats went uncontested. In others, nominees lacked the name recognition or community connections needed to persuade voters to cross party lines. Even when the political environment turned favorable, opportunities were squandered.

This year was different. Democrats fielded candidates in 158 of Missouri’s 163 House districts. And some of their most unexpected victories came from candidates whose strongest political asset wasn’t a clever message or an enormous campaign treasury.

It was that their neighbors already knew them.

Consider Staci Czar.

A lifelong Belton resident, Czar has spent decades raising her family and volunteering in the community. She’s served on the city’s park board and helped develop its charter.

Her campaign slogan was simple: “From here. For here.”

When she knocked on doors in Belton and Raymore, she talked about public schools.

Missouri lawmakers had fallen $190 million short of fully funding the state’s school formula, and Czar worried about what that meant for local districts already confronting rising costs.

Those schools, she reminded voters, weren’t just educating their children. They were among the communities’ largest employers.

“We may not always see eye to eye on every policy or everything we believe in,” she said. But most families want the same basic things: financial stability, a vacation now and then, the ability to take their kids to a ballgame.

Czar won with nearly 53% of the vote.

There were other factors. The incumbent Republican, Michael Davis, lost his August primary to Steve Baker. And Czar unquestionably benefited from the national political climate.

But an opportunity is worthless without someone capable of seizing it.

Luther’s path was remarkably similar.

She grew up in Jefferson City, attended its public schools, taught for years and eventually served on the school board. She didn’t need a television commercial to introduce herself to the community. 

“I think they felt listened to,” she said of voters, adding that she knew many of them from childhood.

Both women emphasized public education. Both talked about affordability. And both had established reputations in communities where the Democratic label has long been a political liability.

That matters when campaigns spend enormous sums trying to convince voters that their neighbors are dangerous extremists.

Republicans spent much of this election cycle using anti-transgender messaging to attack Democrats, including in Luther’s race and the unsuccessful effort to restore Missouri’s abortion ban.

Those attacks didn’t deliver the intended victories. And attacks portraying a candidate as an extremist carry less weight when voters have known that person for decades.

None of this means Missouri has turned blue. Republicans still control the legislature and every statewide elected office.

One of the smartest things anyone told me last week is that Tuesday was an opportunity for Democrats, not a mandate. Voters rebuked Republicans. They didn’t necessarily embrace anyone else.

Luther and Czar didn’t prove Democrats can win everywhere. They demonstrated that some places considered unwinnable may simply require the right circumstances, the right message and, most importantly, the right candidate.

For a party that spent years writing off much of Missouri as hopelessly Republican, that’s no small lesson.

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