Missouri Senate voter guide

Good morning, and welcome to The Weekender.

For weeks, The Independent has profiled 11 state Senate primaries on Tuesday’s ballot, including nine Republican contests. In most of these districts, the primary is the whole election.

Read together, the GOP primaries look less like nine separate campaigns than nine versions of the same argument: What, exactly, do Republican voters want?

Four things will likely decide the outcome of those races.

The first is money.

No race has displayed its force more nakedly than the 16th District, where an Illinois gambling company seeking to legalize video lottery terminals has poured more than $400,000 into a PAC attacking former state Rep. Hannah Kelly while backing state Rep. Bill Hardwick, the House sponsor of the legislation the company wants.

Then there’s the 20th District in southwest Missouri, where incumbent state Sen. Curtis Trent and an aligned PAC have spent $1.3 million trying to fend off a challenge from elder law attorney Lori Rook.

In most of the races, at least one candidate is vastly outspending any rivals. Maybe the money carries them. Or maybe it becomes evidence for their opponents’ central claim: Jefferson City is run by candidates whose alliances are measured in PAC checks.

The second is Amendment 5.

The income-to-sales tax overhaul was expected to be a loyalty test — and a cudgel against Republicans who voted no. A PAC funded by the group promoting Amendment 5 has spent more than $137,000 attacking state Reps. Rudy Veit in central Missouri’s 6th District and Greg Sharpe in northeast Missouri’s 18th.

But the striking thing across these races is not Republican discipline. It is retreat.

Rook opposes Amendment 5. So does Kelly. In the 18th, Dusty Blue opposes it. In the 16th, state Rep. Don Mayhew voted to put it on the ballot but has since soured on it.

Four of the six candidates in the 6th oppose it or question its details. Veit highlights his opposition in ads. So does Sharpe. In the 28th, physician Sam Alexander opposes the current version, while state Rep. Brad Pollitt, who repeatedly voted for it in the House, won’t say how he’ll vote on the ballot.

Even 6th District candidate Jake Vogel, endorsed by Gov. Mike Kehoe, offers only: “It is a plan.”

The third is data centers.

In the 10th District, where projects are rising along Interstate 70, state Rep. Tricia Byrnes built much of her campaign around opposition to them, while Missouri Cattlemen’s Association executive Mike Deering moved toward calling for “massive” guardrails.

In the 16th, Kelly, Hardwick and Mayhew all oppose data centers in the district. In the 18th and 28th, concerns about farmland, water, electric bills and local control have intruded into races once expected to revolve around more familiar conservative issues.

In the 20th, Rook has tied Trent to the 2025 utility law he supported, which lets electric companies bill customers for power plants still under construction — the plants data centers are lining up to draw from. Trent, in turn, is airing an ad saying he is “sponsoring a moratorium on new data centers,” though no such moratorium appears among the bills he sponsored this year.

Finally, there is anger.

Blue in the 18th, Rook in the 20th, Alexander in the 28th and former state Rep. Dan Stacy in the 8th aren’t simply running against their opponents. They are running against Jefferson City itself — the “swamp,” the consultants, the lobbyists, the legislative leaders and the expectation that newcomers should wait their turn.

Even the lack of video livestreaming in the Senate comes up repeatedly as proof that the Capitol prefers to conduct business beyond public view.

Four forces, and they cut against one another. The money says the establishment holds. The anger says it won’t. Amendment 5 was meant to sort Republicans into camps, but many are edging toward the door. Data centers began as a wedge, and now candidates compete to oppose them hardest.

Tuesday tells us which force was real.