Missouri Senate Candidate Field Takes Shape

The hotly contested GOP Missouri U.S. Senate campaign where the eventual winner will face vulnerable incumbent Claire McCaskill (D) became better defined this week as Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO-8) announced she will not become a statewide candidate. Ms. Emerson will instead run for re-election. The congresswoman, 60, of Cape Girardeau won an eighth term in November. She has held the seat since her husband, the late Rep. Bill Emerson, died in 1996. Mr. Emerson was in Congress for 15 years before his passing.

On Feb. 3, Rep. Sam Graves (R-MO-6) also announced that he would not run for the Senate as he, too, is opting to stay in the House. Previously, former Sen. Jim Talent (R), who McCaskill narrowly defeated in 2006, said he was declining to run again because he landed a top position in the Mitt Romney for President campaign.

Two Republicans have announced plans to seek their party’s nomination and are already lining up campaign organizers and contributors. Ed Martin, a former chief of staff to Gov. Matt Blunt, raised $229,000 in December alone. Former state Treasurer Sarah Steelman, the other official Republican candidate, had pulled in $208,000 by the end of the same month.

But all of Missouri’s federal political action will not be in the Senate race. With the state losing a district in reapportionment, the St. Louis suburban 3rd district, formerly held by House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt, could be collapsed as Missouri recedes from nine congressional districts to eight. The city of St. Louis has failed to keep pace with the national growth rate, thus necessitating a huge population increase for Rep. Lacy Clay’s (D-MO-1) district. The 1st district will require 161,547 additional people to comply with the one person-one vote deviation directives. In order to protect Mr. Clay’s African-American voting base, its population gain almost assuredly will come from Rep. Russ Carnahan’s (D-MO-3) district, which is 123,365 people under-populated. Ten years ago, the situation was reversed as voters from the 1st district were transferred into Gephardt’s seat to provide the then-legislative leader with a stronger political seat.

The “Show Me State” may be the show-down state in 2012. The Senate race is expected to be highly competitive with Sen. McCaskill’s job approval ratings hovering only in the low to mid-40s and the state being high on the national Republican conversion list. Missouri is also always a battleground state in Presidential election years and usually swings toward the winner of that contest (choosing only two presidential campaign losers in the last century in Adlai Stevenson and John McCain) so both parties will spare no expense in trying to capture the state’s ten electoral votes. McCaskill has to be given a slight advantage for re-election today, but moving into the toss-up realm as Election Day 2012 approaches is a distinct possibility.
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