Missouri Democrats walked into Tuesday night hoping to pick up enough seats to break the Republican supermajority in Jefferson City. They walked out with a whole lot more than that.
By the time the votes were counted, Democrats had flipped 16 seats in the Missouri House and two in the state Senate — their largest delegation since 2012. The goal had been four House seats and one Senate seat. They quadrupled it.
And the St. Louis area was right at the center of the story.
Along with sending U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner of Ballwin packing from Congress, local Democrats picked up three legislative seats in St. Charles County and four more in St. Louis County. Among the casualties: state Rep. Brad Christ of St. Louis County, the lawmaker behind the bill that put the St. Louis police department under state control. He lost to Democrat Matt Vitale.
Rep. Phil Oehlerking of Ballwin also lost his seat. He had survived his last two races by fewer than 200 votes, but this time Democrat Mary Ann Perkins beat him by 2,612 votes, 56 to 41 percent, according to final but unofficial results.
A big reason for the wave, by the Democrats’ own account, was old-fashioned groundwork. State Rep. Mark Boyko of Kirkwood, who chaired his caucus’s recruitment effort, helped field candidates in all but five of the House’s 163 seats — a sharp jump from the previous cycle. Republicans, despite their big majority, left nearly 30 seats uncontested.
Boyko is quick to spread the credit around, saying it’s gotten easier to find people willing to run as frustration with the ruling party has grown. “Part of that’s the national environment, obviously, and part of that is Missouri specific,” he said. “People have been noticing over the last five to 10 years that the Republicans keep pushing bills that are out of step with where the state of Missouri is.”
Vitale hammered Christ on public school funding and affordability. And while Vitale didn’t make a major campaign issue of Christ’s role in the police takeover, it may have helped him anyway — St. Louis Alders Michael Browning, Daniela Velazquez, Alisha Sonnier, and Megan Green all spent time knocking doors for him in the county.
Green’s connection to Vitale goes back to around 2021, when the two worked together against a proposal to bring a privately funded surveillance plane over the city. “I was sad when he moved to the county,” she said. “Then when he hit me up and said that he was going to run for state rep, I was so excited for that. Then when he said he wasn’t just running, he was running against Brad Christ, I was like, ‘Oh, this is amazing.'”
Green said she worked through Our Revolution, the organization founded by Bernie Sanders, to steer resources into the race and let city residents know this was the county contest to get involved in. Her face even ended up on anti-Vitale mailers in the district, an attempt to tie the two together in voters’ minds.
It didn’t land. In a race shaped far more by voters’ feelings about the president than about the president of the Board of Aldermen, the mailers became a punchline. “People were just kind of laughing, and they’re like, ‘You’re a celebrity down here,'” Green said. Christ’s effort to paint Vitale as anti-law enforcement fell flat too.
What comes next matters as much as the wins themselves. Democrats are still in the minority — but now they’re a regular minority, not a superminority, and Boyko says that changes the math in a real way. “There’s dozens of bills that passed out of the House just last year by margins of between one and five votes, and we just picked up 16 seats,” he said. “There are going to be very tangible things that people are going to see that we’ll be able to do, even though we’ll obviously still be in the minority.”
The day-to-day dynamics should shift as well. Paul Lentz, who ousted Rep. Ben Keathley of Chesterfield on Tuesday, said he’s heard from other representatives that Republicans would simply leave the room when Democrats walked in, because they didn’t need a single Democratic vote. “They didn’t need any input and it just made it very demoralizing for the Democrats,” Lentz said. “I think we’ll have to work together more now.”
The gains weren’t limited to the St. Louis suburbs, either. Democrats also won a seat in Cass County, in far western Missouri. “There were a number of Republicans who lost yesterday who had never feared an election to a Democrat,” Boyko said. “They had only been fearing a primary election from the right.”
Boyko is already thinking about 2028. He’s eyeing districts where Democrats came close — like House District 110, covering parts of Wildwood and Eureka, which opened up when Rep. Justin Sparks took a job with the Department of Homeland Security. Two years ago, the Democrat there lost by 25 points. This year, Democrat Claire Heinrich knocked on 10,000 doors and came within 2.2 percent.
“A lot of what we’re going to be doing in the next couple months is trying to figure out what exactly were the things that those candidates were able to do, and try to replicate that two years from now,” Boyko said.
