ST. LOUIS–Along with a new campaign cycle, Missouri Democrats now have a new Executive Director at the helm. Matthew Patterson is in his first month on the job, but didn’t have to travel very far. He’s been on the executive staff for more than a year, first as Managing Finance Director and then Deputy Executive Director.
Patterson, a Nixa, Mo. native, worked on Claire McCaskill’s first U.S. Senate campaign, Jake Zimmerman’s bid for Attorney General in 2016, and Renew Missouri, a statewide policy organization focused on energy issues.
He left Missouri to become Executive Director of the Utah Democratic Party in 2019 before coming back to the Show Me state.
His arrival in the new role comes as Democrats find themselves out of every statewide elected office for the first time since the 1860s. He talked to Spectrum News about what lies ahead.
State Legislative Races
Democrats will again look to break the supermajorities Republicans hold in both chambers at the State Capitol, with Patterson showing optimism about picking up State Senate seats especially, thanks to new district boundaries and term-limits, which will force out Senate President Pro Tem Caleb Rowden R-Columbia, Sen. Andrew Koenig R-Manchester and Sen. Bill Eigel-Weldon Spring, while Democrats look to maintain seats in South St. Louis County and the Kansas City area.
In Koenig’s 15th District, St. Louis County Councilman Mark Harder, former State Rep. David Gregory and Wildwood Mayor Jim Bowlin have already announced their candidacies on the GOP side.
Primaries
The only high-profile race to get a Democrat to announce a 2024 bid of any kind is Lucas Kunce, the Jefferson City native who ran for the U.S. Senate in 2022 and was defeated in the primary by Trudy Busch Valentine. Kunce will go after U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley in Hawley’s first bid for re-election.
“I'm glad to see that the race has started....That Lucas has obviously jumped out there early,” Patterson said. “I think that was probably pretty smart on his side to discourage other people to certainly run against him.”
Democrats would appear to have a bench problem at this stage of the campaign cycle, without many potential candidates who have name recognition and/or the warchest to wage an expensive primary and a potential general election campaign.
While he concedes that avoiding primaries would be good for conserving resources, Patterson said the party will not put its thumb on the scale.
“I would never discourage someone from running and we're not gonna discourage anyone from running for office. That's just what it is. That's not our job as a party. Our job as a party is to build a ticket for 2024,” he said.
Patterson expects momentum to pick up with Democrats announcing intentions after the legislative session ends in May.
Statewide races
Democrats are at a historic incumbency disadvantage at the statewide level, but Patterson sees the potential for opportunity in that none of the current officeholders who are running as Republicans in 2024 have ever run for and won the office they’re seeking.
Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe, Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft and Eigel are all either running or exploring a run for Governor. House Speaker Dean Plocher is set to run for Lt. Gov. Greene Co. Clerk Shane Schoeller announced his candidacy to run for the GOP nomination for Secretary of State over the weekend. He won the nomination in 2012 but lost the general election. Attorney General Andrew Bailey, appointed to the job last month, already faces at least one primary challenger and Treasurer Vivek Malek, also recently appointed, could expect competition in a primary.
But despite all that, Democrats need only look back to 2022, when a bruising U.S. Senate primary on the GOP side still produced a double-digit win for Eric Schmitt over Busch Valentine.
Messaging
Patterson looks at some of the federal legislative wins for Democrats over the past two years and hopes that they translate into improvement at the state level on the ground here. Federal infrastructure legislation that didn’t have GOP congressional support will still see payouts locally, and can be seen already as Missouri Republican Gov. Mike Parson proposes using federal funds for highway expansion and broadband growth.
Democrats, he said, have been pulled into nationalized fights, and should focus on economic issues that have plagued the state for decades since manufacturing jobs left the state after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was passed.
“We lost the economic message there...Democrats have been a lot better in terms of helping everyone, lifting everybody up. I think we really lost that message showing that we're for the working people, we're for public education,” he said.
“It’s not a liberal message or a moderate message, it’s just a message that shows we can help everybody and that we’re the party that gets things done and the party that makes government work for everybody.”
