Bellwether turned red: Missouri’s shifting 200-year political history

By:: Alison Patton

COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ) -- While Americans celebrate 250 years of freedom in July, Missouri will reach 205 years of being a state in August. When Missouri became a state in 1821, it was at the center of a war between America and itself: the Civil War. 

“Missouri played an important role very early on in the country's history,” said Charles Zug, a political science professor at the University of Missouri. 

That’s because the nation was trying to decide which states could have slaves, and one solution, known as the Missouri Compromise, was to make Missouri a slave state and Maine a free state. Lawmakers also decided to make any new state added from the Louisiana Purchase that was above the 36-30 line a free state, and states below a slave state. 

That was overturned over 30 years later with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which left the decision up to the states whether they wanted slaves.

Although there were slave owners in Missouri, the state remained in the Union. 

“Missouri was sort of right at the heart of this slavery issue, which provoked and catalyzed and sort of crystallized broader problems of the Civil War and was very much at the center of that story,” Zug said. 

The Kansas-Nebraska Act kicked off the border war between Missouri and Kansas, where pro-Southern guerrillas from Missouri tried to prevent Kansas from becoming a free state. The conflict, known as Bleeding Kansas, started in the 1850s and lasted until the Civil War, and included the ransacking of Lawrence, Kansas.

Following the Civil War, the U.S. entered Reconstruction, which used federal resources to protect formerly enslaved people from aggression.

“[Reconstruction was] a series of national measures, congressional acts, coupled with aggressive presidential execution of those acts, basically protecting former enslaved people from re-enslavement, white violence [and] the [Ku Klux] Klan,” Zug said. 

Reconstruction ended in the late 1870s when federal troops were pulled out of Southern states, allowing state governments to implement Jim Crow laws that worked around the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. Those amendments were added to protect African-Americans from discrimination and slavery. 

20th century changes

The civil rights movement started as a response to Jim Crow, and it gained the nation’s attention in the 1960s. But President Harry Truman, who was from Missouri, made some advancements toward equality in the 1940s when he desegregated the military. 

“He was seen as being someone who would essentially toe the line when it came to issues over holding or preventing civil rights from being enacted,” said Sean Rost, assistant director of research for the State Historical Society of Missouri. 

Truman was working with a Republican-controlled Congress and a fractured Democratic Party that didn’t fully back civil rights, Rost said. 

Zug said this move was a way to get more Black votes. 

Understanding Missouri politics is key to understanding the state's history. 

For about 100 years, Missouri voted for nearly every presidential candidate who won, from 1904 to 2004 – the only exception being in 1956 when Missouri voted for Democrat Adlai Stevenson over Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, a top World War II general from Kansas. 

For a long time, Missouri was a bellwether or swing state. 

“[The] Missouri popular vote went for the person that would go on to become president of the United States,” Zug explained. 

Rost said it's hard to pinpoint why there is a shift in Missouri voters, but it boils down to tracking conservative values between the Democratic and Republican parties.

"The issues that are concerns for rural Democrat conservative voters become more and more aligned with the Republican Party," Rost said. "The story is not so much the Democratic Party losing those voters, but how did the Republican Party gain those voters is just as important."

Former U.S. Sen. Kit Bond aided in the shift after taking over as Missouri's governor in 1973 and ending a three-decade-long Democratic streak for that office.

Rost said he also influenced many young Republicans to get involved in government as well.

"Once you become a person in office, you can kind of make sure that other people behind you are kind of slowly getting involved in politics as well," Rost said.

In recent years, Missouri has held strong as a red state, with Republicans holding a supermajority in the state legislature since 2012. The GOP has held all statewide elected offices since 2023.

“Democrats have a harder and harder time holding on to their share of political influence in the state,” Zug said.

While Democrats might have trouble getting into office and keeping it, Zug said Missourians have passed some liberal policies through ballot measures, like access to abortion, the legalization of recreational marijuana and right-to-work laws.

A measure on the August ballot will ask Missouri voters whether it should be harder to enact policy through referenda.