Sen. Roy Blunt staved off a nerve-racking challenge from Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander, delivering Republicans a significant victory in their fight to retain the Senate majority.
Blunt won by 3 points with 99 percent of precincts reporting.
Few Republicans would have predicted the race would be even that close at the beginning of the election cycle, given that Missouri is a reliably-Republican state, but the candidates’ respective strengths and weaknesses made the Show-Me state home to one of the most-watched races in the country.
“[Democrats] believe this is the 51st seat in the Senate,” Blunt said while campaigning in the final week of the election. “We should, too.”
That wasn’t supposed to be true, not in a year that featured seven Senate Republicans seeking reelection in states that President Obama carried in 2008 and 2012. In Missouri, by contrast, public polling showed Trump leading by as many as 14 points in the closing days of the race, but Blunt struggled to catch those coattails all year.
“He is one of the few candidates who is actually trailing Trump,” a senior Senate Republican aide told the Examiner. “They’re running an anti-Washington campaign against him and he’s sort of an easy target.”
Kander drove a wedge between Blunt and Republican-leaning voters by saying the 20-year lawmaker had gone native in Washington D.C. — a message made credible by the fact that Blunt’s wife and three of his children are lobbyists.
“Roy Blunt has been protecting the status quo because the status quo has been great for him, his family and his special interest donors,” Kander said during the campaign. “He’s not the same person who was a history teacher.”
Kander had the resume to take advantage of those weaknesses. He’d won statewide elections, but didn’t have a federal record that could polarize the electorate. He also served in Afghanistan as a captain in the Army National Guard, specializing in military intelligence.
“What we really need are more people who have been through something voluntarily in their life that is more difficult than a reelection campaign,” Kander said on the stump.
Blunt thwarted those attacks by reminding the conservative electorate of the stakes of the Senate majority. “This is about the Supreme Court,” he told voters, in one forum or another, throughout the homestretch of the campaign. “We’re deciding what happens for a generation.”
That issue gave Blunt a crucial argument to make to Missouri voters, many of whom favored the outsider political message championed by GOP nominee Donald Trump. “The Supreme Court issue plays really well in Missouri; it’s one of the few states where it really resonates,” the senior Senate aide said.
Republican-aligned groups spent millions driving home that message, and the National Rifle Association made a particularly-potent case on behalf of Blunt. Kander’s campaign tried to mitigate the damage by releasing an ad in which Democratic nominee toed the party line on background checks and discussed his military record — but did so while assembling an AR-15, blindfolded.
It was one of the best ads of the cycle, but it wasn’t enough. And Republicans can derive extra satisfaction from the knowledge that they’ve kept a talented Democratic leader off the national stage, at least for now.
“He sounded just like Obama when Obama’s talking off the cuff, just the very casual, almost bro-like rapport with the audience,” the Senate aide said. “Very reminiscent of Obama.”
