8th District race in June could be 'just weird'

With a little more than 10 weeks remaining until voters in Missouri's 8th Congressional District head to the polls, analysts are taking a wait-and-see approach when in comes to making voter-turnout predictions and forecasting the outcome.

Candidates are traveling the 30-county area in an attempt to become the better-known politician to the people who will decide if they move on to the national scene.

Longtime Republican congresswoman Jo Ann Emerson left her seat in the 8th District in January to become president and CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.

Since then, four political parties have nominated candidates to run in a June 4 special election. Democrats chose Steve Hodges, a state representative from East Prairie, Mo. Republicans picked Jason Smith, of Salem, Mo., who is Missouri House speaker pro tem. Libertarians selected businessman Bill Slantz of St. Charles, Mo., while the Constitution Party chose businessman Doug Enyart of Piedmont, Mo.

The selection of a new congressman will stand alone on the ballot, which, according to election officials and politicos, could create a fascinating voter-turnout scenario.

"These special elections are really interesting, because that being the only thing on the ballot, the people who turn out for that race are doing that for that reason," said Rick Althaus, a professor of political science at Southeast Missouri State University. "It's not that there's some other office that has gotten them fired up. It's this one. It will be interesting to see what they think."

Cape Girardeau County Clerk Kara Clark Summers envisions the unfolding Election Day as being "just weird."

She continued, "I think a problem is that a lot of people aren't even aware we are having an election in June. Turnout is probably just going to depend on how hard candidates campaign, and how much word gets out that way."

Previous general elections show decent turnouts in the 8th District, but those ballots always have contained other races and questions. In November 2012, 300,391 votes were cast in the congressional race, which Emerson won with a hefty 72 percent of the vote. The 2010 race brought 196,000 votes in a four-way contest, of which Emerson took 65 percent.

But it wasn't always that way. Before Bill Emerson, Jo Ann Emerson's husband who died in 1996, rode the Republican wave in 1980, the district largely went to Democrats at all levels of government. That first Emerson election coincided with the start of the transformation of the 8th into a GOP stronghold rooted in the area's conservative values.

Clark Summers on Friday said it's too early to predict how many voters may participate in June, but she expects it will be between the 8 to 10 percent normally seen in general municipal elections and the 20 to 25 percent seen in statewide primaries.

"Any special election you always have a smaller turnout, and having it on that June date is really going to be a challenge," she said. "I think people just won't know about it enough."

The district is the state's second-most Republican leaning, according to the most recent version of the Cook Partisan Voting Index, which measures how strongly congressional districts leans toward the Democratic or Republican Party, compared to the nation as a whole.

Emerson's 16-year tenure was not marked by any significant challenges from within her own party, and she was helped during each re-election attempt by the district's Republican voters who tended to be more reliable overall than Democratic voters, Althaus said. Some Democratic voters also favored Emerson, who was seen as a moderate.

Hodges' and Smith's campaigns so far are taking similar approaches to reach out to potential voters.

"I'm going to be concentrating on the populated areas with all due respect to the rural areas," said Hodges, who was planning to attend meetings in New Madrid and Stoddard counties this weekend.

Hodges is well-known and well-liked within his own district, which covers most of Mississippi County, about half of Sikeston, Mo., in Scott County, all of New Madrid County, the northern part of Pemiscot County and in other parts of Southeast Missouri.

Jake Breymaier, Hodges' campaign manager has worked on various congressional campaigns throughout the Midwest. He calls Hodges a "proven Republican vote-getter."

Whether Hodges can pose a challenge to Smith, simply because Smith is a Republican, is unquestioned to Hodges' supporters, and to Hodges himself.

"And I don't think it's nearly Republican as everybody makes it out to be," Breymaier said of the district.

He pointed out that U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, Gov. Jay Nixon and Attorney General Chris Koster, each re-elected in November, only lost some of the district's most populated counties by a minuscule percentage.

"I think a lot of people, when they think collectively about this district; they just look the presidential [race], and they look at Jo Ann, and they just say, 'we can write that one off.' But I don't think you can really do that," Breymaier said.

Hodges also outperformed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and Emerson in his district in November, Breymaier said.

"That's an encouraging sign for us, that there is that cross-party appeal from Steve Hodges," he said.

Smith visited Howell County, the district's sixth-most-populated county, on Friday and attended a Republican event Saturday in Bollinger County. Both counties voted Republican in races at all levels in the most recent elections. Hodges was headed to Washington County on Saturday, which favored Republicans in contested Missouri House races, but chose Democrats for all statewide races with the exception of voting for Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder, a Republican.

eragan@semissourian.com

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