Three leaders emerge in GOP contest for Missouri governor
By My Courier-Tribune
JEFFERSON CITY — Of the nine candidates running for the Republican nomination for governor in Missouri, three have emerged as front-runners heading into the final weeks of the 2024 primary election campaign.
With the Aug. 6 election swiftly approaching, Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe has amassed the most money and secured the backing of a significant number of influential lobbying groups as he attempts to replace his term-limited patron, Gov. Mike Parson.
Two-term Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft has the name recognition as the son of former U.S. Sen. John Ashcroft, who served in four statewide offices before he was appointed U.S. attorney general under former President George W. Bush.
And, Sen. Bill Eigel, R-Weldon Spring, is attempting to make the leap from the legislature after eight years of agitating in the upper chamber as a hard-right conservative aligned with the U.S. House Freedom Caucus.
In a state that’s become increasingly Republican in the past 20 years, whoever wins the GOP nomination has the clearest path to victory in November.
In 2020, Parson beat then-state Auditor Nicole Galloway, the last Democrat to hold statewide office in Missouri, by 17 percentage points.
Distinct campaigns
The three 2024 contenders have crafted distinct campaign narratives heading to the wire.
For Kehoe, the message is conservative stability. Ashcroft plans to rework state government from the inside out. Eigel wants to blow things up and start over.
Kehoe is attempting to straddle Missouri’s urban-rural divide, pointing to his upbringing in north St. Louis in a single-parent household and his transition to successful automobile dealer in Jefferson City and his ownership of a cattle operation on the Gasconade River.
Ashcroft has presented himself as a culture warrior on GOP issues ranging from abortion to banning inappropriate books after eight years as the state’s top election official. Despite his pedigree as the son of a longtime public official, Ashcroft has called on voters to “drain the swamp” and send him back to the Governor’s Mansion where he grew up.
“The problems facing Missouri aren’t impossible, but they take an outsider’s approach. Electing career politicians who come from the system won’t change the system,” Ashcroft said in a statement on his campaign website.
Eigel is the face of a splinter faction of state senators that held up action in the chamber this year leading to one of the most futile legislative sessions in recent memory. As governor, he says he will eliminate the state’s personal property tax system — a task he has been unable to achieve in the Senate.
Publicly available polling has Kehoe and Ashcroft fighting it out at the top, followed by Eigel in the teens with an estimated third of GOP voters undecided. Those numbers have been changing as the candidates put their ads into heavier rotation on the airwaves.
Ashcroft spokesman Jason Cabel Roe told the Missouri Independent it isn’t surprising the polls have tightened after Kehoe has spent millions of dollars and had the TV airwaves to himself for months.
Mike Kehoe
Kehoe, 62, was appointed lieutenant governor by Parson after the resignation of Eric Greitens as governor in June 2018.
At the time, Kehoe was in the final months of his job as floor leader in the Missouri Senate and was expecting to return to private life and resume being a businessman.
Kehoe has lived in mid-Missouri for more than two decades, but his roots are in St. Louis, where he was brought up by a single mother with six children.
As a teenager, he washed cars at Dave Sinclair Ford in south St. Louis County, rose to become a salesman there, and by age 25 he was operating a company in Linn that makes ambulances. At age 30, he purchased a Ford dealership in Jefferson City.
His path into politics came in 2005 when then-Gov. Matt Blunt appointed Kehoe to the Missouri Highways and Transportation Commission, where he served as chairman of the panel that oversees road construction spending in the state.
In 2010, Kehoe won his first bid for elected office when he ran for the Senate seat representing Cole and surrounding counties.
“I’m not a professional politician. This is not something I dreamed about ever doing,” Kehoe said during a Lincoln Days event earlier this year. “Government is not super smart. They don’t need to tell you what to do every day, they need to get out of your way and let you grow and prosper. And I need your help.”
Jay Ashcroft
Ashcroft, 51, was elected Missouri’s 40th Secretary of State in November 2016, overseeing a 200-employee office that oversees elections, the state archives, business services and the state library.
He trained as an engineer and, in 2008, received a law degree from St. Louis University. In 2014 he made an unsuccessful bid for a state Senate seat representing St. Louis County.
In the run-up to entering the race to become governor, Ashcroft began weighing in on issues in the Capitol, testifying in legislative committees on a range of conservative issues including banning medical treatments for transgender minors and prohibiting the ownership of farmland by foreign adversaries.
In 2022, Ashcroft moved to cut funding to libraries that make “age-inappropriate materials” available to children.
Ashcroft also put a new rule in place last year designed to limit the impact of environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors in investment decisions.
The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association filed a lawsuit to kill the rule, arguing the regulations violate the constitutional right to free speech by requiring brokers to stick to a script.
Bill Eigel
Eigel, 46, was born in Dayton, Ohio, where his father, a St. Louis native, was serving in the Air Force. He attended Purdue University from 1995 to 1999 and holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering.
In his 20s, Eigel joined the Air Force, serving as an aircraft maintenance officer for nearly eight years. His final posting was at Whiteman Air Force Base in Knob Noster.
He left the service in 2007 and bought a home remodeling business, settling into St. Charles County. He has since sold that company.
In the Senate, Eigel has served largely as an obstructionist in recent years, helping to grind work in the chamber to a standstill as he crafts an image as a fighter for conservative causes.
In his rush to raise his profile during the 2024 legislative session, Senate leaders stripped Eigel of his committee duties and parking spot.
He is pledging to enact many of the same policies he unsuccessfully fought for in the Senate, including requiring the hand-counting of paper ballots, which experts say is expensive, burdensome, time-consuming and unnecessary because electronic vote tabulators are more accurate.
About the issues
The trio agree on a number of issues, including creating a board appointed by the governor to return oversight of the St. Louis police department to the state.
Kehoe also wants to give the attorney general more power to remove local officials who aren’t doing their jobs.
The GOP candidates are solidly anti-abortion, but Kehoe set himself apart by saying he is open to altering the state’s abortion ban to include exceptions for women who are victims of rape and incest.
Missouri Right to Life, the state’s leading anti-abortion group, earlier endorsed Ashcroft.
Despite the prospect of triggering major cuts to programs serving Missourians, Ashcroft wants to eliminate the state’s income tax, a move that could force budget cuts in a state that has drawn scrutiny for failing to adequately serve poor people seeking assistance.
Eigel is on the same page, at the same time that the majority of low-income Missourians seeking health insurance are waiting more than two months for the state’s bare-bones workforce to process their applications.
Ashcroft and Eigel have bashed Kehoe’s support for a phased-in increase in the state’s motor fuel tax, which he said was needed to keep up with inflation and to ensure the state’s roads are maintained.
Thus far, the tax has risen by 10 cents since the boost was enacted in 2021.
Ashcroft and Eigel also have made foreign ownership of farmland an issue after Kehoe voted in 2013 to allow Hong Kong-based Smithfield Foods to operate its hog farms in the state.
Kehoe said China was viewed as a trading partner at the time, not a national threat.
Eigel said he would slash funding to cities if, for example, they attempt to make gun laws that are stricter than the state’s policies.
“I’m prepared to use the state budget as a tool to make sure that if they’re not going to protect the rights of their citizens, they’re going to start suffering consequences for all this government down in the city of St. Louis,” Eigel told attendees at an event in Kansas City in February.
Other contenders
The winner of the Republican race will likely face a Democrat from Springfield, House Minority Leader Crystal Quade or chain restaurant magnate Mike Hamra, a political newcomer.
Other candidates seeking the Republican nomination include Darrell Leon McClanahan of Milo, Jeremy Gundel of Washburn, Robert James Olson of Springfield, Chris Wright of Joplin, Darren Grant of Maryland Heights and Amber Thomsen of Hollister.
