The shocking suicides of a candidate for governor and his spokesman in Missouri have thrown the state’s Republican Party into disarray amid accusations of dirty campaigning and smear tactics.
While the twin tragedies remain under investigation, they’ve exposed bitter rifts in a party that’s on the verge of dominating the state but appears to be at war with itself. The fallout might have a ripple effect on 2016 races for governor, the U.S. Senate and even the White House.
The deaths of Republican gubernatorial hopeful Tom Schweich and his spokesman, Spence Jackson, just a month apart came in the early stages of what was shaping up to be a nasty primary election battle between Schweich, the state auditor, and Catherine Hanaway, a former speaker of the Missouri House of Representatives.
The turmoil has left the Missouri GOP stunned and struggling to recover amid allegations of anti-Semitism and bullying – and calls by some Republicans for the top party official in the state to resign.
“Without a doubt, these tragedies have made everybody step back a little bit try to figure out what direction to go: OK, are we going to continue to do business this way, or are we going to change?” said state Sen. Mike Parson, a longtime Republican politician from southwest Missouri.
The party needs to build coalitions to get back on track, said Parson, a former Polk County sheriff.
“People are fed up with negative campaigning,” he said. “You start doing things two years out before an election, use tactics that aren’t based on any truth, any facts, it’s just starting to turn into a pretty ugly side of politics. . . . You don’t want to destroy people, destroy their families, all for the sake of winning.”
Schweich killed himself Feb. 26 . Last Sunday, Jackson was found dead in his apartment, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. So far, police say they’ve identified no evidence to link the deaths. Jackson’s final note said he couldn’t face being unemployed again.
Shortly after Schweich’s suicide, Jackson had called for Missouri Republican Party Chairman John Hancock to resign . At the time, Jackson accused Hancock and others of spreading rumors that Schweich was Jewish in order to help Hanaway, who was Schweich’s Republican rival in the governor’s race. Schweich’s grandfather was Jewish, but he himself was Episcopalian.
Hancock has acknowledged that he might have said Schweich was Jewish, but not in a derogatory manner.
In a telephone interview Thursday, Hancock said he’d been falsely accused. He pointed out that police have found no evidence of any “whisper campaign” about Schweich’s religion.
Hancock, a party stalwart, added that the Republican state committee is more united than it has been in years.
“I’m unaware of any deep divisions in the party,” he said. And he has no plans to resign.
“As long as I can effectively lead the party I plan on doing so,” Hancock said.
“The whole episode is one of the greatest tragedies that we’ve had to deal with in state government,” he said, “and it’s horribly, horrifically sad.”
‘Words can kill’
Despite Hancock’s talk of unity, discord and distress were evident among mourners at Schweich’s funeral March 3. In a homily, his mentor John Danforth, a Republican former senator from Missouri who’s an ordained Episcopal priest, lambasted the alleged whisper campaign and what he described as political “bullying” in the auditor’s final days.
That bullying included a radio ad in which an actor imitating “House of Cards” villain Frank Underwood compared Schweich to Barney Fife, a scrawny, bumbling, 1960s TV detective with a prominent Adam’s apple, and warned that Democrats would “squash him like a bug” if he won the Republican primary.
“Words can kill,” Danforth said.
Now that Jackson appears to have taken his own life, too, the mounting controversy surrounding both suicides has many Missouri Republicans growing anxious. There’s distaste among some Republicans for a primary atmosphere that they say is very different from the days when Sen. Kit Bond was the senior Republican in the state. Like Danforth, he set a tone for the kind of behavior considered acceptable.
Bond could be as scrappy as anyone, and when the party needed a partisan warrior he rose to the task. But he was an old-school politician who knew how to reach across party lines and accomplish things.
One Republican said a divide had been growing in the party for a while and the suicides had “pulled the scab off.”
The intensity of the infighting reflects how much the state party has at stake in next year’s elections.
Missouri once was considered a key swing state – more purple than red or blue – but Republicans are in ascendance across the state.
The GOP controls the state legislature. The governor, Jay Nixon, is a Democrat, as is one of the state’s U.S. senators, Claire McCaskill.
Republicans blew a golden opportunity in 2012 to capture the seat held by McCaskill, who was seeking a second term and viewed by both parties as one of the most vulnerable senators that year.
Then-U.S. Rep. Todd Akin won the party’s nod in a divisive primary, but he proceeded to destroy whatever advantage Republicans had with his now-infamous comments about “legitimate rape.” McCaskill won.
For 2016, Republicans are eager to take control of both the statehouse and the governorship. Republican Sen. Roy Blunt will be defending his seat against Democratic challenger Jason Kander, who serves as Missouri’s secretary of state.
One of the biggest concerns for Republicans is whether the party’s internal disputes will affect its ability to raise money.
“Fundraising’s always challenge for a political party,” Hancock said, “but I’m very satisfied with our results so far and I’m optimistic that we’re going to produce the resources to implement a very sound political plan in 2016.”
If the state party becomes dysfunctional and can’t raise money, the national party might set up an organization to take its place, said Jennifer Duffy, senior editor for The Cook Political Report.
In that scenario, the Republican Governors Association, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the Republican National Committee would form another entity. Such a step is extreme, Duffy said, but not unprecedented. That’s how Republicans until recently had been working in Nevada, where libertarians took over the state party, she said.
“When they’ve needed to, they just go around the party,” Duffy said.
What happens now?
What the Democrats might do with the controversy – if anything – is unclear. It’s a risk if voters see them as using the tragedies for political gain.
Asked to weigh in recently, Blunt’s Democratic opponent, Kander, declined to comment.
McCaskill was less shy in comments to reporters in Kansas City this week. She said the radio ad was “beyond cruel and inappropriate” and added that she hoped voters punished candidates who were associated with such over-the-top negative campaigning.
“I would hope the way we fix this is by people reacting with their votes,” McCaskill said. “If someone is running these nasty ads . . . people ought to vote against you. You ought to lose. That would clean it up very quickly.”
The ad was sponsored by Citizens for Fairness in Missouri, a front group operated by Jeff Roe, a longtime GOP political operative in Kansas City with a bare-knuckle reputation. Both Democrats and Republicans on the receiving ends of his attacks over the years have filed police reports and sued for defamation.
Roe could not be reached for comment. He’s now working as a senior strategist for presidential hopeful Ted Cruz. The Texas senator’s campaign did not respond to questions about Roe’s role.
Cruz likely will wait to see whether the ruckus blows over, said Duffy, of The Cook Political Report.
“He can actually afford it,” she said. “One, it’s early” in the presidential campaign, “and two, nobody else outside Missouri knows who this guy is. So he doesn’t have to do anything just yet.”
Blunt is biding his time as well. He’s repeatedly deflected questions about whether Hancock should resign as chairman of the Missouri Republican Party, saying Hancock’s fate is up to the state party committee.
But Blunt’s role as perhaps the most influential member of the state party makes it hard for him to steer clear of the fray.
Hancock, a longtime GOP political consultant, has worked for Blunt in the past, and the senator voiced support for Hancock when he was elected party chairman just a few weeks before Schweich’s suicide. Complicating matters further, Jackson once worked for Blunt’s son, Matt Blunt, a former governor of Missouri.
Candidate Hanaway is in an even more precarious position. The group that funded the controversial ad mocking Schweich, Citizens for Fairness in Missouri, was set up by her campaign treasurer. Hanaway also hired the firm that produced the ad, Roe’s Axiom Strategies, as a campaign consultant.
Hanaway has distanced herself from the ad and says her campaign wasn’t involved.
She took a monthlong hiatus from politics after Schweich’s death. She’d just restarted her campaign when Jackson died. Now she must tread even more carefully, said Steven Smith, a professor of political science at Washington University in St. Louis.
Hanaway probably still is the odds-on favorite to win the Republican nomination, but she faces a severe challenge in handling the suicides with diplomacy and sympathy, Smith said.
“There’s going to be a lot of digging, and she’s going to have to worry that even if she’s not responsible for any of the meanness that it might boomerang on her,” he said.
If Hanaway’s candidacy is hurt and Democrats are motivated to come out and vote against her, it could help Democrats in a close race, Smith said.
“It’s possible that even if there’s a very small impact – a couple of percentage-point loss to Hanaway because her candidacy is somehow tainted by this – it could make a difference to the outcome,” he said.
“But we are so far away from an election and so far away from our primary that it’s very difficult to say.”
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