As Missouri moves right, it’s no longer a mirror of national voting, but rather national polarization

The attempts to unseat Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are over, but it’s worth noting that both of the senators who will represent Missouri next year, incumbent Senator Josh Hawley and Senator-elect Eric Schmitt, wanted to remove him as head of the Republicans in the Senate.

It’s no secret that Missouri has moved from being a bellwether state — one that closely mirrored national trends — to being a strongly Republican state. That’s a major change for Missouri, which for many generations was viewed as a microcosm of the national political environment with a mix of urban, suburban, and rural, as well as northern and southern voters, which therefore served as a good reflection of Republican and Democratic voters nationwide.

What’s less obvious is that Missouri’s Republican majority and Democratic minority are themselves internally changing. The state’s Republican Party was once typified by men such as former US senator and former state attorney general John Danforth, and by outgoing Senator Roy Blunt, also a former Missouri secretary of state and former US congressman from Springfield. Whether people love or hate Sen. Josh Hawley, it’s patently obvious that he’s very different from most previous Republican senators from Missouri. Eric Schmitt…