Over the last year Mid-Missouri DSA has gathered more than 3,000 signatures to put two initiatives on the ballot in Missouri in November: one to institute a $15 minimum wage and guaranteed paid sick leave (Healthy Families and Fair Wages, or HFFW) and another adding reproductive rights to the state constitution (Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, or MCF).
That represents 3,000 conversations with Missourians that ended with an affirmative decision to put their names on the record in support of these key issues – a remarkable experience for a small chapter like ours.
Scene: A spectator I approach about the HFFW petition in Columbia, Missouri’s Juneteenth parade asks me, gravely, if I “have ever heard of the proletariat.” He is, it turns out, a lefty from way back – a member of St. Louis’s Free Angela Davis Committee.
Scene: A man I approach for a signature in Fulton, interrogates me about how much I am getting paid. I assume he thinks I am lying about being a volunteer, but it turns out he is an itinerant paid signature gatherer trying to figure out how much it would cost to poach me. He usually works with his daughter and her family as his signature-gathering crew. She is, however, pro-life and will not travel with him in Florida to gather signatures for a reproductive rights initiative that winter. I run into him again almost a year later, trying to get the loyal Democrats of Columbia’s farmers market to put RFK Jr. on the ballot.
Scene: A member of the International Union of Operating Engineers contingent at the Jefferson City Labor Day parade signs with relish before saying, “Let’s get these motherfuckers.” Thirty minutes later I inexplicably fumble my pitch to a pair of sympathetic painters, staging the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades float on the other side of the parking lot (my attempt to sympathize with a nearby signer about concerns about enforcement of the sick leave rules in the petition, and the complications of paid leave benefits in the building trades, made the whole thing sound too complicated, if I recall correctly). They decline to sign, but console me with a branded frisbee.
Scene: A crew sets out to gather signatures at Columbia’s sedate “First Friday,” a downtown art gallery showcase – not registering that a substantial chunk of the University of Missouri’s 30,000 students would be celebrating Cinco de Mayo. It’s a great signature-gathering opportunity, but gets rougher as the night goes on. We call it a day after an apparently more-or-less sober signer’s erratic entry spoils another gatherer’s signature sheet.
Scene: It’s the end of our sprint to qualify the reproductive rights amendment for the November ballot, and Mid-Mo DSA is worryingly short of our goal. I have made a basic mistake of asking permission rather than forgiveness to gather somewhere and then, amazingly, given the political complexion of even red-state roller derby circuits, failed to secure the go-ahead to gather on the sidelines of a Columbia-Rolla-Iowa City roller derby spectacular. I am exiled to a gravel parking lot in Hallsville, population 1,614, trying to catch participants on smoke breaks, though they all seem to be with the out-of-state (and therefore) ineligible Iowa City contingent. As it gets dark, some self-destructive breed of beetle begins to throw itself at the lit door of the venue. Dead and dying beetles are strewn around my feet as my year of signature gathering comes to an end.
These scenes are all small pieces of the work that put these initiative petitions on the ballot in November (barring dirty tricks in the signature validation process). Mid-Mo DSA will campaign to get these measures passed. In the interim, we can reflect on the experience so far.
Most importantly, the initiative petition campaigns allowed our chapter to contribute to significant material benefits for working class Missourians. Half a million Missourians would receive a raise should the minimum wage increase to $15, and 200,000 Missourians who do not have paid sick leave be eligible if the petition passes. Missouri’s abortion ban is effectively total. More than ten thousand Missourians crossed state lines to receive an abortion in 2023 according to estimates published by the Guttmacher Institute. The strategic considerations that follow would not matter if these goals were not worth fighting for.
These campaigns also help build a framework we can build on in the future. Mid-MoDSA’s work for these ballot measures put us in coalition with the labor unions and advocacy groups that are necessary ingredients of an alternative to the political coalitions contending for power in Missouri. In the Columbia area, important backers of the minimum wage ballot initiative included, for instance, the union local representing many city workers and the local Jobs With Justice chapter. We exchanged friendly signature-gathering bets with that union local and University of Missouri YDSA (we will make good on our bet with YDSA as soon as they get us their t-shirt sizes). A member of our steering committee, Alejandro G., spoke about the ballot measure and his experiences as a fast food worker at the HFFW signature turn-in rally. These are valuable relationships for our chapter.
Ballot measures are huge undertakings, demanding financial resources, organizational infrastructure and intense mobilizations of supporters, making coalitions indispensable if DSA is to engage at all. When I turned in my roller derby signatures on the last, desperate night of signature-gathering for the MCF ballot measure there were dozens of volunteers and campaign staff processing hundreds of signature sheets crowding the campaign headquarters for Boone County – the most remarkable demonstration of organized political enthusiasm I have seen in Missouri. Our chapter’s contribution was not nothing – we gathered around three percent of the required HFFW signatures (1.5 percent of the signatures turned in, since you want a healthy buffer). Other DSA chapters gathered signatures, and Mizzou YDSA in particular posted impressive signature totals and built themselves into the infrastructure of the campaign — one member, for instance, qualified as a notary, allowing her to witness signature sheets and help clear an important bottleneck in the signature-gathering process. A concerted DSA campaign could have done more statewide, but a gap remains between DSA’s foreseeable strength in Missouri and the demands of these campaigns.
But these near-term considerations — the good the policies will accomplish, and the relationships we built along the way — do not totally capture why I found these campaigns so exciting. If successful, they will be the most recent in a series of progressive ballot initiatives. Together, these results are full of political possibility. On the minimum wage, paid sick leave and abortion rights, the majority of Missourians likely agree with DSA over the state’s conservative political establishment. These issues both have a good chance of success, and recent history suggests that they represent an opportunity to build a coalition along class lines, breaking the state’s urban-rural polarization.
In the last decade, Democrats in Missouri have been wiped out, with the party reduced to a super-minority in the state legislature while losing both every state-wide office and control of county courthouses in the subset of rural areas where it had once been dominant. In the same period, Missourians voted for ballot measures striking down so-called “Right-to-Work,” passing a $12, inflation-adjusted minimum wage, legalizing marijuana, and expanding Medicaid. Many of these initiatives passed with overwhelming support: elimination of “right-to-work” and the minimum wage passed with 68 and 62 percent of the vote, respectively.
In each of these campaigns the urban and suburban parts of Missouri generally put up the biggest margins. Working-class Black voters in North St. Louis City, South City bohemians and even well-off residents of inner-ring suburbs polarized against Trump were generally more likely to back these ballot measures than rural voters in any part of the state. St. Louis City had the highest margin in every one of these elections. Except for overturning “right-to-work”, Jackson County (containing most of Kansas City) and suburban St. Louis County occupied the next two spots. Blow-outs in St. Louis, Kansas City and Columbia are, however, perfectly compatible with humiliating losses statewide, as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and any recent statewide office-seeking Democrat could testify. The ballot issues won where these candidates lost because they performed better outstate (in local usage the rest of Missouri is “outstate” from St. Louis and Kansas City as the rest of Illinois is downstate from Chicago and the rest of New York is upstate from New York City).
The maps below chart the over-performance of these ballot measures, displaying the percentage point gap between the vote for the “progressive” position and Biden’s 2020 vote share. Red and pink counties outperformed the state-wide gap between the ballot measure and Biden (26 percentage points on overturning “right-to-work”, 21 on the minimum wage, and 12 for marijuana legalization and Medicaid expansion). White counties matched the state-wide gap, while black and gray counties trailed the state-wide gap.Different factors are at play here across these ballot initiatives. I would speculate that union traditions, surviving party infrastructure in ancestrally Democratic areas, and low incomes drove support to different degrees in different ballot measures. Where these factors are combined – in the Lead Belt in central southeast Missouri – every ballot measure over-performed. Washington County in the Lead Belt delivered an 18 percentage point over-performance for Medicaid expansion, 30 for marijuana legalization, 39 for the minimum wage and 64 opposing “right-to-work” (the highest gap for any county across any of the four ballot measures).
[Map link]
The results of the minimum wage referendum is remarkable because it suggests the most direct relationship between ballot measure over-performance and class. The minimum wage posted majorities in the Bootheel in southeast Missouri, a northern outpost of the plantation economy of the Mississippi Delta. Pemiscot County in the Bootheel has the highest portion of the population below the poverty line of any county in the state. In Pemiscot, 64 percent of voters backed the minimum wage increase compared to only 34 percent voting to repeal “right to work” and 36 percent voting in favor of Medicaid expansion. Opposition to “right to work” outperformed the minimum wage statewide, but its performance in the Bootheel and low-income parts of the Ozarks with limited union traditions was disappointing. The minimum wage result in particular suggests the possibility of a political coalition uniting the Missourians worst-treated by our economic system.
[Map link]
The alternatives to this coalition are grim. A particularly nasty state Republican party maintains uncontested control of the state. Republican primaries feature increasingly literal book burnings. Only the personal loathing its right wing inspires even among fellow conservatives restrains the state legislature.
Shifts toward Democrats in suburban areas around St. Louis and Kansas City offer an alternative that is distant, dispiriting, and better than the status quo. Clayton township in St. Louis County provides a dramatic local example of this national trend. Clayton township, which includes tony suburbs like Ladue (median annual household income: $242,792) gave the Democratic presidential candidate 49 percent of the vote in 2012, 56 percent in 2016, and 63 percent in 2020. Improvements in the suburbs are largely responsible for Biden’s improvement over Hillary Clinton in Missouri, overwhelming the contrasting trends in places like Oregon County (median income $41,365) which gave the Democratic presidential candidate 47 percent of the vote in 2012, 30 percent of the vote in 2016, and 18 percent of the vote in 2020. Further blue drift in the suburbs could eventually restore political competition and occasionally dethrone the Republican party at the cost of making wealthy suburbanites, most opposed to any meaningful change to the distribution of wealth and power, into kingmakers.
These electoral trends would not matter if successful ballot initiatives were sufficient to accomplish progressive goals. There are limits, however, to government-by-referendum. Despite victories at the ballot box, working class Missourians can expect less from their state government than they could a decade ago (and Missouri under Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon was no Paris Commune). Ballot initiatives can staunch the bleeding and even make discrete gains, but without influence in the normal process of legislation and administration we will lose ground. I worry, for instance, about enforcement of paid leave and minimum wage rules, should they pass, under a Republican-run Department of Labor and Industrial Relations.
Moreover, if these majorities on ballot measures never get reflected in votes for candidates, elected officials will simply close off this route. Missouri’s secretary of state and attorney general engaged in an audacious legal campaign to saddle the MCF measure with deceptive ballot language and, as importantly, to delay the start of signature-gathering by tying the language up in court. The state legislature’s attempt to make future initiative petitions effectively impossible only failed after a Democratic filibuster and fissures in the Republican supermajority.
The phenomenon of huge majorities for both these ballot measures and the politicians that hate them still needs to be explained. It occurs in many red states with ballot initiative laws (see, for instance, votes for abortion rights in Ohio and Kansas, which were also backed by DSA chapters in those states). It is more complicated than a split between social and economic issues. While opposition to “right-to-work” and the minimum wage increase ran up the biggest majorities, Missourians are not voting for elected officials like a state where a majority of voters support marijuana legalization and, quite possibly, abortion rights. Until that puzzle is solved, and as long as the initiative petition process remains, we have a chance to put wins on the board and demonstrate the huge gap between Missouri’s governers and the governed.