Let me just say that the events of the last two days has the feeling of Ohio last cycle (and that was a beautiful sight). There, scandal, bad governance, and the national mood combined to decimate the once vaunted Ohio GOP machine. The only difference is that where that took months, this has been an absolute fall from grace relatively rapidly. Yeah Blunt sucked, but before the damage seemed relatively contained to Blunt himself. From what I'm hearing, this sounds like a scandal big enough to cause statewide/ticketwide damage.
In retrospect, Chris Koster's defection wasn't an isolated event; rather he was smart enough to know that the negative synergies of Bush Republicanism combined with Blunt Republicanism created an electoral black hole, sucking everything with a R next to its name down it.
After the corruption scandals played out in Ohio, GOPers went from having control of every statewide political office to only holding one. They lost the Governorship, the Secretary of State's office, the Attorney Generalship, a US Senate seat, the 18th Congressional District, and a bunch of seats in the Ohio State Legislature. The aftershocks there aren't over yet; Democrats should win at least two, and possibly as many as five more congressional districts; the Ohio State House is in play for the first time in awhile.
Missouri Democrats were already doing much better than their Ohio counterparts, so extrapolate the carnage and smile. The Governorship, possibly the 6th and 9th Congressional Districts.....eventually Kit Bond's Senate seat.
Let me just state the obvious here: without Ohio, the GOP would already be in it really deep; a potential collapse of the same sort in Missouri would leave the GOP without a pot to pee in. If they can't win in MO, the Democrats will sweep the industrial Midwest (minus IN, and not even that is a given if Bayh is on the ticket). The industrial Midwest has always been the commanding heights of American politics. The phrase "But will it play in Peoria?" isn't an accident. Its a fundamental truth.
Furthermore, Missouri has a national sort of symbolism attached to it. The Show Me State has picked the winner of the Presidential election since God created the earth. It sent Claire McCaskill to the Senate last year, which was symbolic of the national repudiation of the GOP. Democrats were a force in Missouri before the collapse of the New Deal Coalition; their rise again could be a powerful symbol of the formation of a new political alignment as well as the end of the political era that we have lived in since 1968.
For the local crowd, who should we be praying that the GOP nominates to take on Nixon? I know it isn't Jim Talent, Jo Ann Emerson, or Kenny Hulshof, they're the smarter, more moderate types that could actually win. However, there are a bunch of names I'm unfamiliar with: Rod Jetton, Catherine Hanaway, Peter Kinder, and Matt Bartle specifically. Who's the biggest quack of all of them? The best case scenario for us would probably be to have Hulshof lose to the wingnuttiest of the bunch in a bloody, nasty primary. Then we could get two birds with one stone.
Oh, and one last thing. If I had to pick someone other than Hillary as most likely to be the first female President, it would be Claire McCaskill. She's tough, honest, smart, and a helluva campaigner. Methinks she's going places.